Responsibility for Those I Invite

A professional actor is trained to play a role. Based on his profession, he is used to assignments, which he tries to fulfil as best as possible during rehearsals. First, he wants to play a role, he wants to participate in the creation of a theatrical performance. He is technically equipped for this. He masters the techniques for stage speech, movement, work with text, knows theatrical terminology, is professionally responsible for the end product, and so on.  On the other hand, take an old man I met accidentally during my vacation. We talked for a while and I found that I was speaking to an extremely rich personality with unique life experiences, storytelling skills and truthfulness. He certainly did not have any of the professional tools I mentioned above. But years later, I was going to invite this gentleman into a creative process. At that point I had many questions in mind: What could I tell him? How would I introduce him to our artistic team? Would he feel comfortable in this group? And would my co-creators be interested in working with such a person? I realized that by bringing him into the environment of a professional theatre, I was taking on a huge responsibility regarding his participation in the creative process. I will speak more in detail in the part describing the show Ordinary People.