It was never my intention that this blog become an obit page, but in spite of recently noting the death last month of Paul MacCready, I can’t let Saturday’s passing of Marcel Marceau go unremarked.

Marceau brought the art of mime to a sophistication and level of artistry comparable to what Segovia did for the classical guitar, or Jim Henson did for puppets. His beloved character “Bip” was a silent Everyman that crossed innumerable cultural and linguistic boundaries. In high school I was passionate about theater arts, and I was extremely fortunate that our school boasted not only an excellent theater but a remarkable selection of classes, including Beginning and Advanced Mime.

At that time, I hated writing classes, and I needed to take another English class my junior year. The only classes available were writing classes. And then the brainstorm! I discovered that I could satisfy the English requirement by taking a theater class. Hence I escaped the dreaded writing class by taking–Mime!

But it was not just a desire to game the system that led me to discover this wonderful lively art. By this time in my high school career I had been in a number of plays and musicals and saw how other student actors who had taken this class gained from that training. Their movement on stage was cleaner somehow, their gestures and stage business more distinct, more defined. They all swore that mime would help me be a better stage actor, so I was inclined to take the class anyway.

We learned all the standard tricks; pulling an imaginary rope, the illusory walk, climbing and descending invisible stairs, bumping into and feeling walls, moving against a strong “wind”, even walking backwards a la Michael Jackson’s “moon walk” (which for that reason seemed positively passé when I first saw it) and many other illusions. On one occasion, we put together a mime troupe and gave a performance at a local school for the deaf–one of the more remarkable memories I still have from those years.
Thus was my introduction to Marcel Marceau, along with Claude Kipness, and Francisco Rijnders–who visited our school and gave a workshop I was privileged to attend–but Marceau stood apart. I recall watching him portray a man who had put on a grinning mask, but then could not remove the mask. His face held that same stupid, vacant grin, yet the rest of his body screamed the panic and torment and at last the exhaustion and fatal resignation of one caught in a trap.

Even in his later years, his ability to enthrall and portray humanity in all its glory and foibles seemed as strong as ever. But perhaps as important, or even moreso, Marcel Marceau embodied the artist as spokesperson for our better natures. Perhaps it was because he escaped the Holocaust to fight with the French Resistance and later fought with Patton’s 3rd Army. He had seen the worst of what we could be, but refused to bow to it. Performer, author, illustrator, humorist, humanitarian… he was a world treasure.