When I was teenager, I wanted to be a comedic actor. The desire had not been lifelong; it came upon me, semi-abruptly, in the latter part of high school. I don’t recall if there was a precise moment or motivation for the ambition. I just remember that the longing to inhabit character was suddenly there, a gnawing sensation in my gut, a hole that needed to be filled.
My family didn’t have a frame of reference for this appetite: no one we knew did anything on stage or TV. So it wasn’t clear what I should do with the interest. I was a good student. I played sports – with passable but not excellent results. And I wasn’t even very funny. I loved slapstick humor, sure, cracked up at dumb jokes, and was drawn to watch Laurel and Hardy or Abbot and Costello movies. But I don’t think anyone in my neighborhood would have called me funny. I had spent grade school getting into fights. I was competitive about grades. I was way too serious.
Still, somewhere inside me lurked an inexplicable appetite to act, to be absurd. I took a summer acting class. And, in my senior year of high school, I quit the basketball team to be in the school play. We were doing Shakespeare. Midsummer’s Night Dream. I was Puck.
I was an awful Puck – in a pretty awful staging of the play. I was also a foreigner for the drama folks, the academically intense pseudo-jock interloper who unexpectedly had discovered theatre. My interests were better suited for stand-up comedy than for Shakespeare. Yet there I was, a bit player in a small series of sketches the name of which I cannot recall. And the inhabitant of a key role in a storied piece of Shakespearean literature. My friends sort of shrugged. The basketball team went on to the state playoffs. My parents smiled.
But – consistently during the performances – the audience burst into laughter. Surprisingly, the laughs, were not at my interpretation of Puck (which, to my recollection, could at best be called bizarre). They came in response to a single line that I had in the brief series of sketches. It wasn’t a line I thought was supposed to be funny. And yet, one show after another, it was.
Our lives take unexpected twists and turns. Our interests, opportunities, and identities can sometimes seem alien or inexplicable. Often, we bumble along. We yearn to be part of something bigger than a dreary stream of days of mundane being. We can even burn to do something, to be somebody, that others notice, that anyone notices. To be different. To play a role.
We can be filled with a hunger to have purpose.
Ah, but the world does not offer us a script, at least conspicuously. As adolescents, there isn’t a storyline and character description handed to us. As adults, there can seem to be an absence of storyline, or perhaps a futility to role and responsibility. What is my part? Will I ever learn my lines? Does it matter if people don’t laugh, cry, or smile in response to my performance?
“The universe is universing again,” a friend likes to say. We laugh at the expression – with an unspoken just maybe awareness. Sometimes the world does indeed seem to move us about. Sometimes I find myself in life scenes and scenarios that seem to follow a plot. The experience makes me want to stop, to turn and ask for direction. Except there aren’t any words written on cue cards. There isn’t anyone positioned offstage to whisper me my next line. And there isn’t an audience watching knowingly, a gallery whose response I can predict based on what their predecessors did yesterday. There is only now. Here. There is only my interpretation. Today.
I would have done better in high school to take an improv class. Looking back, I can see that the young man who wanted to make people laugh was a shy, uncertain, hopeful kid who needed to learn confidence, skills for interacting with others, and the ability to adapt. He didn’t really want a script. He wanted reassurance in the importance of creativity, experience in the art of spontaneity. He wanted to find safety through the shared embrace of the unknown. He yearned to laugh, yes – but with others.
That kid is still trying to fill the intermittently achy emptiness of the unknown. He feeds it with a variety of foods. Many are nourishing. But one of the best sources of sustenance remains the joy of the smile, the silly joke, the belly laugh. And the wonder of doing so with someone else.
Hunger is meant to be shared.