Who

They?

See a sampling of some of my favorite roles

The first play I was ever in—or ever saw, for that matter—was Bad Seed by Maxwell Anderson. I was a junior at Pleasant Hill High School, 1960. I remember that we were in the final stages of rehearsal when I went up to a fellow actor and said, “Now, so how does this work? People are going to come and sit in the multi-use room? And we’re going to be up here on stage? And it’s going to be, like... live?”

You must read a gulp in front of the word “live”.

I guess I thought maybe we were going to film it? That it would be in movie theaters around the nation? Nay, the world? Whatever I may have thought, there was indeed a big gulp when I found out that we would, in fact, be performing in front of people.

And then I got over it. What fun!

And then all those characters over all those years. What fun!

I have often thought that the reason I am so much more secure writing fiction in the first person is that I get rid of Bob Locke altogether, the way I get rid of him when I am onstage in the persona of someone completely different. I am able to think so much more clearly when I don’t have him nagging at me all the time. “Don’t do it THAT way, idiot!”

“Would you get out of here? We have work to do!”

Recently I was writing both A Ghost in Silence and Lonely Island pretty much at the same time. I was pacing about the house, weeding the garden, pausing in the sweeping-up with the broom in my hand, half off the ground, thinking inside those young brains of Dillon and Toromiro. And they kept saying the most remarkable things out of my mouth. They made me laugh, genuinely laugh in surprise, at the things they would say.

What fun!

See a sampling of some of my favorite roles

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