WHEN IT ALL GETS A LITTLE TOO REAL >>>

In David Mamet's Oleanna, a play in which I just appeared thanks to Theater Artists Olympia, a blowhard professor is accused of sexual harassment, battery, and attempted rape by his student, Carol, played in our production by a lovely, dedicated actor named Deya Ozburn. Deya and I are friends, as are Deya and my wife, and I wouldn't have agreed to play the professor if Deya wasn't already locked in as Carol. Since the script required me to verbally abuse Carol, maul her, slam her into a desk, and call her one of the ugliest words in the English language, I felt it was crucial to work with a performer who understood we were both just playing make-believe. I wanted to stay friends with my costar when the show ended, and that's exactly what happened. Our attendance improved slightly over our final weekend, and on balance, I'm glad I did the show--but that was seriously jeopardized by an incident that followed our Saturday evening performance.

Deya did her absolute best to inject plausible motivations and vulnerabilities into Carol. It was important to her, as it was to me and our director, John Munn, that Carol be anything but a vindictive, irrational bitch. Carol is torn between two competing influences. Can that make a person act insane? You bet. Hell, it made HAL 9000 act crazy, and he was a major appliance. But Carol was NOT a feminazi in our production, nor was she a harpy, nor was she a psychopath. What she was, and I say this after feeling as if I were at war with her for seven weeks, was a fighter, and fighters don't always choose their battles correctly. Perhaps you can relate.

But as I may have mentioned before, we humans prefer to "relate" to characters who are far wiser, more heroic and attractive than we are. We want to believe Jennifer Aniston will have trouble finding love, because we did. (She won't. She never has, because she looks like Jennifer Aniston.) We want to believe we're so heroic we'd always make the right choices, even as our autobiography calls us on our self-serving crap. When some audience members, many if not most of them women, saw Carol wage a bitter campaign against a professor who probably meant her no harm, they took it personally. Very personally.

Too personally.

It got harder and harder for Deya to greet friends in the lobby after the show, because patrons got in her face. Not Carol's face, her face. Deya and I were always careful to change into street clothes before entering the lobby, but it didn't matter; to infuriated audience members, Carol was Deya and Deya was Carol. What Carol had done, Deya was responsible for. David Mamet had nothing to do with it. The fact that Deya and I are friends, or that I'd go home safe and sound to my beautiful wife and condo every night, didn't enter their calculations. If you'd asked them directly, they'd say they knew it was "just a play"--but it wasn't, not to them. It was real.

It's one thing to be confronted by audience members directly, where rules of social propriety keep things in check. Email, unfortunately, is another matter, and Deya's been fielding some doozies. Then came Saturday night. A patron saw the show, went home angry, slept on it, hunted Deya down on a social networking site, and messaged her at length Sunday morning, still every bit as enraged. This wasn't an insightful analysis of the show, recognizing Deya as a talented actor playing a character written by somebody else, it was a venomous attack on Deya's motives, sanity, and decency. To this patron, there was no divide between Deya and Carol, no distinction between reality and fiction.

We actors try our best to contextualize such feedback as a compliment to our skills in portraying naturalistic (not natural) behavior. That only gets us so far. Eventually, it wears us down, and we're forced to contend with the fact that even fellow actors sometimes see us as our "type." I've played a child molester, a rodent, a werewolf, an imbecile, an aged pornographer, and the Devil himself. I am none of those things. Likewise, Deya is neither "exotic" nor "bitchy," despite her dark Latin looks. Theater outsiders often tell us it must be painful to deal with all that rejection, but in truth, it's the brand of acceptance we receive that rankles most.