The Rehearsal
the students, like him, were looking uncomfortable, sitting with their eyes cast down and waiting for the tutor to pounce.
“Stanley,” the tutor said, pouncing. “Is death a great taboo?”
Stanley made his hands into fists and pressed his knuckles into the floorboards as he thought.
“No,” he said at last. “Not anymore.”
“Why?”
“Because people pretend to die all the time,” Stanley said. “I watch people pretending to die every time I turn the television on.”
“So?” said the Head of Acting, but he looked eager, and his lips were drawn back.
Stanley said, “If death was a great taboo, then pretending to be dead would have consequences.”
The Head of Acting gave a brisk satisfied nod and turned back to the group. Stanley drew a breath. He was sweating.
“Let me tell you about my father’s death,” the tutor said. “He died in his own bed, and after his death my family spent one evening with his body before he was taken away. I had heard about rigor mortis. I found it an interesting concept, but I was also a little suspicious of it, as if it might be an old wives’ tale, something archaic that didn’t happen anymore.
“I sat by my father’s bed and watched over him, and every hour or so I would sneak forward and give him a little poke, just a little poke with my index finger, in the fold of skin underneath his cheekbone where his skin was all pouchy and soft. I kept touching his cheek like this, routinely, waiting for the stiffness to set in. And after a while it did. I leaned forward and poked at his cheek and it was hard as a board.
“It was the delay that I found frightening,” he said. “He was soft for so long, and then it was like somebody flipped a switch. The delay frightened me. The delay between two of death’s symptoms—rigor mortis and the stopping of the heart. All of a sudden I saw death not as something solitary and final but as an incremental process, a slow accumulation of symptoms, a gradual stepping-down. I had never thought of death in this way before.”
They were watching him warily now.
“This is a very personal memory for me,” the Head of Acting said, “because I had always imagined that at the death of my father I would feel very great sadness, even hysteria, that I would cry and cry like I’d seen my sisters cry, that afterward I would feel a deep longing for what was irreplaceable about my father, and I would have to work to rebuild my life as normal. I imagined that after it happened I would take time to think about my own mortality, but with a new appreciation and reverence for the brevity of life.” The Head of Acting’s voice was steady but his voice was very soft, and somehow intensified by the hush, like the savage clear-blue flame of a gas hob turned low.
“But that didn’t happen for me,” he said. “I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel a great sadness, and I quickly replaced everything about him that I needed to. My own mortality was just as it had ever been, that was all. I thought I knew how I would react to the death of my father, and I was wrong.
“Like Stanley,” the Head of Acting said, quickening and shifting into a new, brisker gear, “any one of you can turn on your television set and watch somebody pretend to die. You all will have seen thousands of deaths which are not deaths but merely people pretending. If I said right now, ‘You have been shot!’ you would all roll around on the floor and clutch your bellies and twitch and moan, and what you would be doing— all you would be doing—is copying a copy.
“What I am asking of you for homework,” he said, “is not to prepare a performance of death, for most of you have no first-hand knowledge of what it means for somebody to truly die. Instead I would like each of you to prepare a performance of your most intimate experience. You will place yourself at the mercy of this experience by showing this intimate moment to the rest of the group. The aim of this exercise is to see how we can use these terribly private experiences as a form of emotional substitute when we come to act a scene or a situation that we don’t understand.”
There was a grudging silence. Everybody tried not to look at everybody else. They quickly tried to think up all the relatively unpainful moments of their lives that they would be prepared to re-create in front of the class and pretend that it was the most intimate experience of their lives.
The Head of Acting let the silence
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