Personal Conversations
Posted by Leslie Frame on 9/24/2009
Hello, readers. I’m Leslie Frame, understudying Kate Arrington in Fake.
“Tech” is an interesting time during a production. For the actors, crew and understudies (well, actually for everyone except the director and stage manager), there is a lot of down time, and - theatre people being the curious social animals that we are - a lot of down time means a lot of conversation.
Fake covers a lot of sacred ground; ideas and questions of belief, memory, veracity, mystery, loss and discovery. It is only natural that as we move back and forth from auditorium to green room, these questions come with us. And so it has been my experience that the backstage conversation of this production in particular has been extraordinarily personal, colorful and often quite deep. There have been conversations of fathers and mothers, ancestral migrations, the weight of a word, historical legislation and how it impacts us today (no, really!), the physical injuries that change our paths, religious backgrounds, experiences and beliefs.
One of my favorite lines and concepts of the play is, “Maybe we never get to the truth. And maybe that’s okay.” Having heard this line again and again, and taken with one of this season’s themes, “What happens when we choose to believe?”, it has set off a now weeks long internal dialogue. What do we ever know, and how important is what we know versus our ability and willingness to ask?
And that, to me, is where the importance of art comes in: the questions we raise with ourselves and the discussions we have with others; the new ideas to chew on. Sigh. This is why I love the theatre.
There have also been rather long and serious discussions about the physics of slapping someone with a large rubber fish. But that is neither here nor there.