The Assistant Storytellers

The cast of the play I’m acting in is at our neighborhood bar for post-show drinks, and one of my fellow actors is showing me his tattoo. He’s whipped off his shoe and sock, and is wiggling his bare foot next to my chair so that I can admire the wide, serifed X across his big toe.

“Why an X?” I ask.

“Well, it’s…” He trails off, then starts again. “Do you want the real story, or the more interesting one I’ve made up?”

“Both,” I say without thinking about it.

“How about this? I’ll tell you three stories, and you guess which one is true.”

“You’re on,” I reply, while thinking to myself, I like this guy! I hope I can keep him as a friend after the play closes! He tells me three stories, and I lose the game. Even though I know that the most mundane of the stories is likely to be the true one, I pick the most interesting and unusual tale, the one with political connotations, the one that says more about him than I already knew. I’m not really playing the game as we’d set it up. Instead, I vote for the story I like best. Even though it’s not true, the story he invented says more about him, how he thinks and what he values, and how he sees me, what he expects I’d like to hear.

I love a good story! This is, at the root of it all, why I’m here tonight. As Harrison Ford put it in his interview on Inside the Actor’s Studio, an actor is merely “an assistant storyteller.” With the help of other actors, the director, the set and lighting designers, the costumer, and the playwright, we have been telling a story that isn’t true. It never happened, and never will. Somebody just made it up. Still, we’re all willing to devote hundreds of hours of our combined lives to telling it. Some, myself included, believe that telling these false stories is the most satisfying and important thing that we do. We are out for drinks to celebrate our success in telling a total lie.

It occurs to me that I will choose a good story over a true one most of the time. I don’t actually believe stories that sound unlikely, but I like to hear them, to roll them around in my mind, and I am more likely to remember them than I am the truth. Even now, two days after my colleague showed me his toe, I remember every detail of my favorite explanation, and only the faintest gist of the true one. Of course, I usually say that I value honesty, and I do value it deeply when it is necessary to give me the power to choose my own path in life. For example, if I’m in a committed relationship and I ask my partner if he slept with someone else while I was out of town, I want him to tell me the truth so that I can freely decide whether I still want to be with him. If I ask my employers whether they’re working on phasing out my job, I want to know the truth so that I can plan my career. If a play I’d like to act in is pre-cast, or if the director is sure that there’s no way she’ll cast me (because I look the wrong age, because she knows I don’t have the skills needed, because my eyes bug out when I’m surprised, or for any reason, really), I want to be told that so I can choose whether to spend my time on the audition. Telling people the truth in matters that affect their lives is a matter of basic respect, of valuing their personal freedom. If I’m part of the story, and it’s happening now, the truth is very important to me.

Still, most of the things people tell me are not factually important to my life. They’re told in order to bond with me in some small way, to share something about who the person is, to impress me, or to entertain us both. A false story can do all of these things just as well as, and sometimes better than, a true one. I don’t need to know the real reason why my colleague has an X across his big toe. I don’t care whether another theater person I know was really a secret member of The Strawberry Alarm Clock. My life and my choices will not change whether or not my best high school friend really had a fling with a hot guy in a Billy Bragg t-shirt while she was in New Orleans when she was sixteen. Still, I love the stories.

One of my favorite vacation experiences came when, on an extended road trip around the eastern U.S., I blew into Savanna, Georgia, and found it advertised as “The Ghost Story Capital of the United States.” I went on a walking tour of supposedly haunted places in historic downtown Savanna, listening to a handsome young man in a Shakespeare festival t-shirt, who later admitted that he was an actor, too. With compelling passion, he told us who had been murdered in this house, and what demons had entered that one because the headboard of the bed was made from iron stolen from a cemetery gate. He told us about a lonely old man who had moved into another historic house, then found his best friend and perfect companion in the ghost of the kindly doctor who had once lived there. As he told us about the doppleganger evil spirit who had attacked one of his college classmates in the mansion-turned-apartment complex on the next corner, I realized suddenly that I didn’t believe a word he was saying. In the next instant, I realized that I didn’t care. I loved the stories anyway. I learned more about the spirit of Savanna from those dubious tales than I would have learned from a dry, proven historical account.

In the same way, I learn more about my friends from the stories they tell about themselves than I would from knowing what actually happened to them. It’s more revealing, actually, when people tell me what they wish had happened, than when they tell me about their real pasts. Now that I think of it, though, my fellow actor’s true story is poignant in its way, as is the fact that he prefers not to tell it. I suppose my favorite way to learn about someone is through his game. I want to hear both stories: what really happened, and what we wish were true.