Anthony Zerbe, through his performance of āItās All Done with Mirrors,ā encouraged his audience last Friday to ālive deeply.ā āItās All Done with Mirrorsā is a performance of a portion of poet E. E. Cummingsā workāboth poetry and prose. This year it was part of the theatre departmentās Performing Arts Series. In the talkback after the show, Zerbe said he strung the different poems and prose together to inundate his audience with Cummingsā imagery, without a clear narrative. Having read a lot of E. E. Cummingsā poetry, I appreciated Zerbeās attempt to recreate the specific and unique feeling of Cummingsā poetry. Zerbe, in pointing out one of Cummingsā lines, āDamn everything but the circus,ā demonstrated a main theme of his show. With a set of balloons and an occasional circus music track, he highlighted some of the more nonsensical elements of Cummingsā work. In focusing on an inundation of images and feelings, Zerbe sometimes lost his audience. Switching between poems as different as āmay i feel said heā and āHumanity i love you,ā Zerbe achieved two different effects from performing such varying work without much transition: he gave a large sampling of Cummingsā work, but the poems and prose sections lost a lot of their individual impact. Despite some of the more confusing aspects of Zerbeās performance, he was able to play the varying characters of Cummingsā poetry with ease and good humor. He performed āmay i feel said heā particularly well, establishing two distinct characters and capturing the audience in that moment. It was refreshing to hear from someone established in the world of acting. Zerbe told the audience how he loved his life because he lived in the moment. Bringing this aspect of Cummingsā life to the stage was a great reminder for me to enjoy the present.