For me, that was the most magical moment in theater—the first instant during a reading when an actor disappears and your character takes their place. That moment of transformation had always felt like ecstasy, like a ritual of transubstantiation. “Or possession,” my friend Stevie Liddell had retorted, when I’d tried to explain the sensation to him. “Like you’re not giving any agency to the actor. Like it’s some woo-woo thing that you make happen.”
