Success and Grace (thank you, M. S.)

I’m doing a show right now, which means that outside of rehearsal, my subconscious mind is immersed in the attitudes of my character and of the show in general. My mind continuously works away at the challenges my character faces and creates, and different parts of the fruits of that labor float to my consciousness with new meaning. My current character is broken, with little hope of redemption, both due to circumstances outside of her control, and because of her own willfulness. I have much in common with this character and her family, though I am farther removed from the circumstances that we share. Part of the difficulty of playing a character whose life and personality hit so close to home is that it involves a subtle danger – the danger of believing that you suffer the same delusions as your stage counterpart. What helps me with this the most is my character’s definition and understanding of two of the key elements of the play: success and grace.

By definition, success is “the gaining of wealth, fame, rank, etc.” (def. 3, Webster’s New World Dictionary). Grace, even with the aid of the dictionary, is more difficult to define. I will use “living in a condition of unmerited love and favor” (my own amalgamation) as well as the actions that would come from a person living fully in such a condition. My character would definitely define success in terms of worldly pursuits of wealth and material things, but her definition of grace is a very superficial one, at best: “help[ing] people”. She doesn’t understand the beauty (grace) of the people around her, and she certainly doesn’t know how best to “help” them. More than that, she doesn’t know that she is running the wrong race for the wrong reasons. Understanding this about her, fiction though she may be, helps ME to understand how different I, the flesh and blood person here, really am from her. My strides toward “success”, by any definition, are largely tempered by my understanding of “grace”, and by my desire to always pull forward to such a state. Her life is ruined by her negativity, her fear, and her un-tempered need to succeed at all costs. My success may be hampered by my own understanding of the impermanence of the material and social status oriented areas of life, and my trust in the idea of a higher power who gently leads us into a state of understanding what is truly important.

Nevertheless, my character’s negative, destructive nature can easily bring me down. In order to play a character with truth and grace, one must not judge, but accept and “become”. At this stage in the creative process, I am too aware of how I, as my character, am hurting those around me. Immersing myself in such a character can have great lessons and opportunities for growth for me as an actor and as a person if only I can find the balance that allows me to be her without judgment while onstage, and throw off the effects of her actions and philosophies as soon as I step off. It’s a fine line – if I distance myself from her too much, my lines will come from my head, and not my heart. If I identify with her too much, I risk believing that I am as broken as she, and thereby risk losing sight of the grace in my life. I’ve worked too hard to break down my own roadblocks of judgment and fear to allow such a thing to happen now. This is definitely one of the moments that being a wife and a mother meshes well with being a creative artist – I am allowed to grow, create, and experiment on stage, and then return to my life and the beauties that grace it in order to receive and give grounding and love. It is precisely this love that my character is unable to give or receive fully, thereby warping her definition of success and grace.