Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself by Alan Alda Page B

are up for a part, encourage them. When you’re in a play, give the other actors the stage when it’s theirs; when it’s your turn, take the stage with gusto—and then give it back to them. And when you go backstage after a show to see actors, you’ve got to remember you’re entering a burn ward. These people are raw, and this is not the time to analyze their work. You hug them and say, “You were wonderful.” You have to say
You,
you have to say
were,
and you have to say
wonderful.
    Don’t try to be honest. The actor is a raw, open wound after a performance. You can’t say
, “The play
was wonderful.” That means you’re deliberately avoiding talking about the actor. You can’t say, “You
are
wonderful.” That means he’s wonderful in general, but not tonight. And you have to say
wonderful
(
brilliant
is okay, too, but nothing less). No one needs to hear they were
interesting
or that they looked as though they were having a good time.
    You probably even need to say, “The play was wonderful,” even if it was a turkey. Never forget that when you go back after a play, you’re talking to the walking wounded.
    And when you’re acting, remember that it’s
play.
Enjoy it, and enjoy it deeply, richly. Use your intellect as well as your emotions. Try to find out what connects the Apollonian and the Dionysian; the serious and the antic. One without the other is not as satisfying. There are at least a couple of ways of looking at the actor. One is as a priest performing rituals of reconciliation, enlightenment, and dedication…or as a clown performing acts of rudeness, appetite, and functions of the body. Find ways of serving as both.
    There’s an ecstasy to acting, and that ecstasy is a glorious experience, but acting is something else, too. It’s a service to the people who come to the theater. Acting may look like the parade of the vanities, but in fact it can be a noble calling. To be able to be another person on the stage, to let an audience feel that person’s vulnerability, that person’s follies, that person’s courage, fear, strength, lunacy, as their own is to give them a chance to understand better what it means to be human.

    It had taken me a long time to understand what I was telling them that day. My education in the theater started when I was nine, stepping onto the stage with my father and feeling the warmth from both the spotlight and the audience. We were entertaining soldiers and sailors during the war. Performing next to him, I felt my father’s love. He was expressing it through sharing the stage with me and allowing me into his profession. This was, I think, the most intimate he could get. He seemed embarrassed to express emotion or love in other ways.
    As I got older, I was carried along by the pleasure of my contact with the audience. My sense of worth was reinforced by knowing I could please them, so I became good at making them laugh. I knew instantly how pleased they were. But it was still mostly about me.
    When I got older, there was a turning point—a realization that when I went onstage, it wasn’t entirely for me: I had a service to perform. I still got pleasure out of it. It was still intoxicating, but now I began to realize I was also there for these other people, out in the dark of the audience. I’m not sure when this thought first came to me, but I think it was in my twenties when I saw the film
Pather Panchali
by the Indian director Satyajit Ray. There was a moment toward the end of the story when the father returns from a long trip away from home with gifts for his daughter, who he finds out has died in his absence. The simple power of his realization that he has missed his daughter’s illness and death hit me hard. I knew instantly that it was possible to be absent without ever leaving home. In my own way, I might have been as cool with my children as my father had been with me. A feeling of rawness stayed with me for days. It was as if something in me that I