March 10, 2009 – Columbus, Ohio

Part of the mystery of God’s creation is Personhood.  Much of the New Paganism is an affirmation of a vague creator spirit, which has no personhood and therefore no will or reason.  How comforting to worship a benevolent sentimentality.  How frightening to encounter a Person!

And we, too, are Persons – and our Personalities are a way of sharing in the Personhood of God.  What a tremendous dignity!  But these personalities can be confounding: who we are is a mystery in many ways.  How do we understand who we are?  We can judge ourselves by our fruits, for the fruit we bear is the best indication we have of who we are.  Our actions are the indications of our personalities, which are the keys to our very beings.

This is what Hamlet is about, to a large extent.  What is the relation of acting to identity?  How do the actions we perform define who we are, and how are we properly to infer a person’s character from his actions?  I bring all of this up because it is central to the task of Acting on stage (and, for that matter, acting in life).

One of our actors is having some trouble making the role he is playing believable.  When actors struggle like this they know that there is a key to any character they portray, and once you find that key, everything resonates.  Sometimes many of a character’s lines in a script will be confusing and seem out of place to an actor, until it “clicks”, until the actor discovers the hidden roots, the trunk of the tree, from which all of the actions and dialogue branch forth.

But this is also a mystery in real life.  For instance, I look at my cast, and I see them on the one hand working very hard and applying themselves with zeal to their roles on stage, and on the other hand I see them shirking the work of setting up and tearing down the set; I see them filled with the spark of conversion and repentance, and then I see them sit down to watch a marathon of The Family Guy or bury their heads in a video game.  Like adolescents, they seem caught between maturity and infantile self-absorption.  And I wonder – what is the key to their characters, their personalities?  Where is the trunk that branches forth in such odd and seemingly contradictory directions, bearing sometimes good fruit and sometimes rotten fruit that stinks before it hits the ground?

Perhaps the answer is a greater mystery – the mystery of conversion, which trumps the mystery of personality, which grafts us onto a new tree and makes us branches of the true vine.