Theatre

There is a hidden wholeness. There is a binding one-ness.

It’s too bad I don’t feel it when I read American Theatre magazine. God how that magazine irritates me. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Part of me thinks it’s my diseased grandiosity again. I am irritated because they’re not writing articles about me. But I actually think it’s the title. It’s not a magazine about American Theatre! At least any American Theatre I recognize. It should be called American Smarty-Pants Theatre. It seems to care a great deal about “new” artists making “good” theatre. The latest issue contained a screed by a new and notable Flemish artist (now that’s American!) railing on about the danger of the populism of the insipid masses, and about how artists must not confuse art with entertainment, and how we must devote ourselves to a life of aesthetic masochism, constantly throwing away and disparaging the things we make, because they don’t measure up to some ill-defined standard of worthiness. American Theatre seems pre-occupied with exploring the outer regions of esoteria in an effort to find the really great theatre, theatre so cutting-edge no one will have a clue what it’s about. It reminds of something Peter Sellars said when he came to address my class at the Yale School of Drama. He was describing the last scene of a production of King Lear he directed in which he slowed down the dialogue to a snail’s pace, scraped great pieces of sheet metal across themselves backstage and shone bright lights in the audience’s eyes – all to make sure they felt the pain of the play. “There was hardly anyone left at the curtain call” he cackled, so pleased was he at his own “boldness”. I was dumb-founded.

American Theatre is also filled with ads by these schools using the most appalling smugness to advertise their programs. “Without us, the actors would be naked and the theatres would be dark” proclaims the North Carolina School of the Arts, or rather, the North Carolina School of Hubristic Conceit. Each ad seems to want to top the next with hollow promises of stardom and success, based upon the extraordinary faculty working there (who?), the awards won by recent grads (Grand Rapids entertainer of the year!) and the seriousness of their curriculum. It all feels phony and inflated to me, and I so pity the starry-eyed teenager who stumbles upon one of these issues, and is infected by the narcotic dreams being peddled there.

Lying in bed grumbling as I flipped through these pages, Sooz passed me an article clipped from The Cape Cod Chronicle, a periodical about as far removed from American Theatre as one can get. It is the folksy newspaper of the part of Massachusetts where Susan grew up, and where her father and brother still live. This article described the career of John Williams, an actor in the community theatres of the Cape, and a hospice care nurse. Susan clipped it out because her Dad is in hospice care right now. But I was drawn to the life of this man who cares for the dying by day, then goes to rehearsal for no pay, and delights audiences at night through the sheer joy of the art he loves. Williams recently played the Stage Manager in Our Town (cue the eye rolling academics, noses in the air), and is now preparing an evening of Chekhov one-acts which will be performed as a benefit for local fisherman, devastated by a recent red tide, and living as they do without health insurance. He also recently performed the long monologue Underneath the Lintel. Clearly, he’s an actor with some chops.

This man does “good” theatre. Good not because Williams’ acting meets someone’s else’s standard (who cares?), but good because he is serving the community he lives in and rejoicing in the art. And clearly the community is supporting him back – he is good enough for the people buying the tickets. This is good theatre because the focus is not on the value of the play being performed, but that a play is being performed. It is good because Williams’ acting acknowledges that people need theatre, and even after a long day cleaning the soiled sheets of the terminally ill, he is going to give it to them. The ads in American Theatre are from schools that promise you will never have to work in community theatre again, it being such a disgrace. But if I had to choose between some weirdness with the Flemish dude and Thornton Wilder with Mr. Williams, I think you know my choice.

Don’t tell me about the danger of populism. Populism is all there is and all there ever will be. The people need their theatre as a comfort and a joy at least as much as they need an innovative stick in their sides. The cutting edge is a wounding image, slicing open our insecurities and dividing us into those in the know, and everyone else. I stand with everyone else. I am an actor to serve the people, the common populace, not to impress others in my art that I do not know, nor to measure up to standards I do not understand or support. I am actor to share the joy and revelation of the art-making I so love with people of all ages, and to witness the peace and healing that comes from working together in the service of creativity, in the service of community, in the service of divine leading, riding the cresting wave of revelation from one play to the next, one day at a time.

I do not desire to prove anything. I do not wish to convince anyone of anything. This is only what I have come to believe. This is a choice I make.

As a Quaker, I listen. I listen to the sounds, and I listen to the quiet where I discern the rustle of God’s great robe. I am touched. I witness. I sense God everywhere: in the patterns of my life, in other people, in the music I listen to, in my students, in my family. But I must choose to be present, watch and listen, and I choose to give divine import to what I witness.

As an actor, I feel, move and speak. I reach across empty space towards other beating hearts. I move them and am moved by them. I serve the community I live in with my art. Each new role is the most important role I have ever played. Each new role is world premiere.

As a teacher, I walk the walk. I let my life speak, and I fill my students with hope and possibility, helping them find the necessary virtues in themselves to begin walking the beautiful and preposterous road of the American actor.

As a husband and a father, I am ever vigilant, never taking these three lives for granted, choosing again and again to be a loving presence in their lives, moving them always back to the center of everything.

As person in recovery, I am reminded that every day free from addiction is a gift and a miracle. I honor that miracle by taking care of that gift.

What I want is to change the world. When I am creative, I am closer to God, and when I am witnessed being closer to God, I am a minister, and when I am minister I am helping others get closer to God too. I have faith that when I am acting, teaching, worshiping and loving my family I am a minister and I am changing the world. I work on letting that be enough.

I cannot stop the war. But I can make people laugh. I can soften people’s hearts. I can bring people together where they can feel each other’s heat. I can give the young hope. I can raise strong and peaceful children. I can lift up an amazing woman. These are extraordinary powers. They are from God.

Here is a pattern I witness in my life: I am led by continuing revelation to explore new territories of Quaker worship. This leading is part of a larger whole, involving a love of youth, of the Society of Friends and of the divine mixture of actor and Quaker in my heart. I sense a chafing at our customs, and a need for new expressions. I am mindful of our traditions that lead us away from adherence to empty forms and rote rituals. I seek the courage to join others in choreographing Godly dances and composing new Spirit songs.

Another pattern: I sense a hunger in the artists I meet for a way to discover and embrace their own holiness away from conventional churches. And yet, I sense a slow growing closer together of my unconventional church – the Quakers – and our evangelical brethren.

And another: I begin in the middle and move to the outside looking in, yearning to be in the middle again. My life is an on-going movement from the center to the edge. Or maybe I am always at the edge, trying to pull the center towards me. In loving the eccentric, the anarchist, the prophet, the outcast, the maverick, I am loving this aspect of myself. It is an essential aspect, one I came in to the world with, and one that was groomed by the circumstances of my life: an only child of divorced parents, raised in a family that was never really mine. My transformation from defeated drunk to worker in the world was due in part to my decision not to be at war with this part of myself. I am no longer ashamed of who I am or where I’m from. This is huge.

My mother and father still continue to teach me: my mother about art, my father about family. I love and honor them. I witness them both in me in so many ways. I am glad I chose them.

And another: I mend the wounds of my real and imaginary exiles by burrowing into community and family. I am led to jump up and down like a silly cheerleader for both my communities – theatre and Quaker. I like to gently mingle those communities, it makes me happy. This is one of the things The Rooms taught me: let us love you until you can love yourself. I love you loving me, and I love me loving you back. I sense that my work is here where I live, and that in naming and celebrating that work – and the work of others here – I am breaking new ground.

And yet I have a strained relationship with institutions. I’m working on this, trying move from the edge a little bit back to the center, trying to ease my wounded suspicions.

Nowhere do I burrow more deeply than with my little family. In making them so very important to me, in choosing them over other things I might have done, I have missed some opportunities and compromised my professional possibilities. I now see this as an intentional choice, and when one of my children leaves their place at the table just so they can thrown themselves at me and hug me, saying I love you so much Daddy, I am certain of that choice. And when I am able step back from the chatter and the frustrations, and witness what my wife and I are doing in the world together, when we come together in embraces too deep for words, when I feel myself humbled by who she is and that she chose me, and that she keeps choosing me, I am certain of my choice. But I have to remind myself to pay attention. This is the only way to work through the doubts. When I pay attention, even in the darkest place, I can crawl back to gratitude. Then I can stand again.

Speaking of gratitude:

Three shows performed: eight total roles.

Forty or so meetings for worship. Ten to twelve meetings for theatre.

Two workshops created and offered: one on Quaker/actor creativity, one on teaching acting.

One book, one article, one pamphlet and two blogs published.

Four classes taught: one high school, two college, one adult.

Three workshops taken: Long Form Improv, Commedia, Psychodrama.

Two children raised: Griffen and Ella.

One wife loved: Susan.

And the water rises . . .

One car lost: Ellex (the Accord).

One car purchased: Little Blue (the Civic).

Song of the year: Speed of Sound, Coldplay. (Runners up: Clarity, John Mayer; Give up and let it go, Francis Dunnnery, Fix You, Coldplay)

One bridge mended.

And the water flows.

One father aided.

No toilets trained.

Birthdays celebrated.

Anniversaries squeezed in.

Important moments overlooked.

Mistakes made, apologies offered.

Moments of transcendent meaning seized and released.

Bitchy vendettas enacted.

Movements begun and left dangling.

I am the faucet . . .

Awesome circles of community created.

Whispers of quiet affirmation passed along.

Sleepless nights of anxiety passed through.

Doubt and despair wrestled with.

Doubt and despair vanquished quizzically.

Poems written and tears shed.

Gales of laughter.

Farts and awkwardness.

Faith considered and pursued.

God under all, through everything,

and I am the faucet

turn me on turn me on

be with me, be through me,

up from mother earth, Your water,

I am the faucet, you are the Source,

be through me, flowing,

running down streams,

filling ponds to drink from

and the heartbreak of emptiness everywhere,

filling us all to overflow,

so our waters mingle and roll

in great warm rivers,

one water

out -

out into the unfathomable sea.