Truth in Make-Believe

by N. BRYLLION FAGIN

SOME years ago I directed a play which had a supremely innocent, demure, and sentimental character named Maria. In a moment of revulsion against type-casting—moments which all college drama directors occasionally have— I offered the part to a flashy and obviously sophisticated girl. She surveyed me with eyes full of perplexity.

“ Do I look like Maria?” she asked. “No,” I said; “frankly, you don’t, But I am trying to give you a break. You want to be an actress and you need the experience of playing all kinds of characters. Take this part and see what you can do with it.”

She took it, and was the hit of the play. Subsequently, in attempting to answer the questions of members of the audience, including friends of the girl, I came to the conclusion lhat the girl had really accomplished no great feat of acting. She had merely played herself, her true self, the self which she had been afraid or ashamed to be in her real little world. There she played the part of a “toughie,” of a hard worldling out of a James M. Cain or John O’Hara novel; Maria had provided her with the opportunity of being what she essentially was: modest, sentimental, and, yes, sweet.

“Afraid or ashamed.” These three words seem to explain a great many people who come to the stage for release from their make-believe selves. With a mere modicum of coaching, sedate housewives and shy stenographers become glamorous Cleopatras and bold Phedres, and ungaink football players and timid bookkeepers become graceful Ariels and assertive Petruchios. The giveaway of their cherished aspiration lies in the authenticity of their characterizations. They ring true on the stage, not because they are good actors— for most of them are not actors at all. in the sense of being trained, disciplined craftsmen — but because they enjoy the rare luxury of being themselves.

A professorial friend of mine, a distinguished economist, recently confessed to me that for years now he has been suppressing a wish to grow a goatee, to wear pearl-gray spats and pince-nez on a black siring, and to carry a cane. My guess is that he would give a creditable performance; even if his characterization should be technically faulty, its inner truth would be enough to hold an audience. For a little while at least he would be not the austere New Englander and conservatively garbed college professor which he appears to be before the world, but a colorful dandy, a sort of Flammonde with foreign air, which he really is.

The difficulty would be in persuading him that his friends and colleagues would not condemn him for engaging in play-acting. There is something about the stage — its very fascination perhaps, its light and warmth, its boldness of rhythm, its air of uninhibited reality — which inspires the “normal” citizen with a sense of uncertainty and resentment. Perhaps it is merely a retention of Cotton Mather’s propaganda that the stage is “the synagogue of Satan.”

At any rate, my economist friend will probably never dare to walk the boards goateed, pinee-nezed, and pearl-gray-spatted. Nor will another friend, an exquisite chef condemned to a life of research in medieval history, ever play the part he once hinted he might like to play, that of the cook in Cyrano. He would have given a capital performance. But he, too, like most of us, is obliged to maintain his dignity, to act the part the world has thrust upon him.

Producing plays in a college theater is an arduous undertaking. But it has its compensations. Not the least of these is the fun of seeing sober people drop the roles the circumstances of life have constrained them to assume, and become, for a few evenings at least, the persons their inner nature has meant them to be.