This show, The Mystery And The Passion, was basically a collection of scenes from Medieval mystery and passion dramas. The set was the first one that I was on that was dangerous and caused an injury. It was a proscenium-wide set of steps starting a few feet from the edge of the orchestra pit and rising up to maybe seven or eight feet. It was a bit steep but going up or down wasn’t really a problem. Unless you were wearing catherni, the high-bottomed footwear worn by Greek actors long ago in amphitheaters along with big masks to make them seem bigger than life. One actor, playing Herod, was wearing them.
I was in a scene of the Three Shepherds, playing the Old Shepherd, along with the Young Shepherd and the Middle Shepherd, the leader of the three, played by the actor who also played Herod. When given the role, I had decided, as a fairly beginning actor, to go for it, and used makeup and a tuft of cotton under my shepherd’s headpiece to make myself look really old. I added a limp, and a deep, kind of shepherd-y, laugh that I could use to comment or make a point, or just for comic effect, during the scene. Well, here’s what happened.
It was great fun playing that scene, with my limp and my laugh, and then Herod stumbled on the steps with the catherni and broke his foot. So there was Herod, and, yes, the Middle Shepherd, with his foot in a cast. I felt that there shouldn’t be two shepherds with a limp so I discarded mine, and at the same time, to make up for his foot, maybe, the Middle Shepherd began to laugh at all the spots I had decided on for my laugh. It was duelling laughs for a while, but I don’t think he noticed we were doing that, so I let it go. I still laughed, but it wasn’t the same.
It’s okay to steal from other actors when you see something that’s so right for the character, and you get to play that character in another production, and you remember what you saw, and it’s still so right you use it. It’s a kind of homage to the actor you saw do it first. But you shouldn’t steal from an actor you’re in a show with. That’s just stealing. And it hurts.
