Doodlemeister’s Weblog

Personal Essay

So far I have known two murderers—only two that I’m aware of—but the odd thing is that both men were also amateur actors. One of them I met in the late 1970s, when I was in the process of learning how plays are written and produced. He, the killer, was in the cast of a community theater production I was observing. Some time later I heard that he had been convicted for the murder of a woman he picked up in a bar. I have come to think of him as an “amateur” killer, by which I mean someone who commits a crime of passion rather than, say, someone who executes a premeditated mob-like hit. That dynamic young amateur actor, whom I had watched for weeks as he rehearsed his stage character, is still serving time. The other amateur killer/actor, the one I came to know best, is serving a life term for the murder of his wife.

Of course there is no reason to believe that being actors, amateur or otherwise, had anything to do with either man’s brutal deed. There have been times when I’ve felt the urge to kill myself, but I’ve never had the least desire to be an actor (too shy). Once, though, I did accept a small part in a play written by an amateur playwright, directed by an amateur director, and produced in a local theater festival. I had to recite just one line and was on stage for no more than ten minutes, during which time I sat at a card table with several other amateur actors and barely moved. The action came in a scene-within-a-scene which had the characters of our play staging the poker game from the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire. My character was not Stanley Kowalski (Brando in the stage and film version), but, rather, a card shark who wore a slick white panama suit and had oily dark hair. For amateur theater in those days that play-within-a-play business was very “postmodern” and the complex staging required to express it only managed to confuse the audience and the actors. After six weeks of rehearsal we actors still spent a lot of time bumping into each other. Our director must have thought that the term “blocking”—rather than mean the purposeful movement of actors on a stage—referred to what is done to cowboy hats at the dry cleaners.

My “discovery” as an actor was a case of serendipity. As a part of my education in theater arts I had volunteered to help behind the scenes and was sprawled on the stage painting the lower part of a background flat. Meanwhile, the director was rushing about at the last minute trying desperately to fill out her cast. She noticed me and the rest is—well, the rest is my amateur acting career. At the time I thought she was attracted because I looked the part, but soon learned the truth—no one else wanted a one-line role in a bad play, and then have to hang out backstage for nearly three hours. (Rule of thumb: All bad plays—amateur or pro—go on too long.) There was no rear exit so I couldn’t escape after my bit and, anyway, our director insisted that her entire cast had to appear in the end of show bow, it being the only stage business she had designed that went off each night without a hitch. On the other hand, the director’s back story for my character, and her instructions about how to play him, were precise. He was a lonely man, she said, no friends except his gambling buddies—no family either, a womanizer with limited education, a man of few words—and he wore white suits because that was the way his mother had dressed him when he was a boy. His mother was the only woman my character had ever loved, the director claimed, and poker was his substitute for the affection he had not experienced since she died under a streetcar when he was fifteen. The director said my guy felt guilty because he was into booze and gambling and loose women and couldn’t (or wouldn’t) free himself to attend his mother’s funeral. She insisted that I think about all that while I sat very still, holding my poker hand in an “irresolute” position, relying on my “sense memory” to convey my character’s motivation to the audience. At the end of the scene-within-a-scene, she said, I should rise from my seat, drop my cards on the table just so, and wait for the imaginary curtain to lower and the play-within-a-play director to tell me that I had done a good job. That was my character’s cue to say the one line, which had become fear-branded on my brain, “Thank you, Ina.”

I’m neither religious or superstitious but I do believe in serendipity, both the positive and negative kinds (which of course are forms of superstition). Once, while considering the role serendipity plays in my life, I was thinking about automobile accidents since I had recently had one. It occurred to me that worldwide each day there are billions of what I call “transactions” at street intersections, those moments wherein—because of the proximity of fast moving vehicles—an accident could happen, but most often doesn’t. Relative to the number of opportunities for trouble, it’s surprising that more of those encounters do not play out if not tragically, at least as fender-benders. This lack of violent happenstance, despite abundant opportunity, I consider to be positive serendipity. The same thing can be said to occur regarding the billions of emotionally-charged human transactions (interactions, intersections) each day where violence—even murder—could happen but seldom does. A personal example. My father was a violent man, often drunk and violent, and I sometimes marvel that my mother or my brothers—or me—were not killed during one of his rages. So why does a random emotional transaction in one case provoke a man to murder, but in another situation cause little more than an angry glare—or a slap, punch, or kick—if that? Why are there not millions more crimes of passion that end with someone injured or dead?

Ask an amateur killer to explain his bloody actions and he may say, “I only meant to slap her, but things got out of hand.”

Ask the guy who thought about harming his wife or girlfriend, but didn’t act on it, and if he’s honest he could say, “I only slapped her, but I really wanted to kill her.”

While I believe that I know what makes community theater actors tick in terms of their unpaid dedication to the craft—the deep love of performing—what drives an amateur killer remains a deep mystery. The one thing I am convinced of is this: The two killer/actors I knew would not have done their terrible deeds in any context other than the one in which they found themselves. It was pure passion, negative serendipity. Theatrically speaking they were working from a bad script, had faulty motivation, and it just so happened that they also had a convenient stage on which to act out a tragedy.

Flashback
As he does most Fridays, our father is drinking up his pay at Lombardi’s tavern on the corner of Cross and Charles Streets and my much older half-sister tells me to run get him because it’s supper time. I’m seven years old, fresh from the mountains of Virginia, new to the big city of Baltimore, and unfamiliar with urban traffic. Dashing across the street near the bar entrance I’m hit by a pickup truck. People who witness the accident later tell my sister that the impact throws me in the air and I land head first on the streetcar tracks. Bleeding, I crawl to the gutter and try to pull myself up onto the sidewalk, but can’t make it. The driver puts me in the cab of his truck and takes me to the neighborhood hospital a few blocks away on Light Street. My sister has come to the bar looking for me and is told what happened. She collects our father from his bar stool and they rush to the hospital to discover that I’ve been given thirty-five stitches to close a large U-shaped laceration to the front of my scalp over the left eye, just above the hair line. Our father says it looks like I was kicked by a horse. I have a concussion, too, and will be in the hospital at least a week, maybe more. It depends, the doctors say. My sister is crying. Our tipsy father is also teary-eyed and when he discovers a smaller wound on the back of my head the doctors have missed, he goes into a rage, loudly cursing the hospital staff for their incompetence.

Part two of Bad Actors will be posted next Monday.

Copyright © 2008 Jim Sizemore.