Every day of our lives the masks go off and on, donned, discarded, exchanged, as we move from obligation to obligation and from friend to friend. Never mind that the masks are invisible, being the facial expressions, the stances, the vocabulary, attitudes, even the tone of voice appropriate to each position, each condition of life. We wear them all the same.
"Good morning, Dr. Cureall," we say, pleating our faces into the proper "patient" folds while he assumes his professional mien, purring confidence and concern.
"Two hours of preparation should precede each class meeting. That is the rule of thumb," lectures the professor, radiating stern righteousness for erring student, suitably downcast.
Parent-child, lover-lover, husband-wife, boss-secretary, foreman-laborer: our days are studded with such mini-dramas, their dialogue long since learned by heart. The oft-repeated exhortation "Why can't you be yourself?" was and is the theme song of adolescence. But who knows, who ever knew, exactly what that was?
We can hardly think of ourselves as beings separate from our social identities. For whatever is uniquely ours - personality, inner-self is inevitably shaped by the parts we play, by the invisible masks. The very word for "person" derives from persona, the Latin word for mask, and through it to the Greek prosopon, which is both mask and face. As Shakespeare wrote:
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.
Of the changing nature of role and of the mask, none knows better than the actor who performs not merely the varied scripts of his own life-drama but those of other men as well. It has been said that Sir Laurence Olivier, the great English actor, achieved his sensitive characterizations from the outside in, from mask to soul. His Mahdi in the film Khartoum, for example, came by way of dark-painted skin and red mouth, by way of stance consciously assumed, by the stride of legs enveloped in long robes, by the tense gestures of the religious zealot, by exotically accented English. These shaped the Patten of thought, directed the actor's search for motivation and the inner man.
Such a search need not have been made in older times, for role was vested in a visible mask, an art form in its own right. In the archaic No drama of Japan, the mask is still the message, as it is in traditional Korean satires. For these, the masks anciently worn by shamans to frighten demons were turned to social and political protest, a way of mocking the lascivious monk, the exorbitant lord. And, as protest, the drama still functions to this day.
The actors of Classic Greek drama were masked with at least one practical end in view. Small megaphones were concealed inside the capacious wooden mouths, the better to carry the author's world to the topmost tier of the sunlit amphitheater. Yet more than amplification was intended. The mask conferred identity and conferred size, conferred heroism
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