Inspired by the elbow drop

It is completely without cynicism that I say I didn’t realize how important he had been to me until I found out on Friday that former professional wrestler “Macho Man” Randy Savage died. Watching professional wrestling on television was an integral part of my childhood. My brothers and I would build a Saturday morning around the WWF (World Wrestling Federation) and we would beg our mother to torturous levels when a pay-per-view prime time event came up. I didn’t realize it at the time but I was taken with the theatricality of professional wrestling way more than with the sporting element. I was learning about storytelling, character development, and, perhaps most importantly, timing. The characters in professional wrestling, at least from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, were based on broad theatrical archetypes created to serve short term and long-running storylines that hooked viewers in and kept us coming back week after week. Relationships developed over time between wrestlers and groups of wrestlers with feuds constantly playing out culminating in huge annual events with names like Royal Rumble and Wrestlemania. Oh, right, this is a theater magazine. Think Montagues versus Capulets but with less sword fights, more diving axe handles, and a different kind of sexual tension. In wrestling there are good guys and bad guys, faces and heels in wrestling parlance. As is the case in many a great play, the heel or villain was usually the much more compelling and entertaining character. And for me there was no heel I loved to hate more than “Macho Man” Randy Savage. Macho Man had so many elements to inform his character. He had a distinctive gravelly voice that didn’t come off as too cartoonish. He wore brightly colored bandanas and also a cowboy hat. He had catch phrases, which made him highly quotable and easy to embody when my brothers and I acted out matches in our living room. And he was a technically proficient wrestler capable of high-flying top-rope theatrics as well as heavy lifting body-slam type action. We could be entertained by Macho Man and not feel bad because we still hated him. In roughly the 10 year span I heavily watched wrestling Macho Man was a face and then a heel and back to a quasi face and finally a heel. To put it in theater terms, Macho Man was who Iago would have been if Othello had lasted 50 Acts instead of 5. I didn’t know when I was a passionate consumer of professional wrestling that it would someday inform the work I do and love. Everything I’ve done onstage has been informed by my childhood of absorbing and recreating wrestling. Figuring out the beats of a scene to get the most laughs, using surprise to throw the audience off, and probably most fundamentally my unyielding love of physical comedy. My love of the violent pratfall has to be the outcome of a combined love of Buster Keaton shorts and Macho Man’s diving elbow drop. As artists we can’t predict where our inspiration will come from. And it’s often not until much later that we put the pieces together and realize how influenced we were by something that seemed like a childhood pastime. I’m sad that it’s too late for him to hear me say it but I still want to say thank you Randall Mario Poffo a.k.a. “Macho Man” Randy Savage for inspiring me to learn how to land on my face.