A doctor models his behavior after other doctors. A truck driver behaves like a truck driver because he’s shown that he can act a certain way. In fact, if you visited the doctor and he behaved like a truck driver (gruff, for example), you’d wonder what sort of doctor he was. We tell each other who we are through our behavior. Not only do we hone our behavior according to the role we are playing in society, we spend a lot of time fine-tuning our act, especially in dynamic social situations, like trying to get laid or doing business. This information about how I should behave is not innate, it comes from outside myself.

I consider this when playing a part. For example, I am given the role of a soldier (Buchner’s Woyzeck). I have no “sense memory” of being a soldier. I do have the memory of being in fist fights or being hurt or being scared. And, of course, when I act, I access those feelings. But I also have a memory of soldiers and how soldiers behave in the dozens of war movies I’ve seen, not to mention TV. So, in fact, I’m recalling a memory of an actor playing a soldier. And that’s as real as anything else in life as far as my subconscious is concerned. The point isn’t to replicate life on stage but, as Picasso said, “create a lie that tells the truth.” And truth is what everybody agrees truth is.

We all have little theatres in our respective heads. The whole world is replicated in our minds. The way we imagine ourselves and other people is a cornerstone to the way we act in our daily lives. We make representations of people mentally and play out imaginary scenes with these imaginary people. From these mental exercises we feel we can predict how someone (say, our mother or father) will behave, and we act accordingly. The interesting thing is that the mother in my head has just as much to do with the real person as she does with the way I think about her. People are conceptual.

The goal of the theatre artist is to take the imaginary “mother” and put her on stage in such a way that when other people come to see the play, they see a mother they recognize. If an audience doesn’t recognize what they see, then the play doesn’t work. The audience sees things laid-out in front of them and they compare the mechanisms of behavior (the acting, the behaving, the plot) to the way they think about them, as opposed to the way they “really” are, which is unknowable.