Truth is the stuff of great performances

There are a lot of things that go into great performances, but there's one thing at the root of it all.  If a performance has something in it that touches people at the level of their human nature, consciously or unconsciously, it is fulfilling its purpose in our society.  It is teaching us individually about life and about some aspect of our social or natural environment, and it is making us smarter as a species.  Nothing is more important, especially with the monumental challenges we face in today's world.

That key ingredient is truth.

I'm not talking about sincerity.  Of course sincerity is important in a performer, because people can spot a fake instinctively.  Nothing will shut down your speech or your musical piece faster than a lack of sincerity.  But of course it's not enough to be sincere.  I can stand up and tell you that my eyes are blue (which is true) and that would be totally sincere, but it also wouldn't be doing much for you.  And a lunatic can be sincere about any crazy thing he believes is true, like trickle-down economics for example.  Don't get me started.

We're also not talking about accuracy.  A physicist can stand up and tell you that the acceleration of gravity is 9.81 meters per second per second, and be pretty darned accurate.  It would even be teaching your something factual about the universe!  But unless you are doing a physics problem, it's not going to improve your quality of life much.  Truth is deeper than facts.

Truth is the critical part of the performance ecosystem.  Truth inspires the composer and moves through the performer to the audience.  The audience knows it is truth because they are in touch with the same source of truth that inspired the composer in the first place.  Great art reveals what we knew was there all along, even though we could not see it.

People react in some powerful ways when they see truth in a performance.  Sometimes they choke up, or tear up, or cry.  Sometimes they cheer and applaud.  Sometimes they sit silently, as it sinks in, not wanting the moment to end.  Often, they laugh, because finding the truth can be intensely funny.  Humor may be humanity's way of dealing with truth.  I'm not talking about Laurel and Hardy slapstick, or gimmicks or surprises, but the kind of humor that comes from awareness of our situation.  The kind of humor that should be in every scene of a play.  As Michael Shurtleff says in Audition:

Humor is not jokes.  It is that attitude towards being alive without which you would long ago have jumped off the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge.  ... When we say about a life situation, "And it's not funny, either," we are attempting to inject humor into a situation that lacks it.  We try in life to put humor everywhere; if we didn't, we couldn't bear to live.

That's the kind of humor that should be in every performance.  That's what people really need.

The truth we seek is the "cosmic truth" - something that speaks to our greater human nature, helps us understand our place in the world, and how to get along in it.  A performance that reveals that kind of truth can be truly inspiring, and life changing.