AN ACTOR'S CHALLENGE: ABRAHAM ADAMS

I have said, half in jest, that the remainder of my career in theater will likely be playing some combination of racists, rapists, or both. This can be a challenge. Myriad questions arise: Should I be telling this person’s story? Why? Should any more space be made in the theater for perspectives that are almost exclusively from a white, colonizer lens? How does a white actor, cognizant of these questions, navigate through deep structural flaws and still keep his moral compass pointed true north?

A graduate school mentor had a poster in his office that stated: “You cannot act and judge at the same time.” Judgement is the sole province of the audience. It is imperative that I see every character I play as human first. To place my own values and beliefs as a precedent in any artistic approach is tantamount to placing a twelve foot wall of concrete between myself and the character. If judgement comes first, I cannot see what that character sees or how they see it. Judgement serves only to obscure and distance.

Ugliness and hate are as essential to stories as beauty and love. We cannot have light without the dark. But what are these words to which each of us have attached an individualized image or feeling? My concept of “love” or “hate” or “light” or “dark” can be quite different from yours. I know what these words mean to me, but only to me. I can get in my own way by judging a character’s sense of beauty or ugliness or love or hate by my own. Judgement comes at my own artistic peril.

Freeing myself from judgement about the characters I play does two things: 1) it brings me closer to the character, as I have just expressed and 2) in a bit of irony, it provides a measure of artistic distance, allowing me to pursue the character’s targets without imperiling my own sense of morality. I am not this person but I can see what they see and how they see it.

Perhaps it is too simple a thing to say I choose to “walk a mile in their shoes”. In a world that I see becoming quick to judge and silence anything that does not fit within a rigid moral framework, I suppose it is the one aspect of my artistic work that lives in quiet protest against an ever radicalizing world.