I begin.

In 2012 I was living in Los Angeles and working as a struggling actor (read: waitress and broken miserable soul) who went from doing tons of work in the theatre industry to living in a city where there wasn't much opportunity in the medium I had spent years training in. Because the work I saw on stage was generally ghastly, I stopped seeing local theatre about two months after I re-located to the city. 

Three weeks before I left L.A. to eventually come to LA, I saw a friend in a new production at a small theatre company in North Hollywood. I don't remember the name of the play, the actors, most of the characters or even much of the story itself because on the whole it was horrific, but I do remember this one moment. The last scene of the play had three actors on stage. Two engaged in a dialogue about something trivial and poorly written, but there was an actor downstage right building a house out of cards on the floor. He was in a pair of boxers and spent the entire scene trying to construct a house out of a deck of cards. The struggle, frustration, and panic that he felt as he tried again and again to build the fucking house was so captivating that I almost stopped caring that I paid $15 to see this piece of shit. The honesty of truly doing something, being completely invested in this action, standing onstage in his underwear and pursuing the goal of constructing this paper house, fighting through the frustration of continual defeat was so powerful and simple, so present, so affective for me as an audience member that it truly made the experience worth it. This moment was enough of a glimpse of an honest pursuit of goals where I saw true frustration, shame, anger, embarrassment and failure that was completely juxtaposed by the rest of the event and its presentation of lives worth living for a wasted two hours of my existence. 

Another production that stands out to me as one with elements of Truth was a production at the High School Institute housed at Northwestern University in Evanston. The play, Hotel Cassiopeia, is a Charles Mee play based on the life of artist Joseph Cornell. To accommodate for the number of students involved, several actors played the role of Joseph (both male and female) and all the female roles were played by different women rather than one actor. The production choices, casting, age range of the actors weren't meant to be naturalistic or realistic, and the script, although a derivative of events from Cornell's life and memoirs, was an adaptation with inferences made and not meant to be a documentary-style Truth-telling play. So why do I bring it up?  This again comes back to the acting. Toward the end of the play, there is a monologue that Cornell has to a girl that says: 

JOSEPH
Still,
if I were to say anything to you 
it would be:
do what you love
not what you think you should do
or what you think is all you can do
what you think is possible for you
no
do what you love
and let the rest follow along behind it
or not
or not
because
even if it doesn't follow along behind
you will have done what you've loved
and you know what that is
you know better than anyone what you love
and a life centered around your love
cannot be wrong
cannot finally be disappointing

THE GIRL
Easy for you to say.

JOSEPH
No. No, it isn't.

This exchange broke my heart. It spoke a truth to me as an artist both because the words themselves are so powerful to me as an actor, but also because this young man in the brink of starting his career said them with so much earnest love, compassion and truth. It is a monologue that speaks from a place of understanding struggle, but a 17 year old boy believed in what he loved in that moment, that the simple truth of speaking the words was enough. 

So, question two: Yes, I think there is a difference. Because in my opinion, the truth of the play heavily relies on the truth of the actor in the play. Documentary theatre doesn't work for truth if the actors involved don't come from a place of truth and reality which can only be possible up to a certain point. There can be truths in pieces that are written and there can be truths from the actor, but ultimately I think the truth that we see is different for every individual because we're coming to them with different perspectives/opinions/views as Joe mentioned in response to Spill. Theatre is art, art is subjective, and because of that we can argue for the definition of true without ever determining what that means. 

I end.