Showman/Shaman

I was privileged to hear the Haverford College freshman class receive instructions on the Honor Code at the college. Simply put, the Honor Code is a pledge every incoming freshman signs. It has two components: academic and social. On the academic side, the student affirms not to cheat or plagiarize in any way, and to report any instance of cheating s/he witnesses. On the social side, the student agrees to a series of codes of conduct around interpersonal behavior and communal living. Packed into my sweltering meeting room, the freshman heard a series of speakers refer to the honor code as a "gift". They also came to understand that it was not an easy row to hoe, that temptations were plentiful and that everyone makes mistakes. I was astonished to learn that enforcement of the Honor Code is the student body's responsibility - as opposed to faculty and administration - as are judgments of those who break it.

What struck me as wonderful about what the college is doing is that it assumes goodness, but takes enforcement seriously. And I wondered - does my monthly meeting have an honor code? If so, how is it enforced? We assume goodness too - but what happens when Friends reveal themselves as the frail and imperfect creatures we are? How are we accountable to each other? One of the most moving speakers was a senior, who recalled of hearing of a student who had cheated on a take-home exam. He said he felt two things: pity for the pain the student must be in, and a deep sense of personal betrayal. I long for a spiritual community so closely knit together, that one Friend's transgression is my own as well, and so it must be my responsibility to mend it.

Riding the bus downtown for Saturday's LEAP rehearsal, I had one of my "fall in love the world" moments. It's one of those unexpected endorphin rushes, or caffeine pops, or God caressing. I looked around the bus at the different shapes and colors of humans on board and felt kinship. And I was reminded again of Wim Wenders' extraordinary film Wings of Desire, in which angels sit invisible next to subway riders and listen.

I think LEAP had something to do with it too, and during my check-in that morning I shared with the group that I felt that there was something profoundly important about what we were doing. Beyond the enjoyment of watching actors create scenes from nearly nothing, the amusement of seeing us commit to occasionally absurd choices, or the poignancy of our sad ones, there is something spiritually unifying about the work. This is partly due to the cards the audience fills out, which describe secrets or unsaid things, and which propel us into the form.

But it also has to do with the absence of the playwright and director (traditional director, since Bobbi is directing us through the form). Compared with the traditional play, we lose something in terms of elegance, artistry or focus perhaps, but we gain something mysterious and unifying. When it works best - and we got a little taste of this in front of our first audience Saturday - it's as if all of us, audience and performers alike, are creating the thing then and there. And the thing created is life itself, performed.

And this is why I am continually reminded of Quaker worship by this experience, and continually imagining ways to return to "Meetings for Theatre", or their descendent, "Creative Worship". What happens in conventional Quaker worship is a spiritually-driven long form comprised of personal monologues and separated by long periods of quiet. I think it would be no great leap (pardon me) to put this work in a spiritual context, teach some forms and see what happens.

Our performance was a good first step, allowing all of us to work through various degrees of terror and excitement. We did okay, with room for improvement but no train-wrecks. Afterwards, my friend Chris, who had come to be a part of the small audience, said, "It's like church." The comment took my breath away, speaking to my condition as he was. But now I say, amen brother.

PS: Cambridge University's New Theatre Quarterly has published an article of mine about my Quaker - Theatre exploration. The article is called "The Paradox of Quaker Theatre." You can read an abstract here.

Today, Bobbi put a bunch of big pieces of construction paper up on the walls. They were divided in black marker into four sections, and the sections filled with "forms". One might go: Cards/3 monos/decons/char. mono/cards again/char. mono/decons (callbacks)/fugue; or, Quotes/2 monos/ A1, B1, C1/short decons/A2, B2, C2/2 char. monos/A3, B3, C3/Family ronde/Fade. Each of these describe an hour of long form improvisation and are descriptions of various combinations of actors, types of scenes and long-form "devices". Such has been the nature of our "training camp" this week, that when I came in this morning I could read the nine different forms she posted as if they were baseball box scores. We have been trained.

So my desire for structure has been met in spades. Even so, after our first form today, Bobbi admonished me to not initiate so much. It is my tendency to jump in and make a big offer right away, or edit too quickly. I even snogged a scene before editing it, and the two actors just looked at me like, are you changing our location for us? I had an extra cup of coffee this morning and it showed.

The five of us have gotten to know each other well this week. On a long-form level, we are beginning to know what each of our tendencies are, our character types we default to, our comfort and danger zones. We each have unique rhythms, and in some strange way, an essential aspect of ourselves is revealed in blazing relief through the many, many characters we have invented this week. We feel very much like a tight ensemble to me, and so the training camp metaphor is apt. We are a team now.

But on a deeper level, as friends, we are getting to know about each other's private lives. Our rehearsals begin with "check ins", where we sit in a circle and talk about how we're feeling. These are occasionally venting sessions for one vexation or another, sometimes tender confessions about the strain of being parents, artists, homeowners, spouses. And our forms will sometimes begin with cards we fill out anonymously, which describe a secret or something we want to say to someone but haven't. After a bit, you begin to think you know whose handwriting is whose. And the secrets and things unsaid have been sometimes funny and sometimes profound. Then, these vexations, confessions, secrets and unsaid things are the inspiration for the creative form which follows. I have found myself watching my friend perform a version of my deepest fear through a character he has just invented. Sometimes, I am in the scene with him, playing someone else.

Tomorrow, we add our first audience. In one of many ways Bobbi reminds me of Fava, she knows it is all about the audience, and there is only so much to be learned without them. So tomorrow we will have a small group huddled in the rehearsal room with us. We'll see how much of our personal revelations we will share, and whether or not I can rein in my initiating-itis.

Long form improv shines a light on one of my challenges: the need to have a plan, to create a "script", to join events together into some holistic pattern that has meaning for me. When we do an extended form together, I am constantly trying to create links between scenes, by performing corollary scenes to ones we have seen before, or perform "subsequent" scenes. I even tried playing someone else's character to create such a link before Bobbi told me that was no-no. She is much more interested in having us create a "collage" of scenes with no direct linkages, until the end of our aimed-for hour of improv. Given what is happening in my life both personally and professionally, it is no surprise that I am drawn towards having a plan, and fearful of ambiguity and uncertainty. I also recognize the seeking of patterns as a quintessential Quaker trait. It's aspect of my faith, which calls me to take responsibility for sensing the Divine patterns.

I was also struck yesterday by the connection between this form and commedia. In both forms, the story being told is subservient to the relationships between the actors/characters doing the telling. Both forms rely on an intense kind of focus from the actor, who needs to focus both in the shared work between herself and her partner and also on the shape of the whole thing the ensemble is creating together. Commedia is a much more structured and formalized form, with its stock characters and well-known plots. Long form is more mysterious, and in some ways more immediate. It's hard work - there is absolutely no tuning out allowed. Even when off stage I am nearly on stage, so complete is the listening and watching required to prep for an edit or a snog.

I hit a bump yesterday around the idea of "tone" - specifically comic tone. We did a sequence of exercises meant to buff our comic skills and sensibilities. What ended up happening is that some of us - like me - created over the top characters, and others simply continued with creating scenes as we had before, which weren't especially funny. The things is, we have each created funny scenes, but they are funny almost by accident, and when we draw our attention to "comedy", it seemed to send us off into some other territory. Bobbi and I had an interesting discussion about the word "realism" too. I tend to regard any kind of character transformation as unrealistic, though it can be quite truthful. Bobbi uses the term more to identify an aspect of believability.

Anyhow - onwards.

I've begun improv boot camp with Bobbi Block and four dear friends and fellow citizen actors from the Philly theatre community in preparation for our performance at the Live Arts festival in Philadelphia in LEAP. Meg is my dear friend and fellow Quaker actor. She and her husband were Sooz's and my inspiration to try having kids and being artists (damn them!). We are godparents to her gorgeous two year-old daughter Willa. Tom played Petruchio to my Kate, and so we have a kind of secret relationship. Joe has just bought a house with his new lady friend, who is moving here from Seattle to join him. Catherine is married to Whit, a director I have auditioned for a lot recently, and they have twin five year old girls. She and I were at Yale College together.

The day began with Catherine recounting a horrendous and hilarious time spent, in all places, Chatham MA. The similarities of her experiences with ours (mostly with Sooz's) are startling. Both have had to care for frail alcoholic fathers dying in Chatham, Sooz's Dad died last February and Catherine's is still alive. She told us the story of taking him out to a restaurant with her girls, with him nearly deaf so she was shouting at him above the restaurant din. He was also prone to ghastly coughing bouts having to do with the cancer in his lungs. Now add to all that one of her daughters puking on her in the midst of dinner, and I was covering my face in horror and amusement as I listened to her.

Then Bobbi worked our asses off for six hours or so, as we re-learned the basics of long form improvisation: sweeping, edits, snogging, revolving doors, monologues and just getting used to each other. I sensed both an excitement and fear from all of us. I shared the sense expressed by Catherine and others that this journey is starting out as something which feels very special to me, in that it is mine, shared with other artists, and I don't have to concern myself with the pressing, sometimes overwhelming domestic concerns of the rest of my life while I work on LEAP. In fact, LEAP is a kind of creative outlet for those concerns, for they form a very real palette of material to use in the scenes we create. Certainly, for me Meg and Catherine, this is a chance NOT to be parent for a while and to celebrate the artist in us.

I am deeply stirred by the actor-centric nature of this work. It feels like some of the purest exploration of actor creativity I have known. And Bobbi is extraordinary. There's no way any of us would be doing this, taking these risks, without her warm and organized hand at the helm. And there are many risks to take. The work is intensely personal, and at this early stage we are dancing around the rim of the canyon looking down, wondering when we will all fall gently together into the depths of revelation.