Against all better judgement I have begun a 12-part blog series enumerating my reasons for going back to the theatre, specifically to see ACT’s production of A Christmas Carol on December 12. This is day two of my virtual half-advent calendar.
I have never really fully explained why I left the theatre back in 2013. My reasons were personal, even if my retirement was painfully public. Maybe I’ll get to sharing those reasons someday, but before I can do that, I should state for the record who is to blame for me becoming involved in the art form in the first place. That would by my sister, Margaret, or “Maggie” as those of us closest to her know her these days.
Maggie first fully electrified my theatrical imagination playing Puck in her junior high school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was maybe six or seven, but I followed the Elizabethan text better than one might expect. Still, a lot of the language lofted over my head. Except when Maggie spoke, transformed as she was into a mischievous hobgoblin, seemingly in charge of all of the chaos reigning on the stage.
Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand,
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover's fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
I already had it mostly memorized, because I had listened to her memorizing it in her room over the weeks before.
The following year, when my sister played Gollum in the school’s production of The Hobbit, the gas really hit the spark plug.
“Bless us and splesh us my precious. Gol-LUM!”
She would practice her lines over and over in her room with the door shut, but she was loud enough for me to hear everything in the room Eddie and I shared next door.
“What’s it got in its pockets, my precious? Gol-LUM!”
These eponymous punctuations "Gol-LUM!" burst forth from her as seemingly uncontrollable, autonomic eructations welling up from the pit of her gut. Or rather, Gollum’s gut, for she had, indeed, become the twisted little monster.
“We wants it, we needs it. Must have the precious. They stole it from us. Sneaky little hobbitses. Wicked, tricksy, false!"
Looking back now, she was so unlike other girls her age, in the mid-70s: so obsessed with hair and fashion and looks. Oh, Maggie cared about those things too, obsessed about them at times, but she threw them all aside when she came to inhabit Gollum. Once him, she didn’t care one bit about looking feminine, even though the director had squeezed her blossoming body into a green and brown painted body suit. She gave herself over completely to the character. It was really, for me, the first time I had ever witnessed such a transformation.
Now you may say, wait a minute. She was doing theatre, pretending. This wasn’t real. But when your oldest sister by six years is becoming an avariciously murderous monster in the room next door to yours, it’s real all right.
Keep in mind this is decades before the magic of Peter Jackson’s digital capture of Andy Cirkus’ pliable, gamut-running, psychologically insightful portrayal in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. It was even prior to the animated version of The Hobbit released in 1977. As far as I know my sister had never seen a performance of Gollum, and I’m not even sure she read the book. My sister had nothing from which to construct her portrayal but the text of the stage adaption and her own imagination. In other words, she did the quintessential actor’s job, and took fresh text (fresh to her anyways) and molded from it a character whom she then inhabited. Her portrayal of Gollum encapsulated everything about the theatrical process that would get and keep me stoked for the next three decades. As an artist, my sister set me on fire. With Puck and Gollum she showed me how weirdness and audacity could be leveraged into a gift you could offer other people in performance.
The key to my origin story as a theatre artist—which I never put together consciously throughout all those decades of doing it, and only just fully realized writing this—is that I started acting, and then went on to playwriting, because of my sister Maggie. She touched the match to my fuse as an artist, and I’ve been burning ever since.
Every one of my siblings has some experience with the theatre, but I was the only one who went professional. I got my Actors' Equity card at the age of 19 playing Young Scrooge at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC. I never used my union card again.
My Christmas present from Maggie that year was a beautiful, hardbound illustrated copy of A Christmas Carol. Here’s how she inscribed it.
1/11/88Dear Paul,
I saw this book a week or so after we saw your show & I had to get it for you. I know that the show caused some inner turbulence for you but it is a timeless story that touches everyone’s heart. Your show was an excellent adaptation of the story. After buying this book I started thinking about what it is that makes this story so special. What did I come up with? We can identify with Scrooge’s past, present and future “personas”, and we can relate to the loss of Christmas spirit that seems to occur as we get older. We become so caught up in the ways of the world, that we lose touch with the ways of the soul. I’d like to believe that in this story Dickens isn’t merely encouraging the celebration of Christmas, he’s demanding that we celebrate life. The ghosts are merely showing us how we have allowed the control of our lives to be taken out of our hands. To you, dear brother, I wis a full, rewarding, happy, sad, thoughtful, action-packed, glorious and challenging life. I hope that you will enjoy this book & celebrate Christmas every day of your life.
Lots of Love,
MCM [Margaret Cecilia Mullin]
There’s so much I could tell you about everything my sister has taught me over the years, but if I had to boil it all down to highlights it would be these:
- Life is long, but ultimately short.
- Be weird when you want.
- Be loud in your love.
- Celebrate light in the darkness.
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