On a hot, humid evening, I sit on a battered folding chair outside the theater, wearing a sticky costume and asking myself once again, “Why am I doing this? Shouldn’t I be visiting widows and orphans in their distress or something?” Instead I’m waiting for my next scene, mildly anxious about getting my lines right. I tell myself, “Maybe this should be my last production.”
My first time through college, I was a drama major, involved in all the campus productions. I even spent two summers in a resident repertory company and considered theater as a career. But God mercifully took me another way. Now for 20 years I’ve been a pastor in the PCA, occasionally taking part in community theater. In recent years, I’ve limited my efforts to Shakespeare, playing roles in “Macbeth,” “Twelfth Night,” “Much Ado About Nothing,” “Julius Caesar,” and “A Winter’s Tale.”
Our city’s amateur Shakespeare company performs in an outdoor venue that might recall London’s Globe theater on a smaller scale. In our city’s early days, “The Stables” were constructed to house a cemetery’s horses and hearse wagons. These days the horses and hearse wagons are long retired. But the building’s open brick courtyard allows a unique playing space with intimate seating on four sides for our modest audiences.
For over 20 years now, the company’s organizers have staged two or three outdoor performances each year, giving community players like me a chance to act, and local audiences a chance to see The Bard’s plays in live performances.
How are preaching and preaching Shakespeare similar? I keep coming back to three things.
#1: Understand the Text
Performing Shakespeare forces me to study a difficult text and then make it as clear as I possibly can to the audience. Every actor who performs Shakespeare rises or falls according to his own grasp of the text.
For many of us, watching an amateur production of a Shakespeare play is an ordeal. The play makes little sense to us because too often, the actor’s lines make no sense to him. He may have learned the words by brute force memorization, but he’s not *quite* sure what his character is really saying. He hasn’t done his exegesis. He doesn’t know what the text means. And if the actor doesn’t know, what hope does the audience have?
One of the best things I’ve ever seen on textual exegesis is the actor Ian McKellen describing his process of working and preparing MacBeth’s speech, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.” You can find it here (but skip to the 1:02:00 mark). If I taught a seminary class in exegesis, I’d show this video to my students. Actors and pastors both share a challenge: you must really understand the text, or you have no hope of communicating it.
#2: Forget Yourself
Stage performance will fail for any actor wrapped up in how he looks or comes across. An actor’s task is to forget himself for the sake of his character. Performance gives a constant stream of opportunities to get this wrong.
An actor’s selfish thinking will destroy his character’s reality in the play. If an actor worries that his costume makes him look fat, he’ll keep tugging at that worrisome place where it rides up unflatteringly. In doing so, he betrays his character, who is faced with weighty matters like life, death, love, hate, revenge, jealousy, justice, offense, and forgiveness. In the story world, that character hasn’t the least worry about how he looks.
The stage actor’s “forget yourself” rule also applies to the preacher in the pulpit. I must not care what people think of me. If a preacher’s first thought after a sermon is, “How did I do?” then he relegates our Savior — whose story of life, death, justice, offense, and forgiveness is of the weightiest importance — to a secondary role.
#3: Give Yourself Away
Playing in a Shakespeare production is an act of sharing. When I act, I’m giving away something I love. A good performance by an actor gives an audience the chance to actually enjoy dramatic material that many find inaccessible. Like a good guide who can take the tourist to the most interesting and memorable spots, a good actor can open the magnificent story world of Shakespeare to those who might never enjoy it otherwise.
The actor gives not only to the audience, but to the other players in the production. Singers love to sing in a group where everyone knows their notes and sings exactly on pitch. In the same way, actors love it when the other guy in the scene plays his part with intelligence and energy. Tennis is fun when the rally goes on and on. I want to play my role in a way that keeps feeding the ball to the other actors in the scene.
One of these times, I will act in my last Shakespeare production. Just as some day I will preach my last sermon. But not yet. I still love the challenge of the text, the challenge of selflessness, and the opportunity to give something I love to others.
Keith Ghormley serves as associate pastor of Zion Church (PCA) in Lincoln, Nebraska.