It's me and you Hamlet, me and you.

In reading Anna Deveare Smith’s introduction to Fires in the Mirror, the thing that stuck in my mind is her critique of psychological realism. She lambasts ‘bringing the actor’s self’ to the character’s psychology. It is really interesting that we would not value or keep ourselves enough to make the character come to our own psychology. What a hard life we are planning for ourselves to keep modifying our own identities.

I like the idea of bringing the character to me. Just ‘be myself’ as many directors have told me. ‘Don’t lose yourself in this.’ I think I have been trying to lose myself. Why do you like theatre? ‘Oh, I just like to get away from myself, be someone else for a while.’ vs. Why would I want to do that? I like myself. I have to bend to other people’s selves enough all day at work. Why would I want to keep doing that in my art?

That also raises big questions in terms of our relationship to the community we are working with. I don’t think that people in the community want their selves changed. We don’t want to change them. We want to honor the difference between them and us. And the similarities.

The other big question that fascinated me in Smith’s writing was: where is the character? even what is the character? It may have been based on someone somewhere in time, but it isn’t that person. The character doesn’t have anything outside of the words they say. No memories, no body, no thoughts. Smith writes that the character is the space in between her own identity and the character’s. So as we investigate the space in between us and Sports Fans, we are looking at our own characters but we are working on building a new way of building characters. Cutting Edge!