Groping My Best Friend

There really needs to be an emoticon for "awkward turtle," the hand gesture some of us use when things feel 'awkward.'

Playing Wilbur Turnblad in Hairspray may have been the most fun I've had in years. The character is extravagant, bombastic, over the top... yet he has to be somehow sympathetic. At the end of the show, the audience has to accept him as essentially a "good guy," with good motives and a good heart. They don't have to think he's particularly intelligent and they don't have to admire him, but they need to like him and believe his love for his daughter Tracy and his wife Edna is true.

If you know the show, you know the challenges I faced. It was relatively straightforward to portray a father's love for his daughter, and it helped a lot that I already loved the two actors (Michelle and Erin) sharing the role of Tracy. The challenge was in convincingly portraying Wilbur's love for his wife.

Romantic love is a tough one for me to portray under any circumstances; I have very little life experience with it, so I don't really know how David exhibits that. If I don't even know how David embodies romantic love, how do I create a convincing characterization? And while that challenge was a significant one, it paled in comparison to the other challenge...

Wilbur's wife Edna is traditionally a drag role; a large man portrays a large woman in the play. While Edna is not a man in drag--she is all woman--the actor playing Edna is a man in drag.

See why I want an emoticon for "awkward turtle?"

Thank God Edna was being portrayed by my best friend. Neither of us is confused about our sexuality (although after portraying Edna, I'm beginning to wonder about Wayne... ;-)} ), and we're both pretty comfortable together both on- and off-stage. The script is well written and the situation already so ridiculous that we got to just play. I don't think either of us was worried that the other would misinterpret something we did, either, so just about anything was on the table.

There were some lines drawn--things that didn't contribute anything to our portrayal and were personally uncomfortable were scratched without much comment--but (as you know if you saw the show, particularly the last two performances) a lot of other things were fair game and we played them.

Hence the title of this blog entry.

The goal for both of us was to make our relationship sweet and sappy and above all else convincing, and if we can take audience comments seriously we pulled it off. Maybe it helped that as close friends, we are (another kind of) intimate in real life. Maybe we're just damn fine actors.

Or maybe it was the groping.