In this play we're dealing with relative truths - who's lying, who's telling the truth. But underneath that, Ed and I have hit this deeper level of intimacy between old friends that comes out in the play.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
If you take a lie and allow your desire for the truth, you'll end up with some truth - not fact, but something that gets you closer to the truth. That's what we want. When we go to a play, we need to be assured that the experience we're having.
When you're playing a romantic version of a real person, you're playing a version of the truth.
Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships.
If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it may not turn out to be a very good play, but at least it will be a play where people are behaving in a kind of truthful way.
With any part you play, there is a certain amount of yourself in it. There has to be, otherwise it's just not acting. It's lying.
Every time that you do a play or a show of any kind, really you have this family that you really build something with for a while, and then we all dissipate, but you always have that connection, that eternal kind of intimacy, you'll always have.
The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.
Plays, especially great plays, yield their secrets over a long period of time. You can't read it three times and say, 'OK, I got it. I know what's happening.'
I've seen plays that are, objectively, total messes that move me in ways that their tidier brethren do not. That's the romantic mystery of great theater. Translating this ineffability into printable prose is a challenge that can never be fully met.
A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.