There's a Prudential Life Insurance ad making the rounds on my friends' Facebook pages. In it, two members of various families stand facing each other, making eye contact for four full minutes. What emerges is a beautiful testament to the power of connection and the need we often suppress to be seen and to be touched. By simply staring into each others' eyes (the windows to the soul, after all), the pairs weep, laugh, hug, appreciate, and confront the potential of losing one another, In four minutes they affirm their mutual humanity.
The study of humanity is taken up often by those intrepid adventurers we call actors. In his book, Acting One, theorist Robert Cohen asserts the need for actors to touch and be touched. He goes on to explain that while it is important to physically touch your scene partner in appropriate moments and ways, what he's really talking about is the willingness to make oneself vulnerable and open enough to feel and offer true feeling. Can you touch another person and allow yourself to be moved emotionally?
When we confront another person's humanity fully, when we take them in as complex, beautiful, complicated, experienced livers-of-life, and suspend our judgment for a moment, transcending difference, or fear, or prejudice is possible. Actors do it all the time. They have to. It is impossible to play a character whose morality, life experiences, sexuality, and whatever else are outside your realm of identity without accepting them. Furthermore, you have to come at the world of the play with that character's perspective on everything in order to do honest work. In short, it's the ultimate challenge to walk a mile in someone else's shoes.
What if we all had to do that? What if we all at least had to try? Being vulnerable and open to others is terrifying. What if we're taken advantage of? What if we're not heard or understood? These are only a few of the questions we might ask, but the more important question in my mind is: What do we have to lose? Our cultural climate right now feeds divisiveness, and demonizing those who are not like us is the order of the day. Instead of neutralizing the perspectives and experiences that are outside our comfortable norms, we might try facing them. Can you imagine yourself standing across from someone you fear, or pass moral judgement on, or have a bias against and allowing yourself to accept the fact that they are human too? That they have a value system, just like you do? That they have a family they care about, and worry about, and who at times drives them crazy? That they feel joy and pain and disappointment and...are vulnerable.
Depending on who you are you may find this notion either terrifying or simplistic. It is both. All I can tell you is that the gift I've been given as an acting teacher and director is to see acts of breathtaking bravery everyday in class and in rehearsal. Watching two people work to see each other, work to listen to and understand each other, work to touch each other is powerful (we pay money to see it on stage it's so transformative!!!). We can work just as hard out here in the real world. I've seen it happen. I'm buying what Prudential is selling.
