A Silver lining

       Ron Silver died Sunday.

Even for an actor, he had an unusual range. In his art, he stretched from Broadway productions of gritty David Mamet plays to silly TV sitcoms such as “Rhoda” and from film versions of true-life characters such as ferocious lawyer Alan Dershowitz and learned Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on one end to showoff tennis champ Bobby Riggs and ’60s rock-concert promoter Bill Graham on the other. In his active political life, he headed the stage union Actors Equity Association and helped out on Council on Foreign Relations committees. Supported Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama … and Republicans Ronald Reagan and Rudy Giuliani.

So it maybe it makes sense that he also co-founded The Creative Coalition, a nonprofit social and political advocacy group dedicated to educating arts-community leaders on public issues related to First-Amendment rights, arts advocacy and education - and mobilizing them.

Actors know that creative people  need to speak the truth, no matter which side of the political line or what unnerving  human experience it comes from. They know it because they play all of us – all the tangled, dark, bright and blithe characters that we humans are - and find something that matters in every one of them.

So I hope they and the rest of us can carry on Silver’s work and keep creatively crossing the lines between opposites until we find we have linked the encampments with our daring steps.