Vista Online

Fall/Winter 2001

Venue of Truth

Greenville College Factory Theatre

Imagine that you are an actor on a stage. You stand before an audience of people who wait in rapt attention for you to deliver your next line. You feel the heat from the bright lights penetrating your elaborate costume, and the stage makeup caked on your face threatening to melt. Your next line sits patiently on your tongue, while you wait for the precise dramatic moment to deliver it. Ideally, your thoughts are filled with the motivations, movements, and emotions of your character; in that moment, the reality of you as a college student fades beneath the makeup. While you are performing, you are not an actor; rather, you are the person you are impersonating. When you act, no matter how meager the part, the identity you were born with no longer exists.

But is there any gain in leaving your permanent identity in limbo for a period of time? Are you becoming someone else solely to entertain the audience with a story? Really, there can’t be much Christian value in doing that, can there? As Nathan Holbert, a sophomore Theatre major, questions, “Am I justified in becoming part of the industry that creates consumeristic entertainment?”
Yes, there is more to theatre than just providing mindless entertainment. The complete suspension of your own identity is a worthy use of time. As we create a performance, or watch a production, we are embedded with a missile that explodes in our minds to reveal many vivid truths.

The Fall 2000 play, Much Ado About Nothing, inspired several prickling thoughts. Some argue that the theatre is pure entertainment; but in reality, acting can be linked quite legitimately to Biblical descriptions of how we, as Christians, ought to live. As Galatians 6:2 charges, “Share each other’s troubles and problems, and in this way obey the law of Christ.” (NLT)

This is not to say, in some contrived way, that performance is the only means by which we can experience each other’s burdens. Still, even though the theatre is merely a re-creation of events that mirror real life, the fact remains that if you are “being” someone else, you will naturally feel their pain. Being someone else, or “bearing their burdens,” can shed incredible insight on understanding others. This kind of empathy is a valuable asset which causes us to more easily identify with others’ emotions, although we may not have experienced them for ourselves.

To bear another person’s burdens, you put yourself in their shoes, live their life, become who they are. Acting is a form of this identity assimilation. Fictitious it is, but all fiction is based on some sort of reality. Brian Hartley, Professor of Philosophy and Religion, played Don Pedro in the fall production of Much Ado and believes that as we view the world through others’ eyes, we lay hold of new truths about “what it means to be human.”

The world treats each person a particular way. You may not understand certain things about the world until the world treats you as if you were someone else. For example, say that in real life you are wealthy and respected for your business achievements, but in the theatre you are given the opportunity to play the part of a low-income single mother. Every character during the course of the play will treat you as if you are that mother—much different from how you are treated offstage. Through this experience you gain new insight into the way the world works. Often this will bring compassion, understanding, empathy, or perhaps even anger. Professor Hartley agrees, “The stage forces me to assume the persona of another—to ask what makes him ‘tick,’ to see the world through the eyes of another.

In such a way, I am forced out of my own parochial worldview and challenged to see all of creation as ‘my Father’s world.’” Acting not only allows us see the world through someone else’s eyes, it also allows us to see ourselves. Junior Theatre major Sara Cassidy, who played Margaret in Much Ado, comments, “In assuming another’s biases I am better able to see my own biases—biases that I never before realized I had.” As humans, we cannot remove ourselves from seeing the world and other people through our own set of morals, backgrounds, and experiences. So when we are presented with the option of becoming someone else, we should seize the opportunity. In this opportunity, we discover truths about the conditions of humanity. God is truth; and therefore, as Nathan Holbert, who played the role of Benedick, observes, “by showing the reality of our positions and revealing to us truth, God is glorified.”

Mary Niewola

Last updated: July 9, 2001