It may sound strange for a theater critic to say the following, but it's time that somebody did:
Life is not theater.
People are not actors.
Truth is not the same as a nice moment.
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Life as Theater: If It's Real It Could Be Fiction
The business of America is not show business.
Two recent experiences bring these distinctions to mind. The first was reading a Calendar article in which a panel of acting coaches assessed the performance of 12 potential presidential candidates on TV.
The second was a couple of weeks of jury duty. Ten years ago, after a similar stint, I wrote a piece comparing the courtroom with a theater.
This year, the first thing the defense attorney asked me as a potential juror was: "When you look at the courtroom, doesn't it remind you of a set?"
Granted, this was Hollywood Municipal Court. But everybody is into the idea of life-as-theater these days. In some ways, it's a good thing. For instance, it keeps a person from being too impressed by the trappings of people in power. Behind the curtain, there's usually an average-sized human being working the thunderbolt machine.
This would have been a healthy thing to keep in mind during one of Hitler's torchlight rallies in the 1930s--theater out of the Wagnerian cookbook. Still, Hitler's audience clearly didn't want to look behind the curtain. The show was too much fun.
This is the problem when a culture gets hooked on idealized images, punchy underscoring and terrific stage management. It begins to prefer these things to the modest, mixed signals of ordinary public life. In fact, it begins to identify the glamorous simplification as the real truth. Not on intellectual grounds, but on aesthetic grounds. The other stuff just confuses the play. One wants a clear image of what's wrong with the world. One wants a hero to clean it up.
What this hero figure actually thinks-- whether he thinks--matters less than how we feel in his presence. How's his charisma? How's his body language? Does he have a nice smile? Do his eyes crinkle?
Rather than citizens electing a fellow-citizen to tend the store, we become casting directors looking to fill a star part. After the aforementioned NBC program, it was only logical for The Times' Deborah Caulfield to ask the Hollywood image experts to rate the aspiring candidates. Wasn't the show, in effect, an audition, like the one in "A Chorus Line," with Tom Brokaw playing Zach? Just relax and tell us about yourself.
Well, yes, it was an audition, in a way. But it was also supposed to be an examination of the candidates' views, which do relate to the way each would run the country. Assessing their statements, however, is less fun than schmoozing about their presentation. For one thing, you'd have to know the issues. So the acting teachers--like most of us--concentrated on style.
Who looked the most "presidential"? The panel dismissed this candidate as too flaky, this one as too boring, this one as too uptight. Suggestions were also made as to which theatrical roles might help bring each candidate up to pitch. One teacher thought that a particular candidate needed to play someone heroic, like Shakespeare's Henry IV.
Probably he was thinking of Henry V. Henry IV is a heartsick, distracted man worrying about his dissolute son. Caulfield's panel would probably have dismissed him as being not royal enough.
But what does "royal" mean? What's "presidential"? The trouble with \o7 casting\f7 a leader is that you go for a stereotype. Abraham Lincoln wouldn't have impressed the acting coaches of his time as presidential. Too tall. Too gloomy. A bit of a flake.
Warren G. Harding, on the other hand, would have been perfect. Ronald Reagan also filled the bill, the first admitted actor to take the post. I once asked a well-known British player if he wasn't impressed with Reagan's hold on the American imagination. "Not particularly," he said. "I know how it's done."
Reagan gave us a good show. But next time, this theater critic intends to vote for the candidate who makes the most sense over the one who makes the most agreeable presentation. If this person does well in office, he'll eventually look very presidential. Who would have thought, in 1945, that they would ever do a one-man show on Harry Truman?
Jury duty was another reminder that life and show business should be kept on separate tracks. Yes, the courtroom can be thought of as a stage set. But it could equally be thought of as an altar, with the judge as priest.
The robe is to remind him that it's a solemn business to send a man to jail. He is not on the bench to express himself, like an actor, but to express the law. Similarly the jurors, sitting there like a Greek chorus, have sworn to put aside their personal feelings and concentrate on whether or not the law has been broken. Where theater is about emotion, courtrooms are about thought.
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