The Absurd Hero

Posted on | October 15, 2009 | No Comments

Whenever I think about my choice to be an actor, I think about Camus. I’ve mentioned Frenchy McFrencherton before in this context, and you can blame my Freshman year reading list for that. But mere hours before The Man Who Was Thursday explodes into the world, I’m finding my Froggy friend has a special resonance. (Why all the Franco-bile? Come see the show!)

The Absurdity that Camus refers to is this: we inherently do not want to be limited, powerless, and mortal – it’s human nature, coded in our DNA and hardwired into our brains. Yet the very same biology – the very same Nature – that makes us want these things constrains us, castrates us, kills us. We live in a world that programs us to want more, yet gives us less. It’s the basic joke of Creation. It’s crazy. It’s Absurd.

The Heroes (in Camus’ line of thinking) are the folks who face that chasm – knowing it cannot be bridged – and keep going. Who don’t delude themselves. He likes actors because, it is in a real sense our job to be constantly reminded of our own mortality.

Camus draws a finer, more psychoanalytic line around the relationship Shakespeare poetically points up when talking of the world as stage: to convey emotional reality, drama (sometimes symbolically and sometimes literally) compactifies human experience into a few hours. Likewise, the actors playing their parts travel in a few hours “the whole course of the dead-end path that the man in the audience takes a lifetime to cover.”

In Thursday I, of course, get the same frisson I get from every show: here I get to laugh at death, I get to be someone I will never be. I get to live a different life than the one time and circumstance have outlined for me.

But this story, in particular, is chock full of Absurdity. Syme and his comrades face off against forces that may not only end their lives, but may end the world as they know it. They struggle against a world that seems to be actively thwarting their attempts to bring order and sense to it.

Camus also says the actor’s lot brings to light another troubling fact about ‘reality’: “He demonstrates to what degree appearing creates being.” And Thursday is the Absurd Conflict on steroids – not only are things not as you wish them to be, they are not what they seem. And what they really are could not only kill you, it could kill you. Right. Now.

I love playing Syme because his Victorian British stiff-upper-lippedness is the perfect vehicle for raging against the conundrum of chaos: he really is an Absurd Hero – he believes by sheer force of wit and will he can make the world make sense. He believes he has to. Truth be told, that’s not very far from myself. And, as Camus predicted, I love getting to play out this little drama when I know it’s only that – play. Even as things don’t play out quite as Syme expects, Dan knows that it’s a show: if things are going right, scene five follows scene four. I know what’s going to happen – which is something I have over Syme. Dan can laugh with the audience at what Syme and his comrades go through – because it is funny. It’s crazy. It’s Absurd.

And maybe because it tricks me, for a few hours, into believing I have control over my own ultimate destiny.

The Man Who Was Thursday opens tonight. And I promise you an absurdly entertaining evening.

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