Word: frightfully
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...convincing, assured, and professional. But George Sheanshang as Lucky, Pozzo's bearer, presents a special problem. Sheanshang acts intensely and well, is properly demented, and has bestowed on his character just the right Marat/Sade touch. Yet because his buckskni leggings, his moccasins, his headband, his pigtails, and his blond fright wg make him look like an albino Apache, the spectre of Lucky-as-oppressed-Red-Man is aggressively and offensively present on stage. As an additional ethnic touch. Godot's angelic messenger is portrayed as a Mexican-American, whose appearances are accompanied by throbbing rascados on the Desi Arnez classical...
organized amusement parks fright-death...
Like other anxiety states, stage fright triggers defense mechanisms, but they ultimately fail because the fear "enlarges with the passage of time; the defense cannot alter the fixed moment of the performance." That failure induces a second-phase symptom: "the delusion that the audience is convening for an occasion of devastating ridicule and humiliation for the performer. This delusion is frankly paranoiac...
...hours and minutes are the worst. Just before his entrance, the actor may experience "blocking"-nothing less than disconnection "from all avenues of functioning, including speech." Onstage, blocking gives way to "depersonalization," wherein an observing self watches, as if from afar, a performing self. This terminal point of stage fright is blessedly brief: "Full recovery," says Kaplan, "is usually rapid...
Kaplan maintains that stage fright derives from "all levels of psychosexual development." He points to the anxious adult's tendency to touch his nose or mouth or chin, acts rooted in the infant's use of its own hand as a source of physical comfort when its mother -its source of sustenance-is absent. The actor fears a hostile or unappreciative audience, but knows he must perform, that his hands and body are strictly choreographed; he is defenseless at the height of his anxiety. (As opposed to the paranoiac, who can try to flee his imagined dangers...