...you want to do what?

…that is the question! Why act? Well, who knows. It’s mysterious to me the more I do it, the more I learn, the less it makes sense, the less I seem to know, and I’ve been at it professionally for more than 35 years, and as an amateur back to childhood. I have of late been comparing acting to learning how to hold smoke: you have to cup your hands gently around this visible but intangible mist in order to be able to make it work—if you grasp at it or lunge, it slips through your fingers effortlessly and maddeningly uncontrollable, ever out of reach. I suppose that is the case with every art form, it does not respond to force, intimidation, booze or drugs, fast cars or agreeable women (Picasso excepted…but even then…). Technique is wonderful, it builds the muscles and tones the instrument, whatever it may be, but there’s something tauntingly out of reach that elevates craft to art: Yo Yo Ma and a cello concerto; Matisse and his cutouts; that fellow Shakespeare’s Sonnets (the word is his plays aren’t bad either); Pavarotti’s “Nessun Dorma”; Artemisia Gentilleschi’s ‘Judith Slaying Holofernes’; Megan Fairchild soloing with the New York City Ballet.


So what is it, that makes us as actors, or artists of any kind, endure hail, fire, wind, flood, poverty, restaurant jobs, precarious incomes, parental dismay, and fallen arches to doggedly pursue our craft, often far out of the limelight or recognition. Odd that Van Gogh, like so many painters, died broke and unrecognized; Vivaldi, discredited, banished from the royal courts whose patronage he enjoyed, impoverished; brilliant playwrights Georges Feydeau, Richard Brindsley Sheridan dying in obscurity, diseased, not a cent to their names. My friend Walter Bobbie, who had a terrific Broadway career and has become a wonderful Broadway director, once compared acting to an addiction: you get a taste of it and you’ll do whatever it takes to get another hit!


I’ll leave it to the shrinks and pundits who write biographies to explain ‘why Mozart, why?’. For me nothing has ever fit like being in this profession. I wish I could explain ‘why, Bob, why?’ in wonderful prosaic introspective psychological pedagogical hoo-hah. I’ve had a lot of jobs over the years, not bad at some of them, sucked at a lot of them, didn’t care about most of them. Was in pre-med until I realized it just wasn’t for me. The best I can say is the feeling I get when I walk onto a film set…like I’m home, and this is where I belong. It fits like a pair of shoes that were meant for me to wear that were always there, just waiting for me to put my feet in. Maybe even more so, it’s this. I love getting into a theatre before anyone is there and just sitting, listening. The quiet. There is something pure about that silence, not unlike when you sit in an empty cathedral…there is a connection there to something else. Something nameless. Something so much bigger, so much more. In that stillness is a connection to something ineffable. Something that words cannot explain. But you know it when you feel it. It’s gentle in its touch but has a power and grandeur that astonishes in its simplicity. 


I was at the Frick museum in New York City awhile ago, there to see “The Girl with the Pearl Earring”. In the main salon, off to the side of the massive Turner and Velazquez  extravaganzas, was a small Rembrandt gouache, “Old Man Sitting with Pipe”. He looked at me with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, like he knew something I was yet to learn, and I could see in his flushed cheeks, the crinkle of his mouth, the laugh lines just forming around his eyes that he was just about to tell me…and I realized a tear had run down my cheek. In this small 8 inch by 8 inch portrait…Rembrandt had held smoke.


I have, a handful of times, felt that on stage, or in a film shot that may or may not have made it into the finished product. It is the feeling of sitting alone in a darkened theatre, listening to the silence. It’s like holding smoke.


That’s why.