The one-actor play

 I was thinking last week about major and minor poets, wondering why I invariably prefer the minors to the majors, and then realized I also like some minor art forms.

I like linocuts, prints made from blocks of linoleum, for example. To me, they are like photographs in which all the shades of gray have been removed. There’s an art in finding an image in black and white.

I also like one-actor plays. I saw Richard Thomas in “Citizen Tom Paine” in the 1980s when it was the talk of Washington. I saw Hal Holbrook in “Mark Twain Tonight” twice, catching the show in different decades, different college towns.

There are other kinds of one-actor plays. In some, one actor will take on 20 characters. But I like the kind of show in which a character from history comes off the page for an hour and engages my imagination.

The art of those performances astonishes me.

I hope one day to see Richard Wright come to life on a stage.