Acting
May 19, 2011 (Thursday)
Recently I saw the 1932 movie, “Strange Interlude,” on the Turner Classic Movies channel. It was a screen adaptation of a play by Eugene O’Neill. O’Neill adopted an old method which had passed from favor about a hundred years before his play on Broadway in 1923. In the movie, the method took the form of letting the audience hear the thoughts of the actors. Their lips didn’t move, but their voices could be heard. The scene continued as if we could not hear the thoughts of the players. When the play was originally presented, there were no voiceovers; instead, the actors turned toward the audience and spoke directly to the patrons, as if speaking directly to those watching, letting them in on the personal thoughts of the characters.
The method used in the play was itself an adaptation of an earlier method used in theaters many years before: the wearing of masks. When the actor was playing the character, his face was covered by the mask, but when speaking directly to the audience, revealing the personal thoughts of the character, the mask was removed.
(I’m writing this from memory of some of the reading 
I’ve been doing; it is oversimplified, so it is subject to error. If you know better, you’re probably right. There’s a lot more involved in the history of masks in the theater).
Since seeing the movie, and reading about O’Neill and the theater, I’ve been thinking about our communications with each other. What we
hear the other person say may not be what that person really thinks.
We wear, as it were, masks to hide our true feelings and thoughts. We go against our own code that “honesty is the best policy.” The result is almost always a tragic personal disaster of some kind, as we weave a tangled web of deceit that ultimately is unmasked by the truth. It all started in the Garden of Eden, when the bold-faced honest truth was cloaked in not-quite-true excuses. The result then was tragic; it always is.
The cultural revolution of the 1960’s pushed for acceptance of the slogan, “Tell it like it is!” Maybe we should examine ourselves and see if we can identify the masks we may be wearing.