Showman/Shaman

About Revival: Meetings for Theatre, an exploration of Quaker spiritual practice and actor creativity:

We are left with the question of application. How, then, can we offer this work to theatre artists, or to artists of other disciplines, who have not self-selected as receptive to this investigation? How might our work morph into a new kind of performance medium? How can this work apply to the contemporary rehearsal structure, bound as it is by the constraints of time and money? How can this work influence what we offer our students in the classroom?

I think meetings for theatre, as we have facilitated them, will remain a forum only for those drawn to them. I can see no way we can offer a meeting for theatre to group of people with no expressed interest in the link between spirituality and creativity. What meetings for theater can be, however, are places of affirmation for those so inclined. We who are stimulated by this investigation may come to meetings for theatre for spiritual sustenance, exactly as we come to any other form of worship. The “clearness committee” idea I proposed to Abbey in September never materialized. But, as I noticed in my work in Jason, we may bring the energy and insight gained in meetings for theatre into our more conventional work, where we may have a soft and steady “ripple effect”, being undercover ministers as it were, shedding a new and gentle light on the harsh life of the professional theatre. We may feel less embarrassed to discuss the spiritual-creative link with those we work with, thus engendering conversations which may lead to others’ openings. Those of us who direct may be more inclined to value stillness and quiet in the rehearsal structures they create. Those of us who act, may be more trusting of the Divine nudge, and more willing to wait for the energy to flow through us, rather than trying to squeeze it out.

The challenges in academia are more thorny. Revival has caused me to reflect on the state of actor training in this country, where it has come from, and where it might be going. There was an explosion of theatre training institutions in the 1960s. This coincided with the emergence of “method” acting as pedagogical model which could be articulated and taught, a burgeoning fascination with the human psyche and increased government funding for the arts. It is my opinion that there was another element that contributed to this sudden surge of acting classes, and that was the great cultural release of that decade, when young people sought to escape the emotional repression characterized by middle class social norms of the previous decade. In other words, there was suddenly a great market for acting classes, as a wave of young people arrived at universities excited by the work of Freud and Jung and eager to explore themselves through creative means. At it’s core, this is what Method acting is: a creative means to explore oneself. Leaving aside for a moment the mangled history of that term, it nevertheless provided a way universities could cater to this new population of young people.

The problem is that, from a career point of view, it’s a giant pyramid scheme. There aren’t and never were enough jobs in the fields of acting and directing to employ this new population of young theatre artists, fresh from their training programs and wearing their shiny new degrees. And yet these proved to be very popular programs and lucrative for the universities, who had no incentive to downsize successful programs (successful because they were making money) simply because their graduates were entering a marketplace with regular 85% unemployment. To this day, most graduate acting programs, the ones we call “conservatories” offering M.F.A.s in acting, will have between six and ten applicants for each space they can offer. Clearly the lust for acting among our youth has not diminished, even though most young people have a fair idea what they’re up against professionally. As I describe in The Actor’s Way, I believe that many of the young people compelled to make acting the center of their lives are potential “wounded actors”, using the art not as a means of ministry in the world, but rather in a self-perpetuating failed attempt to resolve issues from their childhoods. A cynic might submit that these training programs use these troubled young people by perpetuating a lie, the lie being that if you train with us you will have a successful professional acting career. The lie is needed to continue bringing in fresh students and tuition each year. The whole thing is a nation-wide “hollow form”, with institutions teaching skills that promise professional rewards, but do not, in fact, have a prayer of delivering them; institutions which exist mainly to feed the bottom line.

These training institutions perpetuate themselves in another way. They have provided an alternate career track for their own graduates in the field of teaching. But here too there are way more candidates than places – I speak from experience, friends. And once inside these institutions, there is tremendous pressure to conform to the points of view espoused by them, such as the “value” of what that institution is offering its students. In the pursuit of tenure, theatre educators in higher education are not rewarded for truth-telling, for creativity or innovation. They are rewarded for perpetuating the status quo. I am not aware of any theatre training program dealing honestly with it’s own acting and directing students about the realities of what they’re facing upon graduating. I worry that many of the people in these teaching positions perpetuate the lie I described above in order to ensure their own job security. My sense is that most of these places behave the way my conservatory, the Yale School of Drama, did. They virtually ignore the realities of life for the young actor and teach only the craft itself. There is certainly a kind of pedagogical purity in this, and in my case the training was excellent as far as it went. But it didn’t go far enough, and looking back, I think there was deceit in it. What else can you call it when the people in charge know the truth but don’t do anything about it? Many young actors are utterly unprepared for what they’re up against in the real world, and, like me, enter their careers with a vague yet fervent hope that the dream will somehow come true. An honest training program for actors would reserve at least one third of its class time for the teaching of skills designed to help the student survive when they’re not acting. Revival put me in the midst of many citizen-actors (and citizen-directors) who are living in their lives as they are, full of compromise and yet abundant in creativity. There must be a way we can teach this citizen-actor model.

Revival also perpetuates some other designs and archetypes that make the academy nervous, I think. The first is a celebration of the non-hierarchical creative structure. Revival is about as ensemble-based as you can get, with no leader, no director and no script. This certainly has its challenges, but many in the meetings expressed a delight in the collective energy explored, unguided by human hands. The academy perpetuates the conventional, hierarchical model, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is the model at work in the professional rehearsal room. But there is a chicken and egg question here. If we weren’t so attached to hierarchical structure in our institutions teaching theatre, would they be so prevalent in the professional theatre?

Our meetings for theatre were populated mostly by artists who would self-identify as actors. The discussions we had about the nature of our exploration and the implications it had for the way we live our art were deep and as intellectually stimulating as any classroom dialog I’ve ever had. One of the debilitating aspects of the hierarchical model is that is that it perpetuates “stupid” actors. Since the hierarchical model is inevitably a power relationship, in which decision-making authority is invested in one person, there is a tendency to avoid collective discussions about the, well, the direction of the thing being made. As my experience with Shannon (and with many other wonderful directors) demonstrates, this is not always the case, and the best directors are the ones who most successfully perform the balancing act between authority and power-sharing. Still, it is undeniable that in the conventional theatre, the ultimate responsibility for the vision of the production lies with the director. The harm this does to actors is that it conditions some of us to make obedience more important than free thinking. Revival allowed the thinking actors among us a venue in which to not only envision a creative event, but to enact it spontaneously.

It is interesting to note that there is a tradition of the thinking actor in England that seems not to have taken hold in the States. British actors like Simon Callow, Anthony Sher and Vanessa Redgrave have each written important, thoughtful and entertaining books on their craft and their lives as actors. In America, obsessed as we are with exhibitionism and voyeurism, our actors tend towards tell-all autobiographies (my God – am I following in this tradition too?!?)

Lastly, the hierarchical model has a symbiotic relationship with judgment, which is a big reason it will not be de-emphasized in the academy any time soon. We are steeped in a culture which loves winners and loves reviling losers. This is partly because of the capitalist need to vanquish the competition, and partly because we are so in love with sports (and I speak as an avid sports fan). Sports has affected the way we evaluate art, and partially explains our enjoyment events like the Academy Awards, in which one person wins over four “losers”. Any artist worth their salt will tell you the whole idea of winners and losers in art is absurd. These award shows are nothing more than elaborate popularity contests, and we are fixated on them because of the small orgasm we experience after the phrase “and the winner is . . . “ than because we appreciate any value they claim to celebrate.

Revival essentially removed judgment form the equation. As my blog posting called “Doubt and the Full Professor” articulates, I have a bone to pick with judgment, and the whole concept of “good” and “bad” as it applies to theatre. Revival was empirical research: we reported on what we witnessed and felt. Judgment is theoretical: it holds an experience against an invented system of values in order to name that experience as “good” or “bad”. Judgment is deceitful in the area of art, because it masquerades as objective and thoughtful, when it is only ever subjective and opinionated. This is why I hate so much artistic criticism. Most of it is entirely invested in judgment, and never acknowledges its own subjectivity.

Quakerism has something useful too say about all this, based as it is not in Biblical interpretation but rather in personal experience. The ideas that guide us in the religious Society of Friends are called “testimonies”. That word testimony is important, because it implies an idea that is born out of personal experience. So we live by the lives that have come before us, and the Holy Witness of those lives has been informally collected into testimonies: about peace, equality, integrity, stewardship of the earth, community and – if my Yearly Meeting is moved as we in Revival have been – creativity, the newest testimony. So for a Quaker, what you experience is far more important than what someone else has written about it. The Quaker actor (the Quactor?) might de-emphasize script-analysis, and focus more on what is experienced up on one’s feet. This is what makes us such renegades, stubbornly insisting that what we feel in our hearts is good and true when the rest of the world seems to be headed in another direction. And this is what made Revival such a good fit for the thinking actor. It freed us to give testimony based on experience. We needed no permission other than that granted by the Spirit itself.

It is the season of solstice, of pagan rituals of death and re-birth; and it is the Christian season of Advent, of the celebration of the deliverance of a magical, divine child in to our care. I have moved from Anne Lamott to Anne Rice. I am now reading Rice’s novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. It is a creative imagining of the seven year old Jesus’ life during his return to Nazareth. It is told from his point of view, as he wonders about who he is and begins to understand the world he is living in. It is compelling to me because Griffen is about to be seven, and I hear him asking the same kinds of questions young Jesus asks in the book: why do they fight? Why is there death? And versions of: who am I becoming? What is God? The book is helping me develop a relationship to Jesus I can celebrate, especially since it is the “Annes”, two creative writers, who have helped me fashion a Jesus in my imagination, who is a friend and contemporary, someone who laughs and cries. The Annes have helped me see that this titanic character has been stolen from me by fundamentalists, and my misgivings about him have been misgivings about them. The Jesus I believe in is all spirit now, and as such he has no gender, no race, no age. But if it helps me, he doesn’t mind if I imagine him as a young man sitting in my meeting for worship with me, arms stretched out across the back of the bench, staring thoughtfully up at the ceiling.

I imagine him sitting in the house at People’s Light watching the Panto with me and my children, laughing and gently stroking Ella’s hair, before lifting her on to his lap. She sticks her finger in her mouth and looks at me, a little nervous about being so close to this stranger. But his warmth and laughter sooth her, and I smile at her reassuringly, and she leans back, resting against his chest. We glance at each other in the darkened theatre, He and I, and wonder together about this season of darkness, sleep, and mysterious portent. Then we turn our attention to the light.

During the talk-backs for Jason, we frequently heard comments from adults, who would begin with a phrase like, “We’ve seen you all in a bunch of plays here, and I’ve got to
ask . . . “. Many theatres are afraid of employing the same actors over and over, fearing that audiences will get tired of the same faces in different costumes. But my experience at People’s Light, and in Philadelphia theatre generally, is just the opposite. Audiences love recognizing the actors from one play to another, and marveling at the transformation. It is an actor-audience connection over time that creates a comforting continuity for the audience, and it is instructional in the best possible way about the art of acting. It says, acting is about transformation. It also says, these are our artists, yours (the audience’s) and mine (the theatre’s). They are cultural assets that we are investing in. You are watching that investment grow over time. They are not only set dressing for the plays you see. They are people just like you in careers that matter.

I call this relationship “audience-actor bonding”. People’s Light, being one of only a few American theatres with an ensemble of returning actors, has built a strong subscriber base not only on the quality of its shows, but on this relationship. I think it could do more to build on that relationship marketing-wise, but I digress. It’s the same relationship that drives television. We rush home as much to spend an hour with Jack Bauer and his fellow anti-terrorism agents, as we do to see what happens in that episode of 24. Seinfeld is great example of a TV show that was built on this actor-audience relationship, since it openly proclaimed itself to be about “nothing”. My connection to Lost has as much to do with the actors I see week after week, as it does with the exotic locale and great writing. For me, it has mostly to do with actors.

Friends, in most TV and film, we aren’t watching characters, at least not in the same sense as they are brought to life in, say, Jason and the Golden Fleece, in which the actors playing the extreme characters (like me) were attempting to disappear. In most TV and film, the actors chosen are the ones that most resemble the characters. So there is very little character transformation at all. Seinfeld is again an extreme example of this, in which the main “character” is in essence the actor himself. Same with Everyone Loves Raymond. It’s small step to the dramatic series from that extreme. I would wager that if I had coffee with the actor I wrote about earlier, Terry O’Quinn, who plays Locke on Lost, I would be struck by how much alike he is to his character. We don’t fall in love with the characters in film and TV. We fall in love with the actors.

The current list of Hollywood actors we witness in various combinations in movie after movie perform a very similar function on a larger scale. I am soothed by the notion that I am going to see Jim Carrey, or Jodie Foster in a movie, as much as I am entertained (or not) by the movies themselves. There is a kind of mass-cultural glue created by the community of A-List actors that binds us all together as one great American audience. In some strange way, Jim and Jodie become the conduit through which I connect to people I will never meet, but if I did, I could say “Did you see the Jim Carrey movie?” and we would have a common thread with which to begin a relationship. With the success of film series like The Lord of The Rings and Harry Potter, Hollywood has realized the potential for long term actor-audience relationship. I couldn’t wait to see The Return of the King, and watch Viggo kick some Orc-ish ass. (That series actually does contain some radical character acting though, notably John Rys-Davies as Gimli and Ian MacKellen as Gandolf. I did not look forward to watching Ian. He had rightfully vanished. But Gandolf will forever have a face like his when I read those books again, so affected was I by Ian’s performance.) Yesterday I saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which I had read with my son the summer before, and thought – my God, I’m watching these young actors grow up on the screen right in front of me.

Why does the theatre tend to shy away from this audience-actor bonding? I think it stems in part from an inferiority complex we have in relation to film and TV. We in the theatre tend to think of ourselves as the poor stepchild, and film and TV as the favored sons and daughters. Hmmmm . . . interesting that I chose that metaphor. I think we in the theatre feel that since we can’t come close to the locations we are transported to in film and television, that we have to stimulate our audiences in other ways, partly by parading an ever-changing cast of actors I front of them. The other reason we don’t build the audience-actor bond is that it’s very hard to find actors willing to commit to the theatre, remain relatively impoverished, and say farewell to the dream of fame – the narcotic bought and sold mostly in New York and L.A. The citizen - actors I’m surrounded by in Philadelphia are unusual in America. They have chosen to stay in one place, whereas most are driven to restlessly move up what ever phantom ladder they are sold.

But my experience in Jason has led me to believe that it is imperative that we actively foster the Citizen Actor paradigm. We need to give actors hope that there is a meaningful and valuable life for us right where we choose to live. Once free of the crushing obsession to become the next Jim Carrey or Jodie Foster, we can be free become the actors we were meant to become, and to enjoy the work of Hollywood, feeling bound to movie actors as fellow craftsmen, part of the wide fraternity, and sorority, of actors. In the Rooms, we might call adopting the Citizen Actor paradigm being “right size” – we let go of an inflated, false self and live in the world as we actually are. This is a concept which has nation-wide implications. I think of all the children entrapped in ghettos, brainwashed by media into believing that their only hope is to become a star of some kind. Our culture instructs us that there is no middle-ground, You either command the attention of millions or you are a failure. Our work in Jason, at People’s Light and in other theatres in the Philadelphia area is a way to say, no – I am just as common, and just as precious, as any who come to see me perform.

Inos’ last gag was to almost sit in the lap of an audience member sitting stage left, then turn and see that person, shriek in horror, and scamper off. At one of the last performances of Jason, I really landed on the kid in that particular seat. When I turned around to see who I had sat on, I remember this young boy looking at me with a strangely empty stare. Usually the kids (I almost never sat on an adult) would have these wide-eyed expressions of delight and surprise, but I remember this kid looking bored, and slightly hostile. Later in the dressing room, Ahren, who played Orpheus, said “”Good for you for squashing that little brat”.

“Why?” I asked, “Did he throw something at you?”

“No. “ Ahren replied. “He was playing a portable Playstation during the entire show”.

I remembered noticing that boy during the talk-back, staring into his lap, jabbing at a piece of plastic with the same vacant look he had given me in performance. Leaving aside the appalling fact that he was at the play with an adult who was ostensibly responsible for him, who allowed him to sit in the front row and choose his toy over us, and who should have her parenting license revoked, he represents yet another reason why theatre is so important.

The New York Times recently published a disturbing article documenting the progress of a lonely young boy from computer enthusiast to child pornography business person, using his body as bait for on-line pedophiles. Through this boy, the reporter uncovered a large network of children who were in the same business, receiving gifts from pedophiles in exchange for disrobing, and worse, in front of computer cameras. These children were frequently lured into live encounters with the pedophiles, and suffered the horrible consequences. I believe our children are in danger from childhoods of increasing isolation, in which the opportunity to gather in groups, to be witnessed by the communities they live in, and to feel what it is to bound in common experience, is under siege. The principal siege gun is the computer, aided by the vast array of other electronic equipment which allow us to live singular lives, taking care of the kinds of business we used to have do through live human beings. Children used to be members of neighborhoods, and played on the streets on the stoops with other kids, and were cared for the parents of those kids. And yes, some were preyed upon by pedophiles there too. But my point is this: the poor boy in the article is on record as saying that essential reason for his becoming a sexual object was that he craved attention. Like so many, he confused the desire of the sick people he encountered online with actual love, which was something he needed more of in his actual life. Coming to the theatre repels the loneliness bombarding our children. It used to be so much more common. All the more reason to celebrate when a group of artists commits to the spiritual exchange the theatre offers.

I believe we are sustained by the mere experience of breathing together in the same room, and this experience, which is spiritual (spirit, inspire, from the same root word meaning breath) is increased exponentially when that breath becomes rapid from excitement, or bursts into laughter, or dissolves into tears, as it frequently did this summer during July 7th, 1994 - both on stage and in the audience. In fact, I believe we are healed by this shared experience. I write in The Actor’s Way about Stanislavsky’s Rays – the spiritual energy he describes which moves from actor to actor. But they are not just for the actor. They are for the audience as well. So, in being an actor, I take part in healing some of the people in my community. I hope by sitting in that little boy’s lap, I loosened the grip of his little electronic prison. The actor-audience bond brings me back to my shamanistic lineage, and I embrace it. I am an agent of spiritual transformation.

I am calling this post an integration. I wish to synthesize the events in my life into an integrated witness of God at work through one man. I have recorded a process, now I want to try to identify some results, some discoveries, some leadings. I wanted to get to work on this a month ago, but God told me to wait, and put a series of challenges in my way which needed attention. They had mostly to do with the severe financial crisis facing my monthly meeting, it’s difficult relationship to the school under it’s care, as well as nine pages of narration I had to memorize for a holiday show I am in downtown for two nights in early December. It’s called Colonial Holiday and it features a chamber orchestra, a choir, a high-end slide show, and me, taking the audience on a “tour” of Christmas music in colonial Philadelphia. And so this journal has had to wait. It has occurred to me that this was God’s way of telling me to see my life from a little distance, before trying to make any kind of sense out of it.

In these pages, I have set out to imitate Quaker journals, recording my experiences and bringing my focus continually to my witness of God’s energy in my unfolding life. It is an act of exhibitionism, as were the early Quaker journals, exposing the inner lives of the authors in an unusual way for the period. I have found it necessary to draw a line of privacy around some issues, only hinting (for instance) at the strife I am experiencing with my family of origin, and using a kind of code to describe my ongoing recovery from alcoholism, out of deference to the traditions of the group which has saved my life. So looking back at the fall, what do I see?

Dear friends, imagine a bow-tie. Imagine it represents a time period, beginning at the left and going to the right. See how it begins broadly, then narrows and compresses at the knot, before expanding again. Now imagine that that the cloth on the left is muddy, grey and brown; imagine the knot is a rich golden yellow, and the expanding wing to the right an abstract mix of bright colors. That is the image of my fall up to this point. To the left is August and September, finding my way through the murky beginnings of rehearsal, and trying to articulate my goals for Revival. The knot represents the last two weeks of October, when I was in the thick of Jason, sending off job applications to universities and beginning the Meetings for Theatre. The bright colors swirl about me now, and seem to suggest patterns, but only fleetingly, like the work of the great Russian abstract artist Kandinsky.

Susan is acting in the holiday show at People’s Light, a rollicking English Panto of Jack and The Beanstalk. During the last weekend of Jason, I had dinner on Saturday in the green room of the Main Stage where she was in final tech. I had one of those exquisite moments of deep gratitude for my life, seeing myself in the middle of this beehive theatrical creativity. Mark, who plays the Dame in the Panto, was standing in the green room in work boots chatting with Chaz the stage manager, a vast tutu wrapped around his big belly and wearing a monstrous set of falsies contained by a girdle which, unfurled, might sail a fair schooner. He batted his false eyelashes at me and said in his resonant baritone, “Hey, Ben”. I am surrounded by extraordinary friends:

• Peter, who joined me briefly at dinner, played several nasty characters in Jason, and his wife Ceal, both company actors at the theatre and perhaps more than any others, role models for me and Susan. Ceal and Peter raised two adopted children while working for People’s Light (and many other local theatres). They are both multi-talented, Peter arranging music for his cello on his laptop in the dressing room, and Ceal, a gifted teacher and editor, who vetted early drafts of my book being published next spring, The Actor’s Way (though it was then called Letters to Alice). Ceal is an astonishing actor as well.

• Kathryn, wandering through and offering words of encouragement to the Panto actors, was the actress I played opposite of in two of the short plays I was in during 30Fest last summer. Kathryn was luminous as Kate, the main role in Donald Margulies’ play July 7th, 1994. I played her husband and we had a kind of actor-connection that no training can create. I am convinced that Kathryn and I are spiritually linked somehow, that we share a past life or something. Actors who work together frequently, who share their lives with each other, have a much better shot at experiencing something like this than the typical vagabond American actor. Kathryn is a playwright too– she wrote the Panto Susan is now in. Her husband is Christopher, who wrote and arranged the wonderful music that underscored most of Jason. I want him to teach Griffen to play the guitar.

• Scott, a young actor in the Panto, whose wife Molly gave birth to Eli their first-born the day after my visit. Scott and my wife and I share a guilty pleasure: the Fox TV series 24. He and Molly are two young actors who I see as following in this new paradigm I call the Citizen Actor. Ceal and Peter, me and Sooz, Scott and Molly – the lineage in action.

• And Susan, my wife, who met me in the green room that Saturday all dolled up in her silly ice cream parlor outfit (it has to do with the Panto – don’t ask – all I can say is, it works). I fell in love with her all over again. As she goes about her business as an actor, I can’t believe she’s the same woman I had breakfast with this morning, the same woman I witness mothering my children, the same woman I have lived with for ten years. It’s a great perq, marrying an actress: you feel like you’re having an affair with someone, but it turns out it’s your wife. Later, I watch her do things on stage I will never be able to do. She’s damn good – technically skilled and so full of joy in her work. She fills the theatre with it.

During the talk-backs for Jason, we frequently heard comments from adults, who would begin with a phrase like, “We’ve seen you all in a bunch of plays here, and I’ve got to ask . . . “. Many theatres are afraid of employing the same actors over and over, fearing that audiences will get tired of the same faces in different costumes. But my experience at People’s Light, and in Philadelphia theatre generally, is just the opposite. Audiences love recognizing the actors from one play to another, and marveling at the transformation. It is an actor-audience connection over time that creates a comforting continuity for the audience, and it is instructional in the best possible way about the art of acting. It says, acting is about transformation. It also says, these are our artists, yours (the audience’s) and mine (the theatre’s). They are cultural assets that we are investing in. You are watching that investment grow over time. They are not only set dressing for the plays you see. They are people just like you in careers that matter.

I call this relationship “audience-actor bonding”. People’s Light, being one of only a few American theatres with an ensemble of returning actors, has built a strong subscriber base not only on the quality of its shows, but on this relationship. I think it could do more to build on that relationship marketing-wise, but I digress. It’s the same relationship that drives television. We rush home as much to spend an hour with Jack Bauer and his fellow anti-terrorism agents, as we do to see what happens in that episode of 24. Seinfeld is great example of a TV show that was built on this actor-audience relationship, since it openly proclaimed itself to be about “nothing”. My connection to Lost has as much to do with the actors I see week after week, as it does with the exotic locale and great writing. For me, it has mostly to do with actors.

Friends, in most TV and film, we aren’t watching characters, at least not in the same sense as they are brought to life in, say, Jason and the Golden Fleece, in which the actors playing the extreme characters (like me) were attempting to disappear. In most TV and film, the actors chosen are the ones that most resemble the characters. So there is very little character transformation at all. Seinfeld is again an extreme example of this, in which the main “character” is in essence the actor himself. Same with Everyone Loves Raymond. It’s small step to the dramatic series from that extreme. I would wager that if I had coffee with the actor I wrote about earlier, Terry O’Quinn, who plays Locke on Lost, I would be struck by how much alike he is to his character. We don’t fall in love with the characters in film and TV. We fall in love with the actors.

The current list of Hollywood actors we witness in various combinations in movie after movie perform a very similar function on a larger scale. I am soothed by the notion that I am going to see Jim Carrey, or Jodie Foster in a movie, as much as I am entertained (or not) by the movies themselves. There is a kind of mass-cultural glue created by the community of A-List actors that binds us all together as one great American audience. In some strange way, Jim and Jodie become the conduit through which I connect to people I will never meet, but if I did, I could say “Did you see the Jim Carrey movie?” and we would have a common thread with which to begin a relationship. With the success of film series like The Lord of The Rings and Harry Potter, Hollywood has realized the potential for long term actor-audience relationship. I couldn’t wait to see The Return of the King, and watch Viggo kick some Orc-ish ass. (That series actually does contain some radical character acting though, notably John Rys-Davies as Gimli and Ian MacKellen as Gandolf. I did not look forward to watching Ian. He had rightfully vanished. But Gandolf will forever have a face like his when I read those books again, so affected was I by Ian’s performance.) Yesterday I saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which I had read with my son the summer before, and thought – my God, I’m watching these young actors grow up on the screen right in front of me.

Why does the theatre tend to shy away from this audience-actor bonding? I think it stems in part from an inferiority complex we have in relation to film and TV. We in the theatre tend to think of ourselves as the poor stepchild, and film and TV as the favored sons and daughters. Hmmmm . . . interesting that I chose that metaphor. I think we in the theatre feel that since we can’t come close to the locations we are transported to in film and television, that we have to stimulate our audiences in other ways, partly by parading an ever-changing cast of actors I front of them. The other reason we don’t build the audience-actor bond is that it’s very hard to find actors willing to commit to the theatre, remain relatively impoverished, and say farewell to the dream of fame – the narcotic bought and sold mostly in New York and L.A. The citizen - actors I’m surrounded by in Philadelphia are unusual in America. They have chosen to stay in one place, whereas most are driven to restlessly move up what ever phantom ladder they are sold.

But my experience in Jason has led me to believe that it is imperative that we actively foster the Citizen Actor paradigm. We need to give actors hope that there is a meaningful and valuable life for us right where we choose to live. Once free of the crushing obsession to become the next Jim Carrey or Jodie Foster, we can be free become the actors we were meant to become, and to enjoy the work of Hollywood, feeling bound to movie actors as fellow craftsmen, part of the wide fraternity, and sorority, of actors. In the Rooms, we might call adopting the Citizen Actor paradigm being “right size” – we let go of an inflated, false self and live in the world as we actually are. This is a concept which has nation-wide implications. I think of all the children entrapped in ghettos, brainwashed by media into believing that their only hope is to become a star of some kind. Our culture instructs us that there is no middle-ground, You either command the attention of millions or you are a failure. Our work in Jason, at People’s Light and in other theatres in the Philadelphia area is a way to say, no – I am just as common, and just as precious, as any who come to see me perform.

Inos’ last gag was to almost sit in the lap of an audience member sitting stage left, then turn and see that person, shriek in horror, and scamper off. At one of the last performances of Jason, I really landed on the kid in that particular seat. When I turned around to see who I had sat on, I remember this young boy looking at me with a strangely empty stare. Usually the kids (I almost never sat on an adult) would have these wide-eyed expressions of delight and surprise, but I remember this kid looking bored, and slightly hostile. Later in the dressing room, Ahren, who played Orpheus, said “”Good for you for squashing that little brat”.

“Why?” I asked, “Did he throw something at you?”

“No. “ Ahren replied. “He was playing a portable Playstation during the entire show”.

I remembered noticing that boy during the talk-back, staring into his lap, jabbing at a piece of plastic with the same vacant look he had given me in performance. Leaving aside the appalling fact that he was at the play with an adult who was ostensibly responsible for him, who allowed him to sit in the front row and choose his toy over us, and who should have her parenting license revoked, he represents yet another reason why theatre is so important.

The New York Times recently published a disturbing article documenting the progress of a lonely young boy from computer enthusiast to child pornography business person, using his body as bait for on-line pedophiles. Through this boy, the reporter uncovered a large network of children who were in the same business, receiving gifts from pedophiles in exchange for disrobing, and worse, in front of computer cameras. These children were frequently lured into live encounters with the pedophiles, and suffered the horrible consequences. I believe our children are in danger from childhoods of increasing isolation, in which the opportunity to gather in groups, to be witnessed by the communities they live in, and to feel what it is to bound in common experience, is under siege. The principal siege gun is the computer, aided by the vast array of other electronic equipment which allow us to live singular lives, taking care of the kinds of business we used to have do through live human beings. Children used to be members of neighborhoods, and played on the streets on the stoops with other kids, and were cared for the parents of those kids. And yes, some were preyed upon by pedophiles there too. But my point is this: the poor boy in the article is on record as saying that essential reason for his becoming a sexual object was that he craved attention. Like so many, he confused the desire of the sick people he encountered online with actual love, which was something he needed more of in his actual life. Coming to the theatre repels the loneliness bombarding our children. It used to be so much more common. All the more reason to celebrate when a group of artists commits to the spiritual exchange the theatre offers.

I believe we are sustained by the mere experience of breathing together in the same room, and this experience, which is spiritual (spirit, inspire, from the same root word meaning breath) is increased exponentially when that breath becomes rapid from excitement, or bursts into laughter, or dissolves into tears, as it frequently did this summer during July 7th, 1994 - both on stage and in the audience. In fact, I believe we are healed by this shared experience. I write in The Actor’s Way about Stanislavsky’s Rays – the spiritual energy he describes which moves from actor to actor. But they are not just for the actor. They are for the audience as well. So, in being an actor, I take part in healing some of the people in my community. I hope by sitting in that little boy’s lap, I loosened the grip of his little electronic prison. The actor-audience bond brings me back to my shamanistic lineage, and I embrace it. I am an agent of spiritual transformation.