Interview with an Actor

When trying to think of different perspectives we could get on death, we realized that we actually knew a former actor and professional magician, Lorin Stewart. He explained to us the philosophy he developed on death when playing the role of Hamlet, the audience reactions to death scenes, and what it's like on stage during such poignant moments.

Real Video (28.8)

Transcript

Could you start by telling us a little about yourself?

I started acting when I was really young, probably around eight, and doing some little shows for our school, and then my folks split up when I was very young, probably around nine, and I was an only child, so I ended up doing little plays and shows using that as imagination to keep my occupied. And eventually I went off to work in a repertory company, and decided, I met some people there, so I ended up going to a Jesuit University, called Santa Clara University, got accepted there. And that was a clasically-trained place, a place for classical training. We ended up doing a lot of Shakespeare and a lot of progressive drama, which worked with a company in San Francisco called Actors' Conservatory Theatre, which was a fairly good production company up there. And I played lots of roles, a lot of things backstage as well - to get a liberal arts education you have to be able to take stage design, script writing, religion, math. A pretty broad education there. And for a couple of years after, I worked with a couple of companies up there in San Jose and Santa Clara. And I auditioned for the Royal Shakespeare Company, had a training program in London. I met up with some of the Shakespeare Company acting troupe when they when they were doing classes in Santa Clara and San Francisco. And I met a couple of people and they said, "Why don't you go ahead and audition in London for the Royal Shakespeare Company program at the Guild Hall?" And so I did that, and got in, and ended up spending the next six years in London, working with the Royal Shakespeare Company apprenticeship program and with the Manchester Royal Exchange. And then we started our own company, a group of Americans, in England, started, in London, we started a company called the Full Value Theatre company. And we went around and did a number of festivals. And then I came back to America. And in parallel to that I was also working as a magician, doing street magic in Covent Garden, and eventually came out here and did a couple of different restaurants and cruise ships. And it all kind of came forward and came together a few years later when Clive Barker, who is English, was producing a show about magic and he was looking for a magic consultant. And so it all came full circle, where I worked in his production as the head of department for magic design and consulting for a movie called Lord of Illusions, which is done by United Artists.

Have you played any roles where you've had to die?

Yeah, Hamlet.

And what went through your mind when you were doing that?

Well, when creating, in rehearsals, I actually did studies of death, because that's a lot of what the whole part is about. What it is to be, what it is to live, and what it is to die. And a lot of my thoughts came from Hamlet, Shakespeare, a lot of the philosophy that I have now comes, really, from Shakespeare. There's a part in it where he talks about imperious Caesar dead and turned to clay might stop a bunghole, where your body turns back to dust, we fat all other creatures to fat ourselves, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Worms. And so the essence of what life is about, I guess not only human life, but all life, was something that you are really confronted to, face-to-face, when you are playing in a show like Hamlet. And so I studied death, I actually talked to a lot of people who had gone through bereavement in their own family and actually there were some videos on death and dying, too, that I watched back then.

So what's going through my mind when you die on stage, nine times out of ten, is "am I hitting my mark and is my light right?" I mean, am I in the right location on stage. But once in a while, your mind drifts to that moment when you're "shuffling off the mortal coil" and you're giving up your body and you merge with forever. So, in Hamlet, I think, you're very, very much forced to talk about what existence is and what essence is. That speech, you know, "to be or not to be," is on many different levels. On one, is it ready for me to live or should I die? And the same time it's, while you're living, what are you going to do with your life? And on the element of whether you should live or die, Hamlet says, the one thing that keeps you away, in his mind, from basically committing suicide and getting rid of all the "trials and tribulations" and all the problems of life is the threat or the "dread that something after death," that we don't know about, might be a lot worse and have a lot more fear attached to it than getting along with your regular life and just living as it is, as we know it on earth.

And I think that's the essence, you know, is that from point A everyone is born. We know this. And everyone dies. In the history of humanity, it's something we all share. And so we don't have a lot of control over point A and point B. What we do have a lot of control over is what the journey we go through on that path going, what we call life. And a lot of thing started making sense to me, there's a few things that made a lot of sense after Hamlet. And one of them was that you know a lot of people, we realize friction, friction is the essence of life, if you think about it. I mean, the moment you're conceived, you know, the sperm goes into the egg and it bores in and you have all the DNA and it tears apart, and the cell tears apart, and the body grows. You know, you're pushed through, when you're born, you're actually pushed through this little tiny canal in lots of friction. And your whole life is walking - walking's friction, eating, tearing the flesh off the bone is friction. Everything you do, breathing to eating to speaking, all of life is friction, and yet so much of modern man, I suppose, maybe throughout time, people are always finding ways of reducing friction in their lives. And I think that all the answers to our journey along life is all the answers are given to us by having to confront and actually embrace that friction. Because if you think about it, the ultimate reduction of friction in life is death. So when you die and you shuffle off your mortal coil, you get rid of your body, your friction's over. And so very few people want, are looking forward to that moment of death, and yet most people during their lives are trying to find ways of eliminating friction within their own lives. So I think the answer is somewhere in that friction, the harder path you take, the more adventurous, the more risky way that you travel, the more you embrace, the more you use the fruits of all the gifts you're given - you know, your legs, your arms, your senses. And yet still driven forward by an ethic, I think you can start unraveling some of the ideas and some of the treasures that life gives you. But it's all about that friction.

Another thing that came to me around the same time I was playing Hamlet, and I'm writing about this now, there was an experiment that was done, it's a biology experiment, I think it's kind of neat - the fishbowl theory, the fishbowl experiment. Which is where you take a glass fishbowl and you fill it with water and you put a few fish in there, male and female, and some plants, and you seal the top perfectly. And if you have this fishbowl and you weigh it - let's say it weighs thirty pounds, well, eventually through time, the fish, say, multiply. And now you have fifty little fish running around in that fishbowl. And if you weight it, the fishbowl still weighs thirty pounds. And eventually, the ecosystem gets all screwed up because, you know, there are too many fish floating around in there, and so they start cannibalizing themselves, and the ecosystem kind of gets out of whack, and now let's say all the fish die and all the plants die, and everything dies inside of that little microcosm there, and eventually there's just this brown scum at the bottom of the fishbowl. And if you weigh it, it still weighs thirty pounds. I think that's really interesting, because it's all that stuff, is all in that little jar. Nothing changes, nothing is added, nothing in, nothing out. It's just the way that things are arranged.

And so for me that was a very exciting thing, because, regardless of religions, you realize that we are so lucky at this moment to be part of that brown scum at the bottom of that jar, you know, the earth, and we're able to kind of be sparked with whatever magic it is and kind of get out of that muck and look around and breathe and taste and smell and exist and think and appreciate all of this other stuff that's around us during that very short span of time that we call our lives before we go back into the muck. And so if death is a process of life, then life is a treasure, a fantastic gift, to be able to, by the very nature of friction get out and exist and smell and just, really, enjoy the stuff that's off the cosmos, before melt back into it, into the stuff.

And that addresses the things, you know, the matter of life. The spirit, the light, the thing we call our soul, again, after this Hamlet thing and a lot of, I mean, that Hamlet experience was a really big springboard off into the rest of my life. You know, I look at a drop of water. I've often thought what would happen, you know, your spirit, your soul, do you retain your own existence? And your spirit floats away to wherever. And lots of religions have many different theories on where it goes and what it does. And from what I can tell from a lot of people, we're very, as human beings, we're possessive of our natures, we're very possessive of our identities, our individual identities. And so I think a lot of people want to hold on to their identities, want to hold on to their existence, their individuality. And I, I look at the raindrop and I kind of make a comparison where rain, a raindrop, it originates in the heavens, in the skies, and a rage happens and the raindrop exists and falls to earth, its life is very short, it falls to earth and it comes back down to earth, and when it eventually hits the ocean, at that moment, if you could freeze the raindrop in the air as its coming down and you could take a stop-action photograph of it, it's completely unique, there's no other one like it, it's completely different, it has its own identity, and yet when it merges with the ocean, does it try to retain its own identity, cling tenaciously to its own droplike nature? Or does it merge and become something much bigger, which is the ocean? And I think our spirit, our energy, whatever it is that we call it, our souls, do the same thing. That when that time goes and we lose our droplike quality of our bodies, that our souls just go back into the cosmos, back into the ocean that's surrounding us, that's everything, not every little individual thing, that's to small. One large consciousness, one large energy. And that, death, therefore is a continual cycle, not only of our lives, but it's a natural progression, a cycling, a cleansing of the universe, just like rain is, you know, rain is cleansing and a condensation and a cleaning of the ocean.

And somewhere in all of that is where I am right now, in this journey, kicked off with thoughts that were blending with traditional religion with thoughts I'm having to embody from an acting point of view, the problems and though processes of a character like Hamlet, and having just having to deal with life and death in the real world. So, as a human being.

How do audiences react to death in the theatre?

It's sobering. People are quiet. You hear a lot of coughs in the audience if you're dealing with heady subjects that are ideas or concepts that people need to be sold on, and yet just the very nature of death, there's something instinctual, I think people stop and watch because people want to know what's it going to be like for them? What's it going to be like for them having to deal with death in their family, parting, what's it going to be like for them when they pass away for themselves? So I think it's a very compelling act to watch in front of you.

And also on stage, I have to say, we're kind of numb on TV and movies, we see lots of death, lots of shooting, not a lot of consequences of that, and yet on stage, I think there's that natural communion that an audience has, a live audience has, with a live actor or performed. And dealing with death in real life, you know, right there, it makes people stop. And there's some kind of reverence to it.

Do you have any interesting anecdotes related to acting out death scenes on the stage?

Yeah, there's a few of them. Let's see - for the people watching, it's reverent. For some of the people on stage doing it every night, it's kind of comical. Having to be the corpse on stage, having played in death scenes a few times, Beggar's Opera, is a comedy and an opera, the beginning the play starts with a character that gets hanged in front of the audience. And I was that person, who's also the lead actor, who goes through life, but you started off by getting killed in the beginning. And so you get all of the comments from the people in front of you, saying your fly's open and just making front of you. There's a show, I'm trying to remember it, I think Arsenic and Old Lace, where the corpse is in this box on stage and inevitably the guy playing the corpse, at least in our production, every night he would be something, he'd be naked or he would like dress himself up in funny outfits, anything to kind of have the shock value when you open the box and see him in there, like "God, what did he do today?" In Lord of Illusions, Clive Barker, he deals, all of his shows deal with death and dying and different bits and pieces of human beings. I mean, he is, he does the horror genre, a lot of films about that. And on that set, he was very, hate to say, almost conservative on the set, because the subject matter was so, you know, grave. But, there's this character named Nix, and he's this magician kind of warlock kind of very poweful magician and he's been resurrected and he's got this thing in his head that, you know, he can beam his thoughts out. And so they made this prosthetic, and the actor, Daniel von Bargen, when we were backstage during filming, he'd play with that thing all the time. And so he'd come up to you and he'd talk to you, making his little thing move. And so it was kind of odd, here you have this character with this incredibly great makeup who's supposed to be dead and resurrected, but what do you do with life? You go around and tell jokes with your little orifice in your forehead. It's pretty wild.

Is there anything else you'd like to add about your experiences that you've had?

Well, I mean, the experience that I've had, I'm a thirty-nine-year-old guy that has been real lucky to follow the whims, somewhat, going to London and playing, you know, acting and then working in business and going and working in film and doing magic in the street and running a company right now with a hundred employees. And so its kind of a neat process and experience. I'm looking forward to, hopefully, having another 39 years ahead of me that I'm sure I'll learn more and realize how naive I am now. But I do think that just repeating yourself over and over and over in your life is not what life is necessarily about. That the great mysteries of life and the great answers and the great questions and the enjoyment of life is found if you let yourself go a little bit and you embrace, sometimes, the most tragic, and the most joyour moments. But you have to enjoy both. And then never try to say that "I'm in control of it." Just embrace it, live it, love it.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.