All the world’s indeed a stage
And we are merely players
Performers and portrayers
Each another’s audience
Outside the gilded cage
Those are lyrics from the song “Limelight” by the Canadian rock band, Rush. This adaptation of Shakespeare was written by drummer Neil Peart and sung by bassist/keyboardist/vocalist Geddy Lee.
The origin of the song is a speech from William Shakespeare’s play, As You Like It. Act II, Scene VII, features one of Shakespeare’s most famous monologues which begins:
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 …
Though I love many of Shakespeare’s monologues, this one is best depicted as a song running through my head throughout my life since I first heard it on the Rush Moving Pictures album in 1981 when I was a teenage fan.
Theater as a metaphor for life is a concept I entertained when I was still in the single digits of life. I was one of those philosophical, geeky, 4-eyed kids who just couldn’t get into sports because my hands, eyes, arms, and legs didn’t know how to work in conjunction. I couldn’t do cartwheels, skip rope with others holding the end of the jump rope, or run at the pace of others. I barely scraped by in gym class.
I couldn’t sing on-key but that never stopped me from singing to myself. It still doesn’t.
I found myself on a stage in Theatre class in college where we did a session on Improv acting. A student director approached me afterward and told me I had a stage presence. He asked me to be in his play but I was too nervous to say yes.
I was afraid of making a mistake in delivering scripted lines. Imagine what might have become if I had gone beyond my fear.
I may have ended up on the right path a lot sooner.
I had jobs at the local Renaissance Faire where I could create a character and play act but that ended a while back. The last dozen or so years I’ve portrayed other facets of myself: a pirate chic named Red-Handed Ginny and a faerie queen called Queen Goo.
I’m a silly person who enjoys playing different roles with friends. I often play Mario to my best friend’s Luigi where-a I talk with-a lousy Italian accent. In real life, I have a distinctive Sout’side (the “h” is silent) Chicago dialect no one else in my family seems to have. It’s all part of the character I play in my imagination.
We all play various characters in the theatre of life: child, sibling, friend, parent, lover, student, teacher, employee, coworker, boss or fill-in-the-blank.
A lot of times we juggle roles.
In the 1965 animated Peanuts Christmas special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Linus, with his blue security blanket and profound philosophical nature, gives a narrative of the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke which ends with:
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and goodwill towards men.
Linus is playing the narrator in that play.
In the theatre of life, there are times when we are in the spotlight of center stage, on the side, backstage or in the audience.
There are people who always want to be the center of attention and demand that we give our attention to them. In our society, we make celebrities out of them, obsessing to no end about what they did or what they said. Some of them can be so ego-driven that they upstage everyone in their lives and may attack those who have a different perspective.
We call them drama queens in everyday life and tyrants in positions of power. They care more about themselves and their own interests than everyone else. In their world, everyone is the audience praising them or antagonists who vilify them. Their reality is warped because their ego is out of control.
We get sucked into their world. When we give them our attention, it feeds their egos. When we give them our attention, it takes away from us doing something wonderful for ourselves.
Getting hooked on their little reality show often makes us forget that we have the right to be center stage as well.
All of us have the right to tell our version of the story, to think for ourselves. We don’t have to believe what another says just because they said it.
When Linus got onstage, he spoke words of love, to which I say:
The ability to shine in the light
is available to all.
Spreading a message of peace
and goodwill uplifts everyone.
Imagine the world if we all actually lived the lessons of kindergarten: sharing, caring, kindness and respect.
Imagine the world if we all gave attention to our joy instead of our misery. Imagine if we stopped attacking those who are different from us. Imagine if our choices were made from a warm loving heart instead of a reactive hot head. Imagine if we listened more than we talked.
Do you ever wonder how our world change if we changed the play?
Always,
Alice Always