ABSTRACT
Just as there can be many performances of a Mozart concerto, some halting, some sentimental, some exalted, so there may be many readings of a work, each bringing to the text experiences, awarenesses and personal histories that complete the work in different ways. I will argue that actors can realize characters in much the same way that musicians realize works or that readers make texts their own (in particular, the latter) by drawing on the reservoir of their own history, past experience, concerns and convictions, all of which inform their reading and their representation of the character. Just as the reader may evoke a world from a text, funded in part by his own imagination, so an actor can evoke a person from a script, by attempting to embody the traits and quirks and dispositions his imagination and critical faculties dictate while working in concert.
