Showman/Shaman

Four things from the last three extraordinary days:

One. I met Jenny for coffee Sunday with Griff and Ella. Jenny is part of our baby sitting “matrix”. Ella calls her “my Jenny”. She is a former student of mine who I had the great pleasure of teaching both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student. She has impossibly blue eyes - really, they take your breath away. She has kewpie doll cuteness which hides the tough Jersey girl she is. She wanted to get council from me about her life, just beginning, as an actor.

As Ella and Griffen devoured a scone and some lemonade, Jenny told me she feels like she’s in a funk professionally and is thinking about applying to an M.F.A. or PhD. program. What did I think, she wanted to know. I asked her what she was afraid of. We whittled it down to this: that twenty years from now she was going to call me to have exactly the same conversation. I told her we couldn’t possibly have this conversation even next week, much less twenty years from now, the way life continually changes, continually evolves. I told her that applying to an M.F.A. program because you’re in a fallow patch is silly (fallow: farmland left intentionally unsown for a time to restore its fertility), and that PhD. programs are for people who really want to study something in depth. I asked her if there was anything she could think of that she could imagine writing a small book about after studying it for several years. She said no, nothing off the top of her head. We agreed a PhD. program is not for her either.

It used to be that when people like Jenny in places like Philadelphia felt stuck, they ran off to New York or L.A. But more and more, they play into the university pyramid scheme, and run off to get graduate training (if they can get in somewhere). For a few years they get completely exhausted, stimulated and in debt by fine training and rich experiences, then most of them return to versions of the life Jenny is living, except with the burden of even higher expectations, and the weight of broken dreams when they aren’t met. I asked Jenny what she wanted as an actor.

“Ben, I want a version of the life you have, “ she said with a wry smile. I flushed. It was not the first time I have been identified as a role model to my face. The experience is simultaneously sweet and nerve-wracking. Griff complained that he was bored.

For the next ten minutes I talked almost nonstop about why it was important for her stay put. “The people who know you best, who value your talents, are right here. They are going to grow up around you and take you with them as they evolve and do all sorts of cool things. You just have to have faith that you’re not going to turn into an old piece of rotten fruit in the mean time. Believe me, I know how tough it is to meet the other friends, the ones who aren’t artists, who are buying new cars and saving money in I.R.A.s and taking expensive vacations. But ask them if they love what they do. Most of them will tell you no. They grit their teeth to get through it. This is our great trade-off: the deep satisfaction of loving what we do for the Caribbean vacation. Let’s think of ways you can love what you’re doing more.”

Jenny and I talked about the “other career”. She has a gift for working with children, and I suggested she look into that area. “You are an actor, “ I told her, “you will be for the rest of your life. Finding the other career doesn’t mean you’re giving up or you’re a loser. It means you’re taking care of yourself.” We hugged at parting and told each other that how special we felt each other to be. It’s the kind of intimate, non-sexual relationship a teacher can have with a student, filled with passionate connection but no gooey stuff. I am Jenny’s mentor, and she is no longer my student. She is my dear friend.

Two. I met with a group of fabulous local actors downtown on Monday to take part in a workshop led by Bobbi, Philadelphia’s mistress of improvisation. For six hours, with a short break for lunch, she led us into the fascinating world of non-comic long-form improvisation. It was food for the soul, being with my “tribe” under the instruction of an inspiring and gifted teacher.

Bobbi models performing arts pedagogy at it’s finest. She is infectiously enthusiastic, organized but admits when she’s gone off the rails, deeply human and non-judgmental. Her approach to teaching can be encapsulated by the “philosophy of moo”: when anyone made a mistake during the series of warm-up exercises we did together, the rest of the group made a “cow gesture” and bellows “Moo!” This tactic makes an appearance in The Actor’s Way. I learned it from a high-school student I had been working with. But it is Bobbi’s invention. So I came into contact “backwards” with the originator of a technique I admire greatly. It smashes to pieces the insecurity we all feel during these warm-ups (yes, even the group of “pros” Bobbi had assembled on Monday). And it says right away that we don’t care about judgment, we care about participation.

Long-form improv has a relation to Revival. In fact, Revival is long-form improv, but with less structure and more overt spiritual content. Bobbi showed us the elaborate techniques used by long-form groups to create the material they work from during their presentations. As an actor, t was like getting a bunch of new toys. We leapt into the work, raced through it much to fast, resorted to the comic choices anyway out of our excitement, and at the end couldn’t wait for more.

Bobbi wants to create a company devoted to long-form improv. I told her “I’m in”. During a break, I sat with Catherine and Megan, two great actors and Moms. I am Godfather to Meg’s new daughter Willa, and Catherine has twin girls. Both are married to accomplished theatre artist husbands, and so the three of us are living variations of the same life. We scarfed down lunch and commiserated about the stresses of child care for the citizen-actor, and we assured each other that the kids are going to be fine. This was my tribe at work, holding each other in loving care, then dazzling each other with artistic provocation. During the workshop, Catherine and I shared a remarkable sequence about two young people getting stoned around a camp fire, and then losing their virginity to each other. Remarkable.

Three. That afternoon, I raced to the Drexel university School of Medicine. The cast of July 7th, 1994 had been invited to do a reading of the play for an audience of med school students and faculty. The play was written by Donald Margulies while his wife was a clinic doctor in New Haven, and it is essentially about her experience there. Several doctors who saw it when we performed it last summer stopped me in the parking lot after the pay and told me what an important play they thought it was. It was this same feeling that apparently led someone to put this reading together, disorganized though it was.

So I moved from my wider tribe to my “village”: the actors from People’s Light. We set up in one of those medical auditoriums with fixed seats behind long curved desks. We pushed the overhead projectors out of the way and cobbled together a semblance of “set” using stools and chairs. David, our director, came to run the slides used to translate the scenes that half in Spanish. The students came in munching on steam-table food that I assumed had been used as an enticement to get them to show up. They looked to me like high school students, but perhaps this is a sign of my age.

We in the cast have developed an unusually strong connection to this script. It is, in my opinion, beautifully written: poetic and yet precise about the stresses the young female doctor meets during the course of her day. The play ends with her returning home to her husband (who I played), a stay at home Dad for their two year old, working on his dissertation. After a conversation about the what was on TV that night, he tells her about the day he spent with their son. It could easily have been a conversation lifted verbatim form one of many I have had with Susan. Kate, the doctor wife, has had the day from hell, and at the end, all she can do is ask him to recite Goodnight Moon to her. I was a weeping mess the very first time I read it, and this emotional connection to the play has remained, six months after I have finished performing it.

Monday night, I was especially vulnerable. It had been a rough night with Ella the night before, three wake-ups. It had been a long day with the workshop downtown. And watching the young med students watch the play, I was deep in that actor-audience connection I wrote about earlier. I felt the ministry of this play flowing through me like a river, and when it came time for me to play the final scene with Kathryn, I fought to keep the tears in check until the appropriate place:

Goodnight little house
And goodnight mouse
Goodnight comb
And goodnight brush
Goodnight nobody
Goodnight mush
And goodnight to the old lady whispering hush
Goodnight stars
Goodnight air
Goodnight noises everywhere.

There we were, holding each other, dripping in our river, on stools in front of med students who were themselves twitchy with emotion, some wiping away tears, bringing the ministry of artists to the healers. Half of them stood up at the end. Not bad.

Four. The next day, I drove to Baltimore to see Yitzak.

In The Rooms, I have heard endless stories about recovery houses, stories from people who lost everything and had to start over. But I have never been face to face to with it, until now. Yitzak is living in room the size of Griffen’s with two other adult men. His belongings are on the floor because he has nowhere to put them. He is doing service to this house by cooking and shopping for the group, but feels no one really appreciates it.

Last September, his wife called me to the house they shared not far from where I live. She wanted my help throwing him out. They lived in a large and well-appointed house, and I found Yitzak in his underwear, standing in the kitchen, mumbling. For the next hour I tried to convince him to let me drive him to detox center not far away. He refused. We threatened to call the cops. He then said he would go in the morning, and he did. Three weeks later he tried to kill himself.

Last Tuesday was his 60th birthday, and I took him out to lunch. We had a wonderful time, talking recovery and the life of the spirit. I asked him if he can feel gratitude at all. “Yes, “ he answered, “a thousand times a day. You know, God has done us a favor, “ he continued, “other people can talk about theology over of a glass of vodka, but for us, it is life and death.” I thought of Samuel Bownas and the necessary life-transformation before spiritual re-birth. Yitzak told me about a visit he made to this recovery house a week before he finally moved here. On the way home, the car he and his wife were in seemed to be followed by a Jeep with the word “Rubicon” on the side. “Do you know this word?” he asked me. I said I didn’t. “It is the name of the river Julius Caesar crossed that marked the point of no return. Why that word on this day? What do you think?” Grasping for something wise to say from my thinking on Quaker prophesy, I said it didn’t matter to me whether or not God was actually speaking to him through that strange car, what mattered was how he interpreted it, and what effect that interpretation had on his life.

Yitzak is moving out of the recovery house soon. Two young thugs there have made his life unbearable and he fears for his sobriety if he stays. He has made some valuable connections through the Orthodox Jewish community, and he described the ways he thinks they will support him. He laid out some promising scenarios for future employment. He has begun to play his violin again.

Yitzak says all the right things, but this has always been so. He had 137 days free of the bondage of addiction last Tuesday, but we both know his recovery is fragile, and his record staying sober is poor. He says he is changed, that this time it is different, that he has embraced recovery in a way he never has before. When a recovering person says things like that, you can only hold him, and pray that it is true. But there is no doubt that the externals have changed radically for him, and this may be a great blessing indeed.

“We are judged not by our thoughts but by our actions” my minister said last Sunday. I pray that Yitzak’s actions remain extraordinary.

I just finished Anne Rice’s Christ The Lord. I think it is a remarkable achievement, as much for the deep humanity in it, as for the clear vision she presents of 1st century Judea. Some observations:

I am struck by as similarity between her novel and another great book of scholarship I have read recently, Steven Greenblatt’s Will in the World, about the life and times of William Shakespeare. Both books unabashedly use creative means to bring the main characters to life. In both books, the life circumstances of Jesus and Will are described with great care and sympathy, and so the reader slowly falls in love with them, following the author’s lead. In her note at the end of the book, Rice describes an almost palpable dislike for Jesus in much of the scholarship she read about him. It made me think of that unpleasant academic characteristic, which is to look down one’s nose at jus about everything, even the subject you’re supposed to be expert at. She and Greenblatt so obviously love their subject matter, and that love evaporates off the pages and surrounds the reader in feelings, as well as thoughts. This is the mark of academic greatness – the ability to impart feelings which do not detract from the intellectual exercise one is undertaking, but enrich it.

In her note – an autobiographical essay at the end of the book, really – she describes two powerful life journeys which relate to Christ the Lord. The first is sweeping. It is the arc of her faith: the initial indoctrination, the long adult doubt, and the delicate return after a life rich with success and blessings. The second is short and devastating. Her husband of 41 years was felled rapidly by a brain tumor just months after Anne first conceived of the form of this novel. I thought of Lessing, losing his wife so soon after marrying her, then writing Nathan. I thought of Mozart, facing his own mortality, and writing the Requiem. Great artists have this terrible ability to use the despair of tragedy as the fuel for creativity. Anne implies that writing this book through her husband’s death kept her sane. I wonder if she was asking Jesus some powerful questions as she brought his little figure to life. I’m certain the passion in the book tastes of the Anne’s life as surely as Hamlet smacks of Shakespeare’s grief.

Her Jesus is a child, and beautifully child-like. Sent by God to earth, he has a wonderful curiosity about everything he sees, and is prone to find a quiet place in the grass, lie down and listen to the bugs humming nearby. This is my kind of Jesus. He experiences every emotion, and clings to his family for love and support, even though, through most of the book, he is aware that they are hiding something from him, something about his birth. What touched me the most is that, after all the miracles, the super-natural events, his great revelation at the end of the book is two-fold: he was sent to earth to live, and like all living things, he will eventually die. It is his human-ness which continually overwhelms him, not his divinity. Reading her book, I wanted to be there next to him, to shelter him, to play with him, to learn from him. She makes him seem beautifully fragile amidst a rugged and sometimes violent landscape.

I really don’t care much about the historical Jesus. Anne writes that Christ scholarship is so divided and rancorous it’s impossible to settle on anything without picking a side in a gigantic theocratic/academic turf battle. A bit like Will Shakespeare, we’re just going to have to live with not knowing, and bring to life the Will and Jesus we want to see in the world, hoping others will do the same. I’m sure, if I was somehow time-transported back to the first century, and met the historical Jesus, I’m sure I’d be disappointed. It would be like meeting that rock star you idolize. It’s better when you can’t smell them.

Singing Tiny Dancer to Ella tonight, I inadvertently switched the genders:

Blue jean baby, L.A. lady, seamstress for the band
Pretty eyed, pirate smile, you'll marry a music man
Ballerina, you must have seen her dancing in the sand
And now he’s in me, always with me, tiny dancer in my hand

Jesus freaks out in the street
Handing tickets out for God
Turning back he just laughs
The boulevard is not that bad

Piano man he makes his stand
In the auditorium
Looking on she sings the songs
The words he knows, the tune he hums

But oh how it feels so real
Lying here with no one near
Only you and you can hear me
When I say softly, slowly

Hold me closer tiny dancer
Count the headlights on the highway
Lay me down in sheets of linen
you had a busy day today


Right around the “Jesus freaks” line, I heard what I had done. Oh no, I thought, it’s happening – I’m becoming a Jesus freak. I knew that tonight I was singing to Ella about a new Tiny Dancer, one I had just inherited from Anne Rice. But Ella didn’t care. She snuggled in close to me in her warm dark room, and I just kept singing.