An Actor Prepares by Donald Antrim, 1999
The magic trick:
A first-person narrator who thinks they are self-aware enough to tell the real story but instead wind up sharing a hilarious subtext too
What a brilliantly preposterous story this is.
Antrim is going all out here into comic absurdity and absurd surrealism.
His narrator is a college professor, putting on a student production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream of dubious quality and even more dubious ethics.
He tells his story wonderfully. He reminds me a little of Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster. There is more here to chew on thematically than the pure silliness of Wodehouse. But the Bertie comp holds in that both characters – our theater teacher here and good old Bertie – tell their crazy stories with a straight face. They think they are giving their audience the real story, told straightforwardly. In fact, I’d argue both narrators pride themselves on their self-awareness. They believe they are mixing in helpful insights with their storytelling. Of course, as the reader sees very quickly, there are two levels here: the story the narrator thinks they are telling and the real story we are receiving.
The result is something very, very funny.
And that’s quite a trick on Antrim’s part.
The selection:
What is the point in all this? Strasberg was wrong. Seven years are not enough, a fact that I discovered recently during a twilight performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” presented on the college green to commemorate the founding, a hundred and fifty years ago, by Reverend William Trevor Barry – my great-great-grandfather on my father’s side – of the small liberal-arts institution that bears our family’s nae and our seal. I am Reginald Barry, Dean of Student Life and Wm. T. Barry Professor of Speech and Drama at Barry College, so naturally it fell to me to direct our commemorative, barefoot production of Shakespeare’s great festive comedy. While I was it, I decided to serve up some ham myself as Lyssander. What would a skinny, balding, unmarried, and childless forty-six-year-old Lyssander – a Ph.D. with hair on his back – mean within the context of an otherwise college-age show? I’m not sure I can answer that question.
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