The Performing Arts 5: On a Wing and a Prayer

I’m  taking theater classes because I’m writing a novel in which the characters stage a show. Nobody asked me, the author, about this. I turned my back briefly and the characters just decided this by themselves. But as the creator, I can view the work from the outside. I page back in my previous novel, His Selachian Majesty Requests, and I see it right here in the text: “To be a star, you had to be able to improvise.” I (or the Muse) knew that already, ages before I began hammering on Off the Screen.

Acting is the art of using your entire body to create. Improv actor games start you out on this. The corridor game is played with two actors. The first one is in a room, and the second goes down the corridor with some stressful change. What do you mean, we’re getting a divorce? Sir, the FBI is out front with a squad. Mr. President, the government of Bolivia has just declared war. A brief kerfluffle, and then the person in the office exits, leaving the second there to be confronted by someone coming down the corridor in their turn.

There is no script, no plan, no nothing. You have no idea what your fellow actors are going to pull. Every time they play the corridor game it goes in a totally different direction. And … you can do this. Relax and go with the flow, listen to your fellow players, and play along. There is a Muse of the theater, and I don’t know her that well — if I really wanted to become an actor I should have started fifty years ago.

But I recognize her, running this. I already know how to hand the wheel over and let someone else drive. The very word ‘inspiration’ means a drawing in, the inflowing of the divine. It is possible that all creative arts bend around and meet each other and that fountain on Mount Helicon. This is so cool!