It's Why They Call It Acting

     So I'm doing a crossword puzzle the other day and the clue is something about Tom Hanks. And before I go any further, let me just state for the record...I'm a fan. The guy is a Hall-of-Famer! I mean, listen to this run he went on that included Big, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Sleepless in Seattle, Philadelphia, Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan, Cast Away, Road to Perdition, The DaVinci Code, etc, etc, etc. If I left out one of your favorites...my bad. He also produced an award winning mini-series about our manned space missions as well as a series about World War II. Like I said; Hall-of-Famer. AND...between you and me, he seems like a decent guy: intelligent, family man - not your typical Hollywood nitwit. But again, we don't know much about these people we enjoy watching on television, or in the movie theater, or on the playing fields. For all I know, Tom Hanks could be an axe murderer. But let's give him the benefit of the doubt, shall we? (See what I did there? "Shall we?" Hanks' final line from Sleepless in Seattle? God, I'm good...)
    But back to the crossword. My mind, which isn't as sharp as it was 10 years ago, remembered an interview Hanks did a week or so ago regarding his current film about Elvis Presley. And because this is the world we live in now, the reporter asked about the film Philadelphia in which Hanks plays a gay man with AIDS, his ensuing battles, both physically and emotionally, and his eventual death. His Academy Award for Best Actor was probably one of the easiest votes in that organizations history. Simply a great film and an even greater performance. In response to one of the reporter's questions about whether he could play that role now, as a straight man, Hanks replied, and I quote, “No, and rightly so. The whole point of ‘Philadelphia’ was don’t be afraid. One of the reasons people weren’t afraid of that movie is that I was playing a gay man. We’re beyond that now, and I don’t think people would accept the inauthenticity of a straight guy playing a gay guy.” Sometimes the mind just loses its capacity for wonder.

    I'll forgive Hanks' holier-than-thou phrases like, "and rightly so", and "we're beyond that now". Really? Tom, buddy!! It's why they call it...ACTING!!!! Apologies for the multiple exclamation points. Man About Town and Editor-at-Large Chip Magee is on vacation at his estate in Myrtle Beach. I'm my own editor this week! Where was I? Oh, yeah. It's acting! I'd like to imagine Hanks didn't really think through the question or his answer. I'd like to think he was just lying prostrate on the ground at the feet of the latest totalitarian idea...Being Woke. 

    One good thing the pandemic gave us these last 2 years was free access to a lot of things that we normally pay for. One of my favorite things were various plays on-line provided by numerous theatrical organizations. The National Theater in London provided many of their plays on-line for free. That was very cool. Also, the Shakespeare Company of Central Park in New York offered many of their greatest plays from the past for free. One of my favorites was King Lear starring James Earl Jones that was recorded sometime in the early 1970s. This was GREAT! And not to put too fine a point on it, but James Earl Jones, another Hall-of Famer by the way, is black. I'm pretty sure I'm correct about that. Here's another little factoid; the character King Lear is white. Oh, and remember Shakespeare's Othello the Moor? That character is black and has been played by many great black actors over the years including the aforementioned Mr. James Earl Jones. But when some shrub named Laurence Olivier (maybe the greatest of all time who is, how shall I phrase this...white) played Othello a few decades ago...nobody blinked...nobody cared. Just like nobody cared that James Earl Jones played the great King Lear. You also can't close your eyes and throw a dart at a newspaper's Arts and Entertainment section nowadays without hitting a play or a movie that has a gay actor/actress playing a straight character, or like Hanks in Philadelphia, vice-versa. And if there are people who care, they aren't worth listening to.

    The other part about this, at least for me, is the idea of empathy. Acting takes empathy. The idea that you can empathize with a character well enough to represent that character to an audience. And since most of what we see on television or in the movies is fiction, then it shouldn't matter what the color of an actor's skin is or what his or her sexual identity is. Don't get me wrong, I understand that a director or producer wants a character to be authentic. And yes, sometimes that means narrowing the parameters of the actor's genetic make up. It would have been a hard sell for the producers of The Godfather to have a person of color playing Don Corleone. There are exceptions to every desire. 

    But being part of a shared humanity, or more importantly, a shared human nature is the idea that we have shared experiences as human beings of love, happiness, betrayal, conflict, passion, anger and revenge. That's why we can find Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey so moving. We understand all the emotions that I just typed and how those characters deal with them. How? Because of a shared human nature. Just because thousands of years and thousands of miles separate us from ancient Mycenaean civilization...it doesn't matter. The same holds true for acting. I hope someone talks to Mr. Hanks and tells him to think about his empathy, which it seems he has in huge quantities. But if his type of empathy takes hold, meaning the idea that we are button-holed into our own biological clothing, as it were, our shared humanity may never recover. 

write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com