By Herald de Paris Contributor's Bureau on June 17, 2012

By Hubert O’Hearn

THUNDER BAY (Herald de Paris) — Acting is the only art form I can think of where being truthful in execution requires the presentation of a perfectly constructed lie. Hide the self, reveal the other, accept the applause and flowers and loudly state that the reviewer wouldn’t know a good play if he was hammered on the head with a shelf of Hamlets.

It’s a wonderful life, although that was a movie so it shouldn’t really enter into the discussion.

Live theatres, both professional and community are closing all around us. Vancouver, one of the wealthiest cities on the planet is losing one of its oldest houses and I just read an earnest plea from a beloved friend about a lovely little space in Roanoke VA that is in trouble. And to me, that’s a goddam shame.

It’s certainly fair to say that I’ve loved theatre longer and more faithfully than anyone or anything I’m not related to by blood. I didn’t get my most beloved childhood teddy bear until I was eight. I wrote my first play at five. Five as in years, not AM. Five AM writing would come decades later.

I’d entered Grade One early. The usual starting age was six, yet remarkably for a Baby Boom year the incoming class at St. Mary’s School was small so the entry date of birth was pushed forward from the end of December to the end of February. And yet you wonder why so many Pisces are insecure? There we were, happy children entertained by Captain Kangaroo, the pre-Alex Trebek Jeopardy! and Nancy Dickerson delivering afternoon newsbreaks between afternoon soap operas on NBC. (I was a precocious child. Deal with it.) Suddenly we were yanked out of the home and stuck in rigid rows with children who were older, probably wiser and definitely stronger. After all, some of them had lived – good grief! – a full 15% longer than I had!

Well what was there to be done to prove one’s worth? I was the slowest runner, held a baseball bat cross-handed, was thumped in the face anytime a football was thrown my way and I didn’t know the dickens from a comic book. Actually I knew Dickens. Say what you will about that great humanitarian novelist – he don’t make you popular. Or at least, not immediately.

Because my mother had seen me literally climbing the shelves of my grandfather’s library to get at what must be the best books on the top shelf – Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples was there, although to this day I’ve never understood that S on Peoples – she thought that the pleasant little lad might be on to something, although please first get off that shelf. So for what would prove to be an ominously portentous fifth birthday, she gave me a little cardboard cut-out stage with cardboard actors and actresses to move about and imagine. The script that came with it was, I think, Snow White. I found it predictable and The Huntsman ill-defined (what WAS his name?) so that went into a drawer and I wrote my own.

So back to Mrs. Gunby’s Grade One class, I decided to bring in a play, adapted from my recent discovery of Peanuts comic strips. I wrote out the scenes, gave them to mother who then typed them repeatedly on pink and green paper.

Well my gosh it worked. Everybody wanted to be in My Play. This in turn gave me an early important lesson in the cult of celebrity which is why I’ve been suspicious of it ever since. I knew that I’d done a play because I knew I was unpopular and wanted to change that, so what was the inner story of Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman or Robert Redford? I’ll bet you anything he just hated those moles.

After Peanuts and a Grade Three version of Mary Poppins there wasn’t much to the story until high school, where I had developed a hellacious stutter, which still pops out like a morning woodpecker hammering on a dead tree to this day. I’ve never known where it emerged from – it has to have been something pretty ugly and if memory thinks it wiser to forget, who am I to argue?

Anyway, one had to take an Arts option – a rule I wish all schools had today. Grade Nine music was a bare scrape-through, Grade Ten Art was an escape from failure, so for Grade Eleven I was left with Theatre Arts. How much worse could that be?

It was glorious for I discovered that when on stage, either in an improv situation or with a script, I never stuttered nor have I to this day. On that one, I actually do have a theory. Acting requires such a focus on the other person or people on stage, where you are, what you do and so forth, that the brain stops pinging away from unrelated thought to thought and instead gets down to concentrated business. Well that’s my story anyway.

More years pass, the first two university degrees awarded and an overly optimistic marriage went on the rocks. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘You’re gay. Be who you are and be happy. Don’t be who you aren’t and spend your life pretending.’ We get along rarely, but just fine.

Oh yes and then I died. No really. I’m one of those people with their after-life experiences. That’s a story for another time, however yes it’s all true. Everything you’ve ever read or heard. It makes you fearless of death.

Life is another matter. I was laid up through three surgeries for the better part of a year. I’d started writing – there wasn’t anything else i could do and those early efforts, while lousy, at least taught me that I enjoyed the craft. I missed human contact. In particular I missed women. Let no one ever tell you that the draw of sex isn’t a mighty factor in the enlistment of actors. Remember, assuming my story is typical – and trust me, it is – insecure people wanting to be popular means that they want physical acceptance. Which is why you should never marry an actor. They expect the audience to be different every night.

So, again encouraged by my Mom (whom I’m slowly realizing has spent her life as a frustrated booking agent) I auditioned for a part in A Streetcar Named Desire presented by the local community theatre company: Cambrian Players. As I recall my performance as Mitch, the poor sap who falls for Blanche DuBois, I cringe. It was shallow, mannered and imitative. Sometimes though, that works. In any event, on closing night a dear, dear man named Jim Hobson gave me a card that though since lost I shall never forget. It read, ‘Cambrian thanks you.’ A fleet of Cadillacs driven to my door by that year’s Playmates of the Month couldn’t have made me happier. I was appreciated? I was appreciated. I. Was. Appreciated.

It goes on from there, yet I think I’ve given you enough if only from the actor’s perspective. I did go on to found my own theatre, write hit shows and in total have 105 opening nights between Streetcar and today. Number 106 comes this fall. The important bit is that without that strange yet loving alchemic family of theatre who’s to say what I, and a million other I’s like me would have ever become? I think I know. Just one more of the million T.S. Eliot described as The Hollow Men; The lifeless, the hopeless, the literally thought-less. ‘I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear my trousers rolled.’

Instead…you know what? it’s been a fab-ulous life dahling! Kissy kiss, see you backstage!

Hubert O’Hearn is a Contributing Editor of San Francisco Book Review. An archive of his book reviews can be found at bythebookreviews.blogspot.com