At the end of the 2011 fall semester, auditions were held for the Spring production of Steve Martin’s play Picasso at the Lapin Agile. I will readily admit that Steve Martin’s work had never really attracted my attention much—Cheaper by the Dozen was the only film I could remember him from, and I thought that was a rubbish film. I knew that the spring semester would be a busy time for me: I fully intended to take 6 classes—18 credit hours worth of work. I didn’t foresee myself having much time to devote to theatre, so I elected to skip out on auditions. Toward the end of the semester, though, I was emailed by the director, MD, asking if I could fill in a small role. “It’s Elvis. Our other Elvises have left the building, so to speak.” A small role, I thought I could manage. Against my judgment about my time, I decided to take the role; I’ve worked with MD in the past, and I always have a hard time saying no. I expected it to be an easy process, but I quickly realized how wrong I was.
I grabbed a script from MD before I headed home for Winter break. I had no plans for break, you see. Typically I just work a lot, but my job didn’t need me back this winter, so I was out of luck. Instead, I spent a lot of time visiting friends and family, playing video games, doing holiday shopping, and ignoring the script for Picasso. It was always on my mind, though. One of the first things I did when I came home was tell my parents that I would be playing Elvis in the Spring production. “You better tell my mother, then,” my mother had said. “You know how much she loves Elvis.” Except I didn’t know. I had no idea that my grandmother liked Elvis, or that anyone in my family liked him, for that matter. There are people in my country-western bluegrass family who love The King? This realization was quickly followed by another: I knew nothing about Elvis, myself!
Toward the end of break I finally read the script. It was amusing, but it seemed a bit random and scattered. I didn’t like it. It was a small part, though, so I wasn’t too worried about it. I barely had any lines; all I had to do was show up on stage, let people be amused by the fact that I was Elvis, and then that was about it. The last line of the play was mine, too, so that’s cool. When I came for the first rehearsal, though, the play really came alive for me. Reading it to myself, it didn’t really make much sense, but with the group reading all of their parts, everything was suddenly hilarious. That first rehearsal got me pumped for the show and encouraged me to give it my all. There was still a problem, though: I still knew nothing at all about Elvis! To remedy this issue, MD brought a professor in to give a historical presentation about Elvis.
It never occurred to me that this man was so big! I know that he made a girl swoon in the play, but I thought it was just for comedy: I didn’t realize that the real Elvis actually did that all the time! This was a man who was larger than life—his memorabilia sells for small fortunes, hundreds of people make a living out of being Elvis-impersonators. How could I ever hope to present a worthy model of a character that was—is—so much larger than life than I am? For the first time in my acting history, I found myself getting nervous. Normally, acting is care-free to me: the characters whom I portray are things of fiction and my renditions of them will be appreciated. But with Elvis, everyone has pre-existing expectations. People know Elvis. If I screwed up, I would be disrespecting a legend. This pressure that I put on myself terrified me. The task that I thought would be a breeze suddenly became the most daunting part of my semester.
I took some solace in the direction I received, though. MD assured me that I did not need to be Elvis—instead, he urged the idea that I only needed to be a suggestion of Elvis. Not a caricature, but a representation. This made sense to me. The King, in his time, was a corporeal man: he may have been larger than life, but he was a man, all the same. After his death, though, he was granted immortality—he now exists as an icon, something that can’t be replicated, only impersonated. In order to pay homage to The King, I would have to stand in as a symbolic representation of the idea of Elvis, not the man of Elvis. With that in mind, I began to piece together a character that would best represent Elvis.
I began listening to his works over and over again so that I could best emulate the accent of his voice—a sort of slow, southern drawl with a bit of a charm that escaped the lips along with it. I realized that, in changing my voice to get close to his, I was actually falling back on my own native accent—an accent that I had struggled for years to abandon. I started to watch recordings of Elvis’s performances. The man could move. I, however, was not a very graceful person. I spent countless hours working to emulate a simple, Elvisian hip-swing. I fell down countless times, and almost gave up, but I eventually got the hang of it. That sexy signature of his, though—the snarl—was possibly the hardest part to imitate. I grew to hate my face with how often I stared at myself in a mirror trying to get a lip curl to coincide with a wink. This was a gesture that could literally make women faint when he used it. I had to become a master of this, if I was ever going to be happy with the product of my work.
By the time the production came together, though, and we performed, I had it all together. I donned my Elvis-suit, and waited for my entrance every night. Cue-line, then lights, then cue fog machine, cue lights, cue entrance—brush stardust off shoulders, inspect bar, inspect picture, swivel hips, and presto!—my character is formed. Without a word and before a line is even said, hints of The King were already identifying my character. For those in the crowd who were a bit slow on the uptake, though, the accent helped to tie it together. Now, I may not have been the right size for the part—I am a bit scrawny—and my hair was definitely not a black pompadour, but people knew that I was Elvis. Then the ending: “Isn’t it funny how the play lasted exactly between the time that the lights went up, and the lights came down?” After the shows, I received praise. I was told that I “stole the show.” I was congratulated over and over. Even when the production was over, for a couple weeks, people came up to me and said that I did a good job. People asked me to swing my hips, or “use the Elvis voice.” I felt, for those weeks after the performance, like a star—like The King, himself! It started to dawn on me after a while, though, that I was changed. I walked and moved differently. My accent had shifted slightly into a more southern drawl. I found myself winking more often at people. The show—this process of becoming The King—it had changed me more than I thought. Before, this would’ve terrified me: I don’t want to even slightly resemble some fat, sparkle-wearing pomp who played old-timey rock-and-roll: I liked being myself! But now that I have an appreciation and understanding of the man—nay, The King—I’m totally okay with being more like Elvis: I am totally okay with being a legend.
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