ABSTRACT
The stage is magic! If you believe in what you do and if you have fully prepared yourself, you can be anything for your audience. You can be old or young, tall or short, heavy or slim, beautiful or ugly, no matter how you look in reality. You can die or evaporate or be born right in front of your audiences and they will believe it. Or you can be an animal or a stone or a large group of people or a house or the moon, full or crescent. There is absolutely no limit. But one thing is essential. You must never lose yourself in the character you portray. You should never assume that you are the person or the creature or the thing you play. All you can do is tell about it – 100% of course, but you should not try to identify yourself with it. You would be fooling yourself if you thought you could. Let’s assume you were playing a cow. You will never look like one, but you can tell so convincingly about “cow,” even without a special costume, that the audience will not see you any more, but a cow in the meadow with a tail and horns. Magic! I once saw Danny Kaye being a slot machine, and I did not see a young man in a suit standing on a stage. I saw a slot machine. I saw the penny he inserted; I saw a display of lights; I heard the inner workings of the instrument, and I saw the penny falling out again. And all the time Danny had done almost nothing. What he had done was this: he had found the very essence of the situation and he had pared it down to the least action. That is one of the most important, and often most difficult, things to achieve: simplicity! To edit one’s own work rigorously, no matter how fond one is of a detail. But the result is usually worth the agony.
