All About Deepak Morris

Minutes before show time...

The announcement has been made that the show will begin in two minutes...

There's a hush and a palpable energy from the audience. Someone coughs and immediately holds his breath... the show is about to begin...

Backstage, actors wonder if they'll get on stage at just the right moment. No one looks at the script. It's too late, anyway. One goes on or one does not. The cue triggers the action or it does not. The tech rehearsal was awful. The dress rehearsal was worse. Oh God! It's show time! Will we forget whole sections of the script like we did in the dress rehearsal?

And then, magic!

We are no longer actors in the wings, waiting for cues.

We are there, telling the story. There's no question of needing a prompter. The story flows. I forget a line, my co-actor covers and moves the story forward. The antagonist cues up and takes over from my momentary lapse. She hates me in the play but, like me, she wants the story to go forward. It's all about the play. It's all about completing the arc of interest in that scene, then the arc in the act and finally, good triumphs over evil. Or it doesn't. We send the audience home with a nagging question.

But no one can say anything about the acting because there was no acting. We were THERE! We lived the conflict! We laughed, we cried, we were cruel, we were soft. We didn't act it, we were it.

THAT is theatre.

Whether we like it or not, we're all going to die. Why not enrich every moment of our brief existence with the exhilaration that comes from telling the story?

Deepak