In a fascinating conversation about theatre and acting, the actor Kaya Simmons explains both why people act and why people go to see others act. "We act to tell stories, and we act to tell other people's stories, and to live those stories, and to live those truths and to tell those truths." The distinct quality is the actor's willingness to be vulnerable, to try things that might work or might not work. This allows the actor to bring to the audience a full-blown experience that makes sense of something in the audience-member that is already in "the back of my mind": Hamlet and other classic plays are these fundamental stories that we can all relate to and explain things that we are already a bit aware of. He gives a further example of how he, as a black man, can understand the experience he sees in A Raisin in the Sun, even though he was never in Chicago in the 1950s. 

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