Kevin Spacey just finished his Richard III tour through San Francisco. My thespian friends were awe-struck. At the end, as he is hung by his feet, you can see the sweat dripping to the stage floor.
I had dinner with him afterward at the Clift, and I can see why Jack Lemmon was smitten when he discovered Kevin at age 13 and encouraged him to dedicate his life to acting.
As a performer of Shakespeare, the master of metaphor, I asked Kevin if he felt a touch of synesthesia, the sensory cross-talk in the cortex that is 8x as prevalent among artists and poets and suspected of Shakespeare.
He became quite animated and said that “my brain feels different with Shakespeare.”
His whole upper body and arms went into a slide, gliding across an imaginary array of pot lights, like a grand gesture from Mack the Knife.
“I don’t memorize lines. It’s a string of ideas. I interpret the script and express it. I am not creating it.”
He told me that he was eager to meet Mark Zuckerberg on this trip, but it was up in the air since he was the executive producer of The Social Network.
The gathering was to benefit the KSF, his foundation to help expose more kids to the arts, a hopeful recapitulation of his childhood experience at the Jack Lemmon workshop.
He rose to address the group, opining that “Art and culture are vital to the health of nations.”
“It is not that big a leap from ‘the winter of our discontent’ to the Arab Spring.”
“If you are lucky enough to have a dream of yours come true, then make sure you have another dream.” — Kevin’s Mother.
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