Fourth Saturday's Loneliest Liberal

This isn’t my usual gig, this isn’t how I work, maybe I should have said “no”

By James Knudsen

“No” never entered my head. For a number of years I’ve known that someday, this task would fall to me. I’ve had plenty of time to prepare. Whether I’ve actually used that time is another matter. But Saturday, March 28, 2005 has arrived (as of publication). Today I am the master of ceremonies for my father’s memorial service. He’s been dead for four months and now it is time to provide some closure.
    But I usually get some rehearsal. As a theatre person I’m used to working on my lines, getting comfortable in the space, developing a thru-line, meeting the people I’ll be sharing the stage with, and creating a relationship between our two characters. No such luxury this time, we get one take and it goes in the can. And this performance needs to be some of my better work.

During the 2004 presidential election, I played John Wilkes Booth in the musical Assassins. While doing that, I started thinking about how I approach roles that involve real people, people from history. In a short time I realized that it didn’t matter. A character is a character. More importantly, I realized that each character’s story is someone’s story, and as such it must be told with the utmost care. Today, with the help of others, I will tell the story of Morris Knudsen.
    Last month I told my mother’s story, the story of Ernie. I noted that there was much I didn’t know. Little has changed in the month since that story ran. Children arrive in the middle of a person’s story. Parents have lives before becoming parents – but never again, I’m told. Children observe, from varying heights of wonder, curiosity, and dismay, their parents steady progress through life. And then one day, you realize that your father is old, that person you envisioned as eternal is, in this one respect, no different, completely ordinary, utterly mortal.
    It isn’t necessary to point that out today – his absence is the statement. But there is still the matter of what to say, how much to share. A good playwright doles out only the information necessary to tell the story and the actor fills in the details. This production asks me, an actor, to provide the information and stifle the details that are not part of the story. And which story to tell?

The experience of playing Booth brought my attention to the very real fact that there is always more than one story. There is the story all school children know of the “deranged actor” who shot Lincoln. Was that the person I was to present? The serious actor in me wanted to delve deeper into his motivations, his pain and disillusionment. But the public clamors for the tale they know.
    My metaphor falls apart in the sense that there was no deranged Morris Knudsen behind the mild-mannered language teacher, and I will not tell his story alone. Former students will fill in some of the chapters I was not witness to. But I know that we will fail to tell the complete story and therein lie some lessons for this poor player. Whatever the stage I find myself upon, I can only tell the story I know and while the play does eventually end, the story continues.

Copyright © 2015 by James Knudsen