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It’s understood that Mickle Maher builds fascinating plays out of unlikely materials—connecting a presidential debate with Albert Camus’s The Stranger, for instance, or putting Beethoven and Quasimodo together on a panel about Chekhov. And it’s no secret that Colm O’Reilly has brought a rare proficiency to his performances in those plays. But both Maher and O’Reilly break through to new levels with An Actor Prepares, Maher’s script named for a textbook written by fabled Russian theater artist Konstantin Stanislavski.
It’s 1935 and Stanislavski has writer’s block. The book he’s been mulling for the last 30 years remains nothing more than a wild gleam in his eye. He arranges to give a lecture that will allow him to talk his thoughts out before an audience (us) and so, he hopes, achieve the clarity he needs to carry on. Dressed in a three-piece gray wool suit, O’Reilly’s Stanislavski uses a newsboy’s cap to play Kostya and pince-nez to indicate Tortsov.
