There was a
psychotherapist I knew who after attending a production of Arthur Miller’s The
Crucible at her son’s high school said, "It was the best acting I’ve
ever seen." Similarly enraptured are the citizens of Blair, Missouri, at the opening
night production of Corky St. Claire’s musical Red, White and Blair as
depicted in Christopher Guest’s 1996 satire of community theatre, particularly of the
town history variety, entitled Waiting for Guffman.
The movie explores the deadly tendency among actors to cultivate the
opposite of what Stanislavsky discovered: that he came to love the art in himself and not
himself in the art. What we see in Waiting for Guffman is a group of
would-be-actors falling in love with themselves in (liberally defined) art. This
self-adulation is essentially what makes them comic, even more so than do their
exhibitions of weak talent or, in the case of the "Teacher’s Pet" character
lovingly played by Parker Posey, untapped talent.
So what are real life audiences responding to in high school and
community theatre productions that causes them to lose perspective? In Waiting for
Guffman one of the Blair councilmen designates Corky St. Claire a genius and the
mayor promises to bring an account of Red, White and Blair to the next
mayors’ conference. To what does Christopher Guest attribute audience acclamation,
even reverence, for amateur histrionics?
Looking at the film’s dentist character, Dr. Allan Pearl, a Johnny
Carson fan, rippingly played by Eugene Levy, we see that he is in possession of desire (to
entertain) and willingness (to work hard), which fulfill Corky’s prerequisites for
someone’s wanting to be an actor. What Dr. Pearl does not possess is an actor’s
equipment: he can sometimes but not always carry a tune or control the quality and project
the sound of his voice, and he moves rigidly. Like his fellow would-be-actors, he also
does not possess an ability to live truthfully and speak naturally in an imagined reality.
Still, the Blair audience at large, and not only Mrs. Pearl, responds to the production
enthusiastically. What is going on here? Superceded expectations, the movie would seem to
say. When Dr. Pearl’s performance holds up, generating no more havoc than shaking the
scenery, his stature rises to the iconic, making him a veritable Dustin Hoffman in an
alien suit, meaning that Dustin Hoffman now resides in the town of Blair. Like the
misguided Dr. Pearl who feels fascination for himself on stage, misguided audiences get
high on themselves: I am a taxpayer, I have Dustin Hoffman on my town stage, I am
neighbors with a celebrity, I am something!
In spite of the self-help movement, an actor may guard against
self-absorption, understanding that self-absorbency militates against the actor’s
real work of self-knowledge and self-transformation. Also, loving oneself in the art, as Waiting
for Guffman demonstrates, makes a person silly.
