Actor

His hands tremble as he wrings them in anticipation. He growls a fierce command, channeling Shakespeare and the very depths of his words. He cackles like Iago, plots like Puck and fights like Tybalt. He can paint his face every variation of evil and succumb to senseless seduction. His smile and eyes break through stage make-up as he twirls in and out of the set pieces. The audiences guffaws when he cracks a joke, ponders when his monologue questions his character’s own existence and gasps horridly when he is beheaded. To them he is Don Jon, Hamlet, and Macbeth.

Only those of us sitting front and center know the personality behind the centuries old poetry. We laugh when he inserts a secret joke and grin when we know his sexual innuendo is directed at one of us. We are backstage in the mind of the brilliant man we see before us. But then there is only what I know. That he bought women’s tights to play John Barrymore and that he only memorized his most important monologue less than twenty-four hours before curtain call. I know the time he put in learning how to fence and how sore he was and how any soreness was overshadowed by his raw excitement and anticipation for opening night.

Yet there is no one that can understand the exact weight and caliber of every word he utters and every name he proclaims. No one can know precisely know how much joy his itchy faux silk shirt brings him every time he dawns it for the closing performance. An actor has many depths, not all of them seen under the hot lights. There is what the audience knows, there is what his friends know and there is only what he knows.