Free Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir by Ron Perlman Page B

the theater is. That’s what movies are. That’s what all of the arts are, that, if done right, are reflections of the human condition. Even painting: the great painters are capturing truth. Was it Jean-Luc Godard who said, “Cinema is truth twenty-four frames a second”? That’s what it is, and it’s hard to know it when you see it in real life because the continuum of time doesn’t allow for that. You’re too busy living. But when you’re creating art, you’re basing the whole exercise on some exploration of facets of the human condition. And in getting the performance to the point at which it’s sublime, you’re coming closer to perfection than you could ever come in real life.
    I became addicted to creating, trying to figure out how to present that human condition either in a play or in a movie. You get a script, and when you decide you’re going to do it and you have a role to play, then you need to figure out the execution of it. It’s a riddle. You have to absorb the character’s traits and motivations into your own psyche and make sense of them and personalize them. Then you come back with your own version of a seamless telling of that. That’s the performance. So it is a very technical thing because it begins when you readsomething and acquire an intellectual understanding of it. Then, little by little, you hope it seeps its way down through your fucking dick, your balls, your calves, and your toes, and then you can physicalize it.
    It’s the human condition that the playwright or the screenwriter is trying to shed light on. The great plays are the ones that have the most to say about who we are and who we aren’t, what our limitations are, what our weaknesses and our strengths are, and what heroism looks like. It shows us what self-sacrifice looks like, what devotion looks like, what loyalty looks like. These are all things that started out with the Greeks and the plays they wrote. And nobody got it better, by the way. Nobody. To this day. Nobody got it fucking better than the Greeks. From Socrates, Euripides, Aristotle—none ever wrote more insightfully about the human condition than they did. Everything that we do, in all of our performing arts, are variations on shit that they came up with nearly four thousand years ago.
    I remember understanding this in a new way the very first time I went to a Broadway play. Even though the theater district was 130 blocks south of where we lived, it might as well have been on the moon, ’cuz my old man just couldn’t afford it. After a rich aunt and uncle from Long Island came to see one of my high school performances, they invited me to join them to see Fiddler on the Roof . It was thrilling. I remember every fuckin’ move, every line, and every song.
    Fiddler on the Roof is a perfect example of how great art can tap into that human condition I’m referring to. Who would think a story about a Jewish man with five daughters would be a sellable tale? But we love it. Why? We share his desires to keep his family together; we identify with his struggles and joys. These are ancient feelings we shared from the first time we banded together as humans and buried them in what Carl Jung called our shared consciousness. This is what the Greek dramatists understood. We relate to the play’s depictions of how outside forces sweep into our lives and how we cope. Because the writer, choreographer, lyricist, directors, cast, set designers, and many more all came together to tap into the human condition, theplay turned into a legacy. For ten years it was the longest-running play on Broadway, until Grease knocked it from its throne. It still remains the sixteenth-longest in Broadway history. The play is still being produced, and I’d bet that some high school or college troupe is rehearsing it somewhere right now. That’s how powerful and noble the arts can be: oftentimes many of us don’t know why we think a certain movie is great, but it is because it manages to