Theatre

The other Disney movie Ella is obsessed with – even more than Lion King – is Beauty and The Beast. This was not on my mind when I wrote the Spring integration, but the Spring integration was on mind the other day when I found myself alone with Ella for a few hours, and we played “Beauty and The Beast.”

I screwed up face and jutted my lower teeth out. I dropped my voice in to a raspy growl. I lumbered around like a giant ape, and all the while Ella played Belle. I tried to engineer the scenes so that, for some reason, Beast had to take a lot of naps. Ella liked this, because it allowed her to play out the “going to sleep” scenario with her on the powerful end, as the one putting some else to bed.

“Go to sleep now Beast. No crying.” she would tell me, before planting the world’s most tender little kiss on my lips. Within a minute she would wake me up. Some nap. I would pretend to cry.

“I’m hideous.”

“No, no Beast. You not hideous.” And she would kiss me some more. She pronounced “hideous” remarkably well for a three year old.

At least I’m not so hideous I can’t be on the radio. I had an interview about The Actor’s Way last Wednesday. It was for a local public radio show called “Radio Times”, which Susan and I listen to a lot. So when I showed up at the studio and was greeted by the host Marty Moss-Coane, I felt as though I was going to hang out with my cool aunt Marty in the radio station where she works and chat about some stuff we were both interested in.

I had spent the previous two weeks “rehearsing” this interview: playing out questions she might ask and answering them with glittering charm and intelligence, fielding awkward subjects (like alcoholism and tenure) with aplomb. But of course, Marty was way too sensitive to ask anything approaching an awkward question, and the questions she did ask were so germane to the book and my concerns, my effort was to pare down the 14 responses which lined up in front of me to the one or two which seemed most urgent. Marty asked questions about psychodrama and the wounded actor, about the criticism thread in the book and about what happens in acting classes. We got some call ins from all over. I left feeling kind of high from whole thing.

In the hallway afterwards, I had a comical talk with Marty’s producer, the red-haired Devora, about toilet training. It turns out she has kids about the age of mine, and had some good advice for Ella’s challenging relationship to her own poop.

“Have you tried just letting her sit in her shit for while?” she asked with charming bluntness. God I love strong women. I replied that Ella seemed to not mind that, or at least preferred it to sitting on the potty. “How about rewards?” she asked. “One piece of candy for just sitting, two for pee-pee, three for poop.”

Marty and Devora are a part of the community I serve. How I love my community.

The next day, The Crucible returned in the form of a horribly mishandled “evaluation” meeting at People’s Light. The issue at hand was my conduct in those difficult rehearsals of 2.2, in the jail, and my attachment to my initial vision of Hale the shattered man. Without getting into the whole thing, the meeting was based on second-hand information – essentially “he said, she said” stuff – and had the wounding quality of a reproach, although Abbey and Steve kept telling it wasn’t. I left feeling very hurt and confused, and resolved to go back to continue the conversation.

That night, Sooz left me and the ids to go to the Cape to be with her dad again. The end is near, I think, and death is like the haze of hot day in our lives, draping us in discomfort, blurring our vision slightly and making us want to just stay inside.

I took night off from child care top go see a festival of ten minute plays downtown, one of them by friend Michael and directed by my friend Joe, another featuring Jenny, one of our babysitters. It was a festival of the smaller companies in town, and it had the quality of a plate of hors d’oerves made by different kitchens. Some made you wanted another taste, others didn’t. One of my favorites was Heavy Metal Dance Fag, pt 2 – a riotous piece of physical theatre in which the title character did comical choreography to the likes of Guns ‘n Roses.

Then I went to a fundraiser for two local companies a The Khyber, a notorious local dive bar and music venue. There I got hang out with my “tribe”, seeing friends from the theater community who I had lost touch with, and just be a part of the merriment. To my shame, I smoked a few cigarettes that night, I strategy I frequently employ to make myself feel more “with it” when I go to bars, but, of course, don’t drink.

While there, I had my first fantasy-author moment. I was talking to a friend when a young girl, moving through the crowd at the bar, suddenly turned and stared at me.

“You’re Ben Lloyd aren’t you?” she asked. I said I was. “OhmiGod! You wrote The Actor’s Way! I’m only half way through and that book is changing my life!” I grabbed her hands and told her she had just made my whole night. She told me her name was Amanda, she was telling all her friends about the book and we talked about it for a while. You know that scene in The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, when the Grinch’s heart grows three sizes to big? Yeah. That was me. Now I have to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to my head.

On the day of Sooz’s “day off”, Mom and I took the kids to see the Julie Taymore production of the musical The Lion King – a big Broadway tour in Philadelphia through September. We sat in the nose bleed seats in the Academy of Music, seats so high up in the air you can inspect the giant chandelier on it’s own level and experience vertigo if you lean forward too much. Still, we loved it, especially the actress playing the Baboon Rafiki, the choral dances and the African music. There was some astonishing mask work in it, and Taymore’s life-sized animal puppets are breath-taking. Griff kept turning to me and saying in a stage whisper, “This is awesome!” Ella sat on my lap a watched with great seriousness. She was, of course, used to the Disney DVD we play over and over at home, so she couldn’t quite reconcile what she was seeing a half a mile away down there on the stage with what she knew in her head. She got a bit restless in the second act, after getting jacked up on a box of Swedish Fish at intermission.

Truth be told, Mom and I both felt the second act doesn’t hold up well compared to the first. But three things are worth noting. I thought, do we come to the theatre to find what’s working in a play, or to note what isn’t? And as when I saw Spamalot, I found myself worrying about how these actors would react to The Actor’s Way if they ever chose to read it. The actor playing Poombah, the farting Warthog, was someone I acted with in Philly in 1995. I think he would have a dim view of my book. But I also noted that many in the cast thanked God in their bios. And thirdly, Sooz had charged Griff to look for God as he went about his day that day. “So Griff, “ I said at the end as the house lights rose, “do you see God anywhere?”

“Dad I don’t want to do that now!” he said sharply. And I hugged him.

The next day in meeting for worship, a woman rose and praised the great Mother, who dwells within and whose name has been forgotten. Time passed and then I felt as deep tremor inside me. I rose to speak.

I spoke about a letter an elder in my meeting had hand-delivered to my children at my home the past week:

Dear Griffen and Ella,

God speaks in the meeting. July the second, two thousand and six, God spoke in the soul of your father.

Benjamin Lloyd spoke those words to us and they lifted us out of our confusion and doubt.

Griffen heard them, Ella was not there.

Our hope is that he will write them in this letter, that someday you will know that what God spoke was truth.

It was a blessed experience.

Barbara, a thankful witness

What I spoke about then was the difference between knowing and believing. I said that knowing can be proved but believing doesn’t need to. Believing is for the believer, because he feels it makes him better. But last Sunday I spoke about how Griffen has always felt God to be a She. This was unprompted, and Sooz and I heard it first when the three of us were walking around a beautiful lake in New Hampshire. “Hey Griff, you see God anywhere?” I asked.

“Yep. There She is.” And he pointed to an old mossy stump.

In my ministry I described Griffen’s refusal to look for God at The Lion King, and my recognition that it takes effort, and that sometimes life is just to be enjoyed. But that as Quakers, we are called to seek God everyday, in everyone. And last Sunday I asked God for help, because I was struggling with my shadow, and I wanted to be a light, like God, because if you think about it, a light shining has no shadow.

Later that day, after a not-so-miserable meeting for business, Friend X and I helped each other with a small chore. Friend X has been at the nexus of my bad feelings about my meeting. But in this small act of collaboration, I felt a bridge begin to be built. She asked about Sooz’s Dad. We chatted.

Looking for God in everyone is hardest with those we are estranged from. But in those searches God’s miracles are most profound, and Her movement is smallest, so our attention must be sharpest. She will meet us half-way, and pull us over. But we must reach. We must reach.

I need to record something that happened at the end of The Crucible. It was significant to me and it didn’t make it into this blog. During the talkbacks, a frequent question would be, “Why is the play named The Crucible?”

“Well,” I would reply, with great authority, “the word ‘crucible’ means a tipping point. Imagine a seesaw. The place where it balances is the crucible. So Miller is using the word to illustrate the way the choices in the play can go one way or the other.” Sounds good doesn’t it? The only problem is that it’s complete bullshit. I have no idea where I got this idea from. But I know I didn’t make it up. I had this distinct memory of someone telling me this. Recently, I heard a piece from the radio show This American Life about the dangers of a little bit of information. In the show, a person talks about writing for “Jackass Magazine” when they go on and on about something they know very little about. I was writing for Jackass Magazine, in front of my peers and thousands of young people, for about two months.

By the end of the run, some in the cast began gingerly approaching me. “Ben?” they would say, “I checked up on it and I can’t find that definition of the word ‘crucible’ anywhere.” My first reaction was bluster.

“Bosh! I’ll find it and bring it in for you.” Then I went looking. Imagine my distress.
So after the very last show, I gathered everyone together and made a comical and public apology for my mistake.

This was significant for two reasons. One was that no one ever told me I was mistaken. I think this had to do with the authority I generated when I spoke. This is a dangerous ability, the ability to sound authoritative even when one is full of it. I could raise some questions about politicians and academics, but I won’t. You get my drift. I was alarmed that I had fallen into this trap myself, and it was a useful warning.

The second reason it was significant was that I apologized for it. This is relatively new behavior for me. I hate admitting I’m wrong. I’d rather eat something disgusting, all the while proclaiming it’s tastiness, than admit someone’s assessment of it was better than mine. I am proud of that confession and apology. It is a sign of progress for me.

So I will play Katerina in The Taming of The Shrew next year. At my Galileo callback I told Blanka about the U Arts job and the teaching conflicts it will create in any rehearsal schedule. Another actor might have kept that information to himself, landed the role and then told Blanka about the conflicts at the start of rehearsal when there would be little she could do about it. But this is a tangible way in which the Citizen Actor model creates working relationships based on integrity. Blanka is my friend and peer. We were classmates in the Fava workshop, making goofballs of ourselves in front of each other. To have not told her about these conflicts would have been a betrayal of our friendship. It may be my vanity, but I really think that had I not told her, she would have cast me in Galileo. Bill the casting director told me it was the teaching conflicts which led her to pass on me.

And having the offer from the Lantern made it easier to let go of Galileo. So: Invalid, Arcadia and UArts in the fall – with perhaps an Actor’s Way – type class or workshop thrown in; and in the spring, UArts and Shrew, while I wait to hear Arcadia’s reply to my application for their full-time position.

Griff performed in his first play at People’s Light Friday, as part of his week-long summer camp in theatre there. In his class there were two other People’s Light kids: Chaz’s son Nathaniel and Jeep and Marla’s daughter Lexie. We joked that the next generation was already in the pipeline. In this wonderful play about strange happenings around a lake (!), Griff played a Dad. He was, well, fabulous. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

He is still obsessed with Speed of Sound, recently getting his first taste of a music video as our little family descended on an Apple Computer store which opened nearby. Griff put on the earphones to a new iPod and found the video to Speed of Sound. Later that day we played it three times in a row loudly, and sang along as we toodled around doing errands in the car before going to the municipal pool for the afternoon. Good thing I love that song. It sure beats The Wheels on the Bus. I downloaded the video at home for him and he watches it over and over. Recently he told me what he wants to be when he grows up: “A rock star, a baseball player and an inventor.” I said, “Practice, practice, practice.”