There's a lot of crying in theater
The show centers on Woods’ character as she goes back in time, literally, to explore the history of Black theater, and Black theater artists, having been commissioned to bring such a show to the stage in the present day. In this way the character stands in for Reginald Andre Jackson, the playwright, and Valerie Curtis Newton, the director of History of Theater. It’s upsetting what she finds, but she makes it into a history of endurance, creativity, and triumph, even if through tears.
This past Saturday, the New York Times ran an article headlined, A Good Cry Can Be Good Cinema.
This, crying on stage, is something I have been working on, as an actor in my current show, An Incomplete List of All the Things I'm Going to Miss When the World is No Longer, by Dacha Theatre, now playing for a few more days only (sadly) at Theater Off Jackson. I’ve been acting on Seattle area stages for about a dozen years (with a couple of shows ten or so years before that in Olympia) but none of the characters I’ve played have ever really needed to cry. And I never managed it really.
Most of the characters I’ve played are not the kind to cry: Charlie Cowell in The Music Man, Frank Foster in the Alan Ayckbourn farce How the Other Half Loves and so forth.
In a short play at Freehold once, I played a father whose son lost his best friend in a school shooting. At one point the two fathers meet. Playing the scene brought up strong emotions. Once during the run, both I and the other actor got the same impulse to hug each other tightly in that scene. But no tears.
In the show Ghost Party with Dacha Theatre, I played (again) a father who, in the end, had to face the fact that he had failed his children. The blocking called for me to be sort of frozen in place while contemplating what I had done and not done, and how nothing could ever be undone. Very sad. A couple of times I almost got there. And once or twice my eyes did start to water, but it felt forced.
It’s an entirely different story with An Incomplete List. At times I have had to sort of pull myself together because the material is so affecting. My character is in a lot of turmoil at times. Even if his troubles are mostly all his fault, it’s still painful. One night the pain began to hit me in a short monologue that I have before one of my songs. Part way through the song the tears did start to run. It was perfect because the song is a sad lament. I let it happen and I feel like the song was great that night.
The final song of the show is sung by another character, while the other characters gather around. As the song is ending, the characters all pass through the audience singing the final lines over and over, “Oh why, oh why do we keep on keep melting,” as we exit up the aisles and out through the doors into the lobby of TOJ. Most nights all of us are crying on the way out. Going up the stairs, I can see the audience feeling the feeling as well. That’s like the definition of theater, right?
I am not sure what has happened to allow this emotion to hit me, move through me and come out. I think it has to do with the profound level of trust and comfort that was built among the cast and the director and the rest of the company. I think it has to do with the power of the material the playwright provided. And I think it has to do with my own growth as an actor to allow myself to really feel things and let it show, to be vulnerable and real, and to tell a story. All of it.
Here is a link to the scene in Mulholland Drive from which the screen shot at the top of this post comes:
Mulholland Drive clip
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