Wednesday, April 12. 2006Salempost 13: Integration 4 “Whore!” screams Proctor, and he rushes to take down Abigail, who is shaking from a “chill wind” she says Mary has sent upon her. In the ensuing speech, after Willard has pulled him off her, Hale gets the answer: “I have known her!” screams Proctor. With this admission, Hale’s search is over. He suddenly understands the entire proceeding in a way he never could before. Standing in the midst of the courtroom chaos, images flash back before me of my visit to the Proctors: Elizabeth’s strange behavior whenever Abigail is mentioned, Proctor blanking on the adultery commandment, Mary Warren’s recounting of Abbey watching her make the poppit. Worse, I think back to my own arrival, and Abigail listening to what I say about the signs of witchcraft, and watching the drama of my effort with Tituba. It’s too much to say that Hale thinks he is to blame right then, but there begins a creeping sense of responsibility - and his new objective: save the innocent. This is his first objective in 2.1, he discovers it at the very end of the scene and it drives him through to the end of the play. And like all good objectives, he fails to achieve it. Searching, searching. It is what I am doing in my life . It what Hale is doing in his. The actor and the character are enjoined. I want to know what God wants of me, how I may I best be of service to Him? This is precisely Hale’s mission too, but on different terms. I am full of portent, I live in the sense of something about to happen that will affect me and ones I love deeply. So does Hale. But his sense has more fear in it than mine, though we are both ride on the spiritual cusp of the unknown. Also in 2.1 I witnessed some the worst actor behavior in performance ever. Suffice to say that there were private agendas and aesthetic vendettas being executed on stage in front of audiences against other actors and witnessed by the whole company. That the play didn’t come grinding to a halt and a fight break out between actors was miraculous. It took some stern lectures from Chaz to put an end to it all. The gossip around it backstage nearly became intolerable. I was not immune. But I finally had to let someone know that I wasn’t interested in passing judgment on others. Of course I do pass judgment on others, but only with my wife and closest friends, and not while the play is up and running. We make light of the different ways actors work. But these differences can manifest in antagonistic ways, and simmering conflicts over process can evolve into bizarre ad libs and warped staging in performance. It is my observation that older actors are particularly prone to this, as convinced and set in their ways as they are. I had about five ten minutes between my 2.1 exit and my 2.2 entrance – less for the morning shows. I change shirts and return to the blue great coat, flipping my hair forward now so it cascades around my head down to the top of my chest, giving me an oddly effeminate air. Hale is changed when he enters the jail. I’ve already told you, friends, about my desire to have him arrive shattered. The compromise we have come to is a kind of end-of the-rope directness. The word “gibbet” is my cue, and for the forth time, I enter the wings, passing my wife in the greenroom as she covers herself in stage dirt for her final scene. Only Proctor and Hale are in all four scenes: the insider and the outsider. Jeb comes up behind me in the darkness, but there is no ass-slapping now. All is quiet focus and marshalling of resources.  I barge into an outburst of Parris’. Danforth nails me with an icy blue stare. Here begins a rapid fire exchange of tactics. He compliments me. I make a demand: pardon them. He bristles. I beg him. He lectures me. I am defeated, until – he wants Elizabeth here, to plead with her husband. A ray of light. I sooth him. He condescends to me. The straw breaks. I challenge him. He faces off with me. I release, shaming him, slamming him. He defies me. I scare him. He retreats, I heap it on – and there’s Elizabeth. He entreats me to speak with her, this woman covered in the shit of the jail, this woman who was so strong and proud three months ago. This woman who’s life, I think, I’ve ruined. I beg her. I plead with her. Nothing. Then Danforth goes to her and – surprise – she relents. Proctor comes, a bent and twisted piece of wreckage. Guantonimo Bay, I think. The jails of Bagdad. We leave the Proctors alone. In the green room, Graham wants to talk about the scene. I don’t. Ceal sits as Rebecca in quiet contemplation. I am sure she is in Quaker worship. I sit near her in spiritual affinity. Something is either building in me or it isn’t. Either way I want to be still and open to its arrival if it comes.  “Proctor will confess!” shouts Hathorne and we gather offstage. A moment and we stream on, Danforth in the lead. I am transfixed by Proctor, this beaten man. Here begins another long passage of watching and listening for me. Some nights it is like a slow-motion wave of feeling, cresting with Proctor’s howl “Because it is my name!” and then tears spilling down my cheeks, choking me as I watch he and Rebecca clutch each other on their way to the gallows. Some nights, when Sooz and I are left on stage together alone for the final image of the play, my last line is a sobbing mess of snot and tears, and my collapse to the stage is pure and genuine exhaustion. But other nights the wave does not crest, the tears do not fall, and all is splendid pretence; the skill of sensitive dissembling all actors must make their peace with (indeed, there are some who feel this is better than the great emotional release, and I have shared the stage with them). Either way, one hopes the audience leaves feeling that they have not been taken by shysters, but rather taken by artists to someplace terrible and true, and haunting in its familiarity.  My emotional relationship to this final moment waned as the production went on. This is natural. The thing that reliably moves you to tears will grow common through repetition, no matter how skillfully it is brought to life. And yet there was a constant opening that happened to me in these final awful moments, even though it was not reliably manifest in tears, and its consistency was bred from the love of the actors I was on stage with more than the story being told. It was the look on Chris’s face, and Ceal’s that knocked the wind of out of me. It was the personal connections between these human beings that generated the feeling. The night before the final show, Chaz read a selection about community. There are two communities at work in those final moments: Salem’s and People’s Light’s. And the interplay between them makes something greater than the sum of its parts. That final show, I was a mess at the end.But I was also led to this thought: that just as the emotion of a moment dims for an actor over time, so too the repetitive witness of horror leads to numbing in us all, and this has implications in our culture, in which horror is the stuff of mass entertainment, and our children are raised watching dramatized killings. Part of what was so poignant about The Crucible was inhabiting the innocence of these people, for whom a child who sleeps a lot may be in the Devil’s grasp. We are numb to horror now, and so there is barely a horror left that will move us to action, and along with horror, we have lost our wonder: of the earth, it’s creatures and of each other. Acting asks us to find that wonder again, to hold it and light it ablaze, and warm the weary who come to see it. Acting asks us to enchant an audience often resistant to enchantment.  We have banished mystery in favor of the comfort of logical answers and rational processes. We are slaves to the tyranny of judgment, in which God’s glorious grey is separated into clear and boring black and white by the tincture of intellectualism. This dry approach has crept into our creative lives as well, leading us to the error that we can understand a creative act before we enact it. Our minds trick us into comfort, but it is a false comfort, and the faithful cannot abide it. Because faith explores mystery, admits doubt, seeks wonder. Faith says there is something bigger than my brain, and I worship it. During a talkback with a high school audience after the show, a young person asked: “How has this show affected you spiritually?” Somehow, over the course of the talkbacks, I became the One who answers the God questions, and on that day I surprised myself by saying the following: “As a Christian, I found this play deeply challenging”. As a Christian. The words just flew out of me, so many little birds bursting from the bush. I have been born again. He is mine, I claim Him, I am his Friend. Sooz and I are out of costume and climbing back into the car. I drive now, the designated one, as she sips a beer or glass off wine. We speak of tragedy. A person in our extended artistic community was killed in a car crash coming home from seeing The Crucible. Neither Sooz or I knew her well, but I can’t stop thinking about possibly of being part of the last images she held inside, and about Caesar’s molecules. On the ides of March, in physics classrooms across the country, they talk about Caesar’s molecules. It is apparently a statistical certainty each time we inhale, we breath in a few of the molecules that Caesar exhaled just after saying “Et tu, Brute?” The Pennsylvania countryside slips by under the warm spring night, and I inhale from an open window, trying to taste the molecules that left my dead comrade’s lungs in her last moment, trying to taste the ones that floated about Golgotha on a hot day in Palestine some 2,000 years ago, or the ones that left Burbage’s lips on the banks of the Thames, the first time he played the Dane. We are all One. Revival will return soon, and I have interviews with institutions which may result in us packing up our things and leaving this community behind us. But tonight, warm in the glow of a job well done, grateful to be alive with my wife by my side, I cannot fathom anywhere else I’d rather be. Faith is being blindfolded and led to a diving board. “It’s nothing but pillows and mattresses below!” shout persuasive and familiar voices. “Jump!” I keep thinking I’ve arrived at the diving board. But then He leads me to a new one. And I don’t think I’ve jumped . . . yet. Or have I? Wednesday, April 12. 2006Salempost 12: Integration 3
During intermission I try to lay low. Sometimes I look at the clock and imagine my kids asleep, and the journey I have left to go before I see them. I’ve been realizing lately all the things I don’t do – don’t even consider – because it would take me away from them too. I remember a full professor at Villanova telling me, “Never, never use your family as an excuse for not doing something here.” I’m sorry – fuck that. Being an active Dad is a conscious choice in my life. I am aware that it sets me apart from a lot of other professional men with families, who either put other priorities first, or who work in patriarchal environments where men aren’t supposed to be as interested in their kids as they are in their work. If I could, I’d take them to work with me. And while Griff was on spring break, we did just that, and he scooted out into the house to watch the morning shows in between books in the greenroom or computer games on the iBook. My backstage boy, growing up in the theatre.
 “Your family is an accomplishment, Ben” my Quaker therapist said to me one day, and a little sun exploded in my chest. I saw then that it’s true – the four of us stand as an accomplishment in a world where artistic careers are belittled, men are supposed to put work first and women are the child rearers. Perhaps it’s because I was raised by my Dad that I have such an instinctive and deep desire to be a father myself. I shock Susan occasionally, and keep Ella home from daycare when I have a free day, not because she’s sick or the place is closed, but because when I am with her I feel complete, joyful and bound to God. And because she’s growing up, and I am already aware that when she is big I will miss terribly this little person with the enormous voice. The world steals me away from my children. Every moment with them is one I steal back. “Places!” shouts Chaz and we in the 2.1. head into the dim wings. As Chaz’s thumping music begins we dance silly Puritan disco in the offstage darkness. Jeb waves his ass at me and I slap it playfully. Peter seems to be air drumming on something large and Japanese. Mark bends over and beats his thighs in syncopation. Graham hovers in the doorway, removed. We spill out onto the stage, Giles Corey in a rage. I knew this outburst was coming – Hale has been aware of this pending challenge to the court’s authority but has said nothing. He was determined to present it himself when the moment seemed right, but Cory has blown it all wide open. Soon the room fills with people. Hathorne demanding indictments of contempt, Danforth questioning and Proctor – poor farmer, awkward, unsure – here to plead his case. I watch and listen. This is the great effort of 2.1 Strangely, I spend most of it just standing on stage, trying to actually listen as opposed to look like I’m listening. The intensity of concentration required to stay engaged is staggering, especially when I have nothing to say for pages. The temptations are legion: wow – there’s a hot chick in the front row; was that Pearce’s laugh? I think that kid’s going to throw something onstage! No – back, back to this. Danforth is considering now – he’s not going to dismiss these charges outright. Good news. But he uses Nurse’s petition as a pretext for issuing more warrants and slaps Giles in contempt. Proctor’s in trouble. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. This girl he’s brought with him is a mess – Danforth’s going to eat her alive. I know – he needs a lawyer, someone who knows how to play this game. I feel the impulse rise. I speak. When we teach script analysis to actors, we often teach them to break their parts down into a seamless series of tactics united in the pursuit of an objective. But a few years ago I began to feel that this technique was missing something. What about those moments when the character himself doesn’t know what he’s doing, or what he’s looking for? I used to tell my students, well your character may not know, but you need to. But there was always a voice inside me that thought – bullshit. Sometimes you’re just searching – for truth, for direction, for answers. And Hale in this scene is a perfect example. When the scene begins, he has no objective. He is in what I have come to call a transition. He is in between objectives. Broadly speaking, he is searching for the truth. More specifically, he wants to know why Proctor is so convinced this girl Abigail would try to frame his wife. It doesn’t make sense to him. Until the great eruption. Wednesday, April 12. 2006Salempost 11: Integration 2
At my first entrance, everyone on stage stares at me. Everyone in the audience stares at me. I am the intruder, the outsider. There is a suspended moment, a breath, then I speak as Hale for the first time: “Pray you, someone take these!” and Parris comes to take my books from me. Hale is constantly interrupting awkward moments, arriving in the middle of arguments. He does it in the first two scenes of the play, and then again in the last scene. Inadvertently, he witnesses this community in its pain. This speaks to him as a minister. It’s information that gets stored away, then detonates in the courtroom. But here, he is all business. He is the expert consultant, called to discover, or not, the Devil at work.
Act 1, scene 1 memories: the way Chris slinks off stage as Proctor. Marsha’s eyes when she tells she’s lost seven children in childbirth. Holding Claire in my lap and connecting to Hale, the father of two. My little scene with Tom as Giles over the book. Julianna as Abigail screaming “I want the light of God!”  Then there’s the Tituba sequence. It is where the fear becomes horror enacted. Tituba is thrown to the floor and knows that in order to live she must admit to seeing the devil. This moment got disturbing laughs from some high school audiences. The image of Lenny being thrown to the floor struck some of them as funny. Lenny was occasionally furious backstage afterwards. “Little fuckers” she would mutter. It has been a painful experience for her – the one person of color in this cast – playing the slave. It is an open wound for her, and the children’s perverse laughter was especially galling. But for me, it was working with Lenny in this scene, in which Hale tries to save her, which either propelled me into the rest of the play, or warned me of heavy lifting when I was tired. The people of Salem Village are ensnared, the girls are screaming accusations, Chaz’s percussive, pounding sound design kicks in, the lights dim and we quickly move scenery offstage during the change. I hold the curtain to the green room open for Lenny and we check in with each other. Sooz is standing there as Elizabeth, quietly focused. We softly slap hands as I pass her. Marsha hands me my coat and hat, occasionally complimenting us all for a scene well performed. I have 10 minutes or so before my next entrance in 1.2. I usually sit quietly, background listening, chatting softly with the offstage company. I hear Sooz as Elizabeth and Chris as Proctor arguing. I think, what a modern relationship in the midst of an ancient culture. A husband and wife battling through their pain and betrayal, locked together because there’s no way out. And despite the infidelity there is still something speaking to them both which says, we’re better together than apart.  Mary Warren exits and I put the great coat and hat back on. In one of my peculiar actor vanities, I desire to look different in each scene. I originally chose not to wear the grey dress coat for the Proctor visit, but Marla felt that the white of my shirt was too much. So I enter with the blue great coat unbuttoned, and hair tucked into the collar. Another peculiarity: the phantom VIP in the audience. I imagine someone I am connected to, or who excites me, to be in the audience: a director, an old friend, a family member. I think of that person out there watching the play and it somehow turns me on. I was embarrassed about this peculiarity for the longest time, but then, like audience peeking, I discovered what it was really about. It is my way of personalizing my relationship with the audience. The main stage at People’s Light is vast, and the phantom VIP helps me make an intimate connection to the masses gathered there. Ironically, when I actually know there’s a VIP in the house, it can rattle me, like the three shows I thought a director I was about to audition for was there (she wasn’t), or the night my half brother came with his wife, and I kept thinking I saw him in the house left or right delta (he was actually mid-way up the center section). The Proctors are fighting and I am waiting in the woods. I stand there quietly for about two minutes, listening, centering, staring at the “trees”. “She has an arrow in you yet!” Elizabeth screams and I move into the woods, meeting Proctor halfway through the door coming at me. This is the second of Hale’s awkward interruptions. We stare at each other, and through the door I see Elizabeth whip around to hide her face and compose herself. I am invited in. We spent a great deal of time in rehearsal talking about why Hale was there. David tried strenuously to move me to the position that Hale was making sure these were good Christians, but through my performance of this play 56 times, I am convinced of something else. Hale is there to warn them, though he doesn’t know how to when he arrives. He quizzes them about the ten commandments less because he wants to make sure they know them, and more because he has now witnessed the way it works in the Salem courtroom, with Hathorne bringing down Sarah Goode with the commandments inquisition. Hale wants to see what will happen to people like these if they are drawn into court and set upon by the judges in the same way. He isn’t happy with what he discovers: that the Proctors are imperfect people, which makes them vulnerable in the current climate. He has also just come from Rebecca Nurse, and as I stood in my ready position for this scène one night early in the run, it dawned on me: what did she say to me about all of this, this woman I clearly hold in the highest regard? What did she tell me about the hunting of witches, about the activities of the court? I’m sure she said some thing like, “Mr. Hale, there is great danger in the seeking of loose spirits” which is exactly what she says in the first scene to Parris. Except at home, with me visiting and her husband by her side, I’m sure she expands upon that idea a bit more. So I arrive at the Proctors’ having just been schooled by my version of Mother Teresa. My confidence in what I’ve initiated in Salem has been shaken - not defeated, but shaken. Hale arrives at the Proctors’ wrestling with a doubt he doesn’t know how to express. The Proctors are at war with each other; Hale arrives at war with himself.  I stand in their house, aware that I have inserted myself into a painfully intimate moment. “You are Goodwife Proctor” I say to Elizabeth, and I say hello to my wife on stage. For the next five minutes or so, Sooz, Chris and I share one of the most subtle and nuanced scenes I have ever had the pleasure and challenge of performing. The scene with the Proctors around their table never got old, even in the haze of the busiest morning after a sleepless night in front of a restless crown of teenagers. But they were seldom restless here. Miller’s language and Sooz and Chris’s skill sucked me and them in every single time. It’s when acting seems too easy for words, and I’m almost embarrassed to be paid for it. Almost. Add to that the privilege of sharing the stage with a dear friend and the love of my life (who never felt like my love on stage, but his), and it was really a peak experience; a treasure I will always have now.1.2 memories: Sooz telling me there is no mark of blame upon her life; my moment with Chris downstage right about what’s he’s said about witches; the sequence leading up to the rifle, one of many beautiful escalations in the play that – when we played them well – ended in that exquisite combined capture of company and audience, all breathing the same taut breath; my exit, having tried and failed bring Proctor comfort, and my admission that the world has gone mad and I haven’t a clue why: “I shall pray, God open up our eyes.” Which might as well be my prayer. Wednesday, April 12. 2006Salempost 10: Integration 1
Sooz and I are in the car. It’s either 8:45 a.m., or 6:45 p.m. Either we’ve just dropped Griff and Ella off at school and day care, or we’ve left them with the babysitter. We are on our way to the woods of Salem, 1692, again.
Listen. I’m chattering away about The Actor’s Way – fretting about the slow-motion publishing process. I’ve finished the appendix, which came in at around 310 entries. Three tremendous blurbs have come in about the book from three heroes of mine: Doug Wright, playwright; Earle Gister, acting teaching and Parker J. Palmer, writer, teacher and Quaker. I’ve posted the blurbs on a website I’ve set up to market the book and myself as a teacher and workshop leader. It is my new entrepreneurial effort, though it is drifting, unnoticed, in cyberspace right now. Like so much else in m y life, it is embryonic, growing in amniotic darkness, it’s birth some uncertain time in the future, the baby’s shape unknown. Sooz is driving and I’m thinking out loud about the workshops I want to create based on the book, and worrying that I may not have the time to see them come to life if I get one of the teaching jobs I’m suddenly up for. Two secondary schools, one in Annapolis one in Lancaster, PA have sought me out, and for the first time I have interviews lined up. It will need to be an extraordinary offer to have us move to Annapolis, but I am in no position to turn down interest like this. Then there’s Arcadia, and the possibility of an adjunct position there, while I apply to the full time position they’re supposed to advertise for 2007. That plus the Actor’s Way workshops might make for a great fall, but no acting. Unless I get cast in Imaginary Invalid, which I had a surprisingly good audition for. Sooz and I auditioned together for a director she’d work for and I had not, and Sooz thinks I’m going to get cast and she isn’t. How might that impact the teaching, the workshops, the moving? Fret, fret, fret. But we’re not moving. At least not for financial downsizing reasons. It’s become clear that we love out little home too much, and we are blessed, absolutely blessed by a family willing to subsidize us for a bit longer. I have to swallow my pride and accept the help, in spite of my profound desire to be self-sufficient. This is artistic subsidy in America, I think. The lucky ones have families that help them. The less lucky have unemployment insurance. When there is no work, these are our options: families and the dole. If I take one of these secondary school jobs, we’ll move. The Lancaster school is one hour west of the theatre, an hour and a half from home. I could work there and we could stay connected to our communities, but live a little further west. Annapolis means making new connections to new communities. I have always loved the drive to the theatre. In spite of the encroaching McMansions, there are still some places where the rural beauty of this old farmland still glows in rich browns. It’s warm, (“warm as blood beneath the clods” say Proctor in one of my favorite lines) and Sooz and I soak in the soft eruption of spring. The magnolias are squeezing out their petals through furry buds, the most erotic vegetative event I know. Sooz tells me a dream. She was in Edinburgh, a place we both love. She discovered she had cancer on her tongue. She recalls feeling in the dream a fierce determination to get through it, to fight her way to health and well being. It seems significant, I tell her, that the cancer was on her tongue. What a ghastly image, and it seems strongly connected to her work as an actor. Or possibly it has to do with a block she feels in speaking something she feels she needs to speak. But it was her will to get through that was most significant, she tells me. This is the feeling she has retained. We pass a Toyota Prius – the fantasy car of the moment. “Look!” says Sooz, “isn’t that Susan McKey driving that Prius?” “Yep,” I reply “and damn she looks fine.” This is one of the financial fantasy games we play. The other popular one is when we drive by some great beautiful old house. “Hey,” I’ll say, “isn’t that the one the rich Quakers are going to leave us in their will?” We resist the call of caffeine, and arrive at the theatre about an hour before curtain. I check us both in (she never remembers). I change into sweats and go to the stage to stretch and warm up. The sweats are both practical and psychological. I hate rolling around on the floor in my street clothes, I like the way the sweats hide the shape of my body, and allow me to release and pooch out in the right places. They also help me begin the gradual transformation into the Reverend John Hale. They make me less identifiably Ben. They are a transitional uniform. There are a group of us who regularly meet on the stage for our warm up rituals. We are warming up the stage as much as ourselves, tuning it like an enormous wooden instrument waiting to be strummed. Each of us has a different ritual. Sooz goes off to one side, stretches and whoops her way in to full vocal fettle. Peter and Ceal do what looks like a kind of Tai Chi, accompanied by fully supported wailing arpeggios. Chris goes out into the house and lies down between the seats and makes noises like a Tibetan monk’s chant, all low and growly and monosyllabic, but when you listen more closely you hear the words to some if his lines. I begin on my back, feet against the wall of the set, and drop my knees over into diagonal stretches. Then over to the folded leaf, then all fours and more back stretches, with the legs reaching out behind me in alternation. Then the slow uncurl to standing, then jiggling, neck rolls and gentle arpeggios, possibly some resonator work, though with the length of the run, the fatigue of the schedule and the demands of the role, I am careful not to push any part of my vocal warm up. Then I use some of Hale’s speeches for articulation warm up. I think I am driving some of my cast mates a bit nutty with the repetition of the speeches I use. Jeb came up to me the other day and said with playful sarcasm, “Glad you’re still working on the that one, Ben!” But I need to use Hale’s language. I need to get it in my mouth, to feel its sound rolling around my tongue and teeth like food. Looking at my friends and fellow artists bouncing and rolling around on the stage like a bunch of asylum inmates, I think of what my accountant said to Sooz and me as he helped us untangle our financial situation. In the midst of a great combined fret from both of us, he took us off guard by leaning forward to us both and saying, “You know, I handle about 20 theatre artists in this community, as well as a wide variety of other types. People with tons of money, people with very little, professionals of all kinds. But you guys, I mean you theatre types, are the most dedicated to your work, the most organized with your finances and the most underpaid an under-appreciated of any of my clients.” That night during the warm-up, I felt like stopping everyone and telling them this story, but instead held it close and basked in the warm sensation of our group.  At half-hour, I usually open my iBook and check email. Sometimes I plug in the headphones and rock out to something. Speed of Sound returned to my life recently again. I was cranking it in the car with Griff, who listened intently. “What’s flying at the speed of sound Dad?” he asked.“Planets.” I answered. “Planets are flying at the speed of sound”. Griff asked if he could borrow X&Y, then played “Speed of Sound” in his room for a few days. Have I told you, friends, about my spiritual song of the moment? “Clarity” by John Mayer I worry I weigh three times my body I worry I throw my fear around But this morning There's a calm I can't explain The rock candy's melted, only diamonds now remain By the time I recognize this moment This moment will be gone But I will bend the light pretending That it somehow lingered on And I will wait to find If this will last forever And I will wait to find If this will last forever And I will pay no mind Well it won't and it won't because it can't It just can't (It's not supposed to) Was there a second of time I looked around? Did I sail through or drop my anchor down? Was anything enough to kiss the ground And say I'm here now? And she is here now So much wasted in the afternoon So much sacred in the month of June How bout you? And I will wait to find If this will last forever And I will wait to find That it won't and it won't and it won't And I will pay no mind Worried bout no rainy weather And I will waste no time Remaining in our lives together I play it whenever I need a lift. It speaks to me of the mysterious intersession of the Holy Spirit, what we in recovery call serenity. It comes unannounced and seemingly undeserved. And, like all things we love, it whispers of its immanent departure as it arrives, making the time it lingers so much sweeter. The song calls me to be present, just in the moment I’m in, and available to God. I fantasize about standing in meeting for worship and singing it a capella. I have also recently come back to Blue. I discovered Joni Mitchell backwards, beginning with Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm, and Blue is so personal I have to be careful not to listen to it when I’m going to meet people. I arrive altered and odd. I had another one of those crying-while-driving jags listening to “The Last Time I Saw Richard” the other day and came to a therapy session with tear stains on my cheeks. But backstage it’s usually the Head Banger playlist, or one called Funky Nuts (James Brown, Earth Wind & Fire, Prince, etc.) Chris pretends I’m not wearing headphones and will tell me a joke as if they’re not in my ears. Sometimes I worry that the guys in the dressing room think I’m anti-social. But I have realized with this play how there is a very private aspect to my experience as an actor which I guard and cherish. And the mysterious approach to that first step on stage has a sequence for all of us, and mine is a bit solitary. I feel like an airplane leaving the gate and heading for the runway. I’m not the pilot, or a passenger. I’m the airplane. Chris absolutely needs to be a jester in the dressing room – and he is delightful. It’s so strange to be convulsed in laughs at something he’s said backstage, and then moments later be onstage with him as Proctor, all scowling fear and smoldering violence. I have most of the costume on by five minutes to places. When Chaz, the stage manager, shouts “Places!” the wig goes one, spirit gum in big dots beneath my widow’s peak and on both temples. Lenny, who plays Tituba, shouts “Take wings, everyone!” Hale enters about 20 minutes into the first scene. There’s usually a cup of coffee for me in there somewhere backstage. As the play begins, I begin “background listening” to the voices coming over the monitor into the dressing room, charting the play’s forward motion, and synchronizing it to the airplane’s journey to lift off. “Where is my wood, then?” demands Rev. Parris, and backstage I put on my greatcoat and hat. I flip my mane of auburn hair over the back of the collar. This beautiful coat was built for me by the costume shop. It is made of a rich blue wool, and based on a pattern Marla used for a coat she made for me when I played Lucio in Measure for Measure eight years ago. So the Rev. Hale’s coat is part pimp. I like that for reasons I cannot explain. I move to the green room and being pacing. This is part habit, part warm-up ritual, part prep for Hale, who comes barging into the Parris house after riding five miles from Beverly. He enters carrying a great stack of heavy books. I need to feel like I’ve been moving. I shake out my hands and mutter some of my lines, keeping the food fresh in my mouth. Lenny sits quietly, getting ready to come on as the slave and be scape-goated, the most vulnerable person in the community branded the first witch. If it’s a morning show, my cue is Parris: “What, are we Quakers?” It’s an authentic Quaker joke written by Miller (though I’m not sure he intended it as such). Philadelphia audiences give it a hearty laugh at night, but the kids don’t get it. If it’s an evening show the cue is Putnam: “A moment, Mr. Proctor . . . “ I sweep the stack of books off the props table and head into the darkness of the wings. The airplane is pointing down the empty expanse of runway now, engines going to full throttle. God be with me, God be through me, I whisper, I am your faucet, turn me on. Giles Corey: “Come on John, let’s drag your lumber home!” Four steps, through the door and bright lights. My wheels leave the earth. I take wings. 
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