Artists on the Cape Series #6: Playing the Leading Role in Our Own Lives with Jeff Zinn
“In a very real way, all of us are actors. Every one of you is playing the leading role in the story of your own life. It’s a heroic narrative and you’re the protagonist. All of us, even in our quietest shapes, are living heroically - or trying to.”
What’s my motivation? It’s a phrase we’ve heard actors ask countless times. However the answer to that might be much deeper than we think.
In this second to last episode of our Artists on the Cape Series, Susan talks with actor, director, and author Jeff Zinn about his book The Existential Actor and how its themes extend beyond the theatre, making it a study of humanity and what motivates us all.
Together Susan and Jeff discuss universal truths such as awareness of our own mortality, the armor we wear to protect ourselves, how culture affects how we see the world, and the losses that we choose.
Meet This Episode's Guest
Jeff zinn
Actor, director and writer, Jeff Zinn, is best known as the former Artistic Director of Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater (WHAT.) His book, The Existential Actor: Life and Death, Onstage and Off (Smith and Kraus Publishing) was released in 2015.
His catalogue of audiobook narrations includes the best seller, A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn. His many accomplishments are overshadowed, however, by his appearance as John Travolta's photo-double, striding into the camera during the opening sequence of Saturday Night Fever.
