Meetings for Theatre

About Revival: Meetings for Theatre, an exploration of Quaker spiritual practice and actor creativity:

We are left with the question of application. How, then, can we offer this work to theatre artists, or to artists of other disciplines, who have not self-selected as receptive to this investigation? How might our work morph into a new kind of performance medium? How can this work apply to the contemporary rehearsal structure, bound as it is by the constraints of time and money? How can this work influence what we offer our students in the classroom?

I think meetings for theatre, as we have facilitated them, will remain a forum only for those drawn to them. I can see no way we can offer a meeting for theatre to group of people with no expressed interest in the link between spirituality and creativity. What meetings for theater can be, however, are places of affirmation for those so inclined. We who are stimulated by this investigation may come to meetings for theatre for spiritual sustenance, exactly as we come to any other form of worship. The “clearness committee” idea I proposed to Abbey in September never materialized. But, as I noticed in my work in Jason, we may bring the energy and insight gained in meetings for theatre into our more conventional work, where we may have a soft and steady “ripple effect”, being undercover ministers as it were, shedding a new and gentle light on the harsh life of the professional theatre. We may feel less embarrassed to discuss the spiritual-creative link with those we work with, thus engendering conversations which may lead to others’ openings. Those of us who direct may be more inclined to value stillness and quiet in the rehearsal structures they create. Those of us who act, may be more trusting of the Divine nudge, and more willing to wait for the energy to flow through us, rather than trying to squeeze it out.

The challenges in academia are more thorny. Revival has caused me to reflect on the state of actor training in this country, where it has come from, and where it might be going. There was an explosion of theatre training institutions in the 1960s. This coincided with the emergence of “method” acting as pedagogical model which could be articulated and taught, a burgeoning fascination with the human psyche and increased government funding for the arts. It is my opinion that there was another element that contributed to this sudden surge of acting classes, and that was the great cultural release of that decade, when young people sought to escape the emotional repression characterized by middle class social norms of the previous decade. In other words, there was suddenly a great market for acting classes, as a wave of young people arrived at universities excited by the work of Freud and Jung and eager to explore themselves through creative means. At it’s core, this is what Method acting is: a creative means to explore oneself. Leaving aside for a moment the mangled history of that term, it nevertheless provided a way universities could cater to this new population of young people.

The problem is that, from a career point of view, it’s a giant pyramid scheme. There aren’t and never were enough jobs in the fields of acting and directing to employ this new population of young theatre artists, fresh from their training programs and wearing their shiny new degrees. And yet these proved to be very popular programs and lucrative for the universities, who had no incentive to downsize successful programs (successful because they were making money) simply because their graduates were entering a marketplace with regular 85% unemployment. To this day, most graduate acting programs, the ones we call “conservatories” offering M.F.A.s in acting, will have between six and ten applicants for each space they can offer. Clearly the lust for acting among our youth has not diminished, even though most young people have a fair idea what they’re up against professionally. As I describe in The Actor’s Way, I believe that many of the young people compelled to make acting the center of their lives are potential “wounded actors”, using the art not as a means of ministry in the world, but rather in a self-perpetuating failed attempt to resolve issues from their childhoods. A cynic might submit that these training programs use these troubled young people by perpetuating a lie, the lie being that if you train with us you will have a successful professional acting career. The lie is needed to continue bringing in fresh students and tuition each year. The whole thing is a nation-wide “hollow form”, with institutions teaching skills that promise professional rewards, but do not, in fact, have a prayer of delivering them; institutions which exist mainly to feed the bottom line.

These training institutions perpetuate themselves in another way. They have provided an alternate career track for their own graduates in the field of teaching. But here too there are way more candidates than places – I speak from experience, friends. And once inside these institutions, there is tremendous pressure to conform to the points of view espoused by them, such as the “value” of what that institution is offering its students. In the pursuit of tenure, theatre educators in higher education are not rewarded for truth-telling, for creativity or innovation. They are rewarded for perpetuating the status quo. I am not aware of any theatre training program dealing honestly with it’s own acting and directing students about the realities of what they’re facing upon graduating. I worry that many of the people in these teaching positions perpetuate the lie I described above in order to ensure their own job security. My sense is that most of these places behave the way my conservatory, the Yale School of Drama, did. They virtually ignore the realities of life for the young actor and teach only the craft itself. There is certainly a kind of pedagogical purity in this, and in my case the training was excellent as far as it went. But it didn’t go far enough, and looking back, I think there was deceit in it. What else can you call it when the people in charge know the truth but don’t do anything about it? Many young actors are utterly unprepared for what they’re up against in the real world, and, like me, enter their careers with a vague yet fervent hope that the dream will somehow come true. An honest training program for actors would reserve at least one third of its class time for the teaching of skills designed to help the student survive when they’re not acting. Revival put me in the midst of many citizen-actors (and citizen-directors) who are living in their lives as they are, full of compromise and yet abundant in creativity. There must be a way we can teach this citizen-actor model.

Revival also perpetuates some other designs and archetypes that make the academy nervous, I think. The first is a celebration of the non-hierarchical creative structure. Revival is about as ensemble-based as you can get, with no leader, no director and no script. This certainly has its challenges, but many in the meetings expressed a delight in the collective energy explored, unguided by human hands. The academy perpetuates the conventional, hierarchical model, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is the model at work in the professional rehearsal room. But there is a chicken and egg question here. If we weren’t so attached to hierarchical structure in our institutions teaching theatre, would they be so prevalent in the professional theatre?

Our meetings for theatre were populated mostly by artists who would self-identify as actors. The discussions we had about the nature of our exploration and the implications it had for the way we live our art were deep and as intellectually stimulating as any classroom dialog I’ve ever had. One of the debilitating aspects of the hierarchical model is that is that it perpetuates “stupid” actors. Since the hierarchical model is inevitably a power relationship, in which decision-making authority is invested in one person, there is a tendency to avoid collective discussions about the, well, the direction of the thing being made. As my experience with Shannon (and with many other wonderful directors) demonstrates, this is not always the case, and the best directors are the ones who most successfully perform the balancing act between authority and power-sharing. Still, it is undeniable that in the conventional theatre, the ultimate responsibility for the vision of the production lies with the director. The harm this does to actors is that it conditions some of us to make obedience more important than free thinking. Revival allowed the thinking actors among us a venue in which to not only envision a creative event, but to enact it spontaneously.

It is interesting to note that there is a tradition of the thinking actor in England that seems not to have taken hold in the States. British actors like Simon Callow, Anthony Sher and Vanessa Redgrave have each written important, thoughtful and entertaining books on their craft and their lives as actors. In America, obsessed as we are with exhibitionism and voyeurism, our actors tend towards tell-all autobiographies (my God – am I following in this tradition too?!?)

Lastly, the hierarchical model has a symbiotic relationship with judgment, which is a big reason it will not be de-emphasized in the academy any time soon. We are steeped in a culture which loves winners and loves reviling losers. This is partly because of the capitalist need to vanquish the competition, and partly because we are so in love with sports (and I speak as an avid sports fan). Sports has affected the way we evaluate art, and partially explains our enjoyment events like the Academy Awards, in which one person wins over four “losers”. Any artist worth their salt will tell you the whole idea of winners and losers in art is absurd. These award shows are nothing more than elaborate popularity contests, and we are fixated on them because of the small orgasm we experience after the phrase “and the winner is . . . “ than because we appreciate any value they claim to celebrate.

Revival essentially removed judgment form the equation. As my blog posting called “Doubt and the Full Professor” articulates, I have a bone to pick with judgment, and the whole concept of “good” and “bad” as it applies to theatre. Revival was empirical research: we reported on what we witnessed and felt. Judgment is theoretical: it holds an experience against an invented system of values in order to name that experience as “good” or “bad”. Judgment is deceitful in the area of art, because it masquerades as objective and thoughtful, when it is only ever subjective and opinionated. This is why I hate so much artistic criticism. Most of it is entirely invested in judgment, and never acknowledges its own subjectivity.

Quakerism has something useful too say about all this, based as it is not in Biblical interpretation but rather in personal experience. The ideas that guide us in the religious Society of Friends are called “testimonies”. That word testimony is important, because it implies an idea that is born out of personal experience. So we live by the lives that have come before us, and the Holy Witness of those lives has been informally collected into testimonies: about peace, equality, integrity, stewardship of the earth, community and – if my Yearly Meeting is moved as we in Revival have been – creativity, the newest testimony. So for a Quaker, what you experience is far more important than what someone else has written about it. The Quaker actor (the Quactor?) might de-emphasize script-analysis, and focus more on what is experienced up on one’s feet. This is what makes us such renegades, stubbornly insisting that what we feel in our hearts is good and true when the rest of the world seems to be headed in another direction. And this is what made Revival such a good fit for the thinking actor. It freed us to give testimony based on experience. We needed no permission other than that granted by the Spirit itself.

We have been steeped in process, without regard to result, and this has been liberating. We were free to wallow in the unknown, and as we became more comfortable with following leadings to ministry, we traced pathways into the process that others could follow and deviate from. From a carefully nurtured collective trust, we began to witness how much our process could hold, and it held anything we brought into it. Even with a constantly changing group, with no two sessions having the same people attending, there was a gathering energy. This I believe speaks to the spiritual nature of the work: something that was beyond our bodies was at play and flowing through us. We carried that Something into our explorations, and it was witnessed by the people present who recognized it and welcomed it.

The language we use to describe what we do has a direct effect on what we do, and the quality of our participation in it. It mattered that we tried to call our gatherings “meetings for theatre”, and not “workshops” or “classes”. It mattered that we spoke of “leadings” as opposed to “impulses”. It mattered that we wrestled with “discernment” and not “choices”. It mattered that we “offered ministry”, rather than “improvised” or “performed”. And it mattered that we were willing to speak of God, the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Inner Teacher, the Inner Light, the Inner Director. It mattered that we invited holy language into our work. Using this new language forced us to carefully consider our actions and words in a way we are not used to as theatre artists. And it gave our work a Holy Implication which was both baffling and provocative. I believe it led us to a deeper place than we are used to going as actors, a place we tend to stumble upon through a curious combination of circumstances in class or rehearsal, a place we long for. We were led to the place our souls speak from.

In Woolman’s journal, he describes meeting for worship with Native Americans in their tribal dwellings. There was an interpreter there, who translated the English ministry offered for the tribe’s understanding. But the chief told the interpreter this was unnecessary. When Woolman asked why, the interpreter related what the chief said: “I like to feel where the words come from”. And Woolman understood, and I think we have witnessed in Revival, that true ministry travels on something other than words; that words are seeds, but the revelation of ministry is the flower, and it comes to life not through any intellectual understanding, but rather through the sunlight and water of the Eternal passing between us, which is experienced as something more than a thought. It has powerful feeling in it. This same opening led George Fox to preach against “head learning”, and to de-emphasize Biblical interpretation in Quaker worship. And so with Revival: we used a text (Nathan The Wise) as a source of inspiration, but were free to receive the Holy Spirit through its continuing revelation to us in the very moments of our existence.

Mary Beth pointed out that, unlike conventional acting classes, it was the sharing of our experience which was the priority, rather than having the experience itself. We spend a great deal of time as actors “squeezing” – trying to have an experience on stage that feels authentic. But what we so often overlook is that we are having that experience in order to give it away. This is why understanding acting as a kind of ministry is so transforming. A minister serves something to a congregation. Paradoxically, when the actor shifts her attention from the effort to generate an experience, and instead witnesses something flowing through her to others, that authenticity is born without effort, and the artifice so often witnessed in “squeezing” actors is avoided. Here is one way in which our work may have pedagogical implications. In ignoring the vital, symbiotic relationship we have to audience, have we been teaching our young actors to rehearse, but not to perform? In other words, have we been keeping the circle closed, when we should be looking for ways to open it, so our students can offer their work to strangers, and perhaps feel Stanislavsky’s Rays flowing through them? Here is a word Peter D. instructed us on: entertain, which comes from two French words which mean “to hold between”. For the ministry to be real, it must be held by both speaker and witness.

We began our research in Quaker stillness, and this had enormous implications. We began as seekers, waiting to receive something rising up within us, or to receive something offered to us by another. This receptive state opened us and calmed us, and - for me at least - showed us the degree to which we are used to charging in to creative situations like rehearsals full of choices to share, and points of view to express. Quaker worship allowed what was essential (another important Revival word) to rise up and find expression. And what rose up seemed to come from something that was held, and then released, collectively, finding expression through the minister most ready to give it life. The stillness also generated surprise. We never knew what was going to happen. The unplanned aspect of our meetings led us to a tingling expectation. When I am well prepared, this is how I feel when entering first day meeting for worship. Can we make room for more stillness in our lives as theatre artists? This is one of the many ways our research is almost oppositional to contemporary theatre practice, driven as it is by tight schedules and the need for financial efficiency.

Revival offers an interesting investigation into the ways in which both the theatre and religion use ritual, repetition and spontaneity. The Religious Society of Friends was founded partly in reaction against the ritualized customs of the English church of the 17th century. Fox and his followers wanted to do away with “empty forms” , and he and his followers went to the opposite extreme: an absolute abolition of anything planned, read or prepared in any way. If ornate church liturgy represents the well-rehearsed musical, then Fox’s liturgy represents spiritual improvisation. To borrow a term form the ‘60s, he created a kind of holy “happening”. So the very notion of introducing something theatrical to Quaker worship is, on the face of it, contrary to original intent. When Stefan described Revival to his undergraduate Quaker theatre professor, the professor replied wryly, “You know, don’t you, that this is heresy”.

But what was Fox really objecting to? When I began coming to Quaker meetings in 1995, I was instantly struck by the theatrical tension of it: the waiting, the dramatic rise to one’s feet, the speaking to the hushed congregation, the sitting down and reflecting, sometimes in the midst of tears. I think Fox was under the common misconception that “theatrical” means “fake”. It’s the same today. Tell someone you’re an actor and many will assume you’re a good liar. Wrong – the best actors are lousy liars, because they are trained to tell the truth. Secondly, I think Fox wasn’t really objecting to the “performed” aspect of ministry at all. He himself was an astonishing speaker, if we are to believe the accounts of his ministry which have come down to us. Here is a man who burst into churches to debate the priests holding services there. Don’t tell me the man wasn’t theatrical. So what he objected to wasn’t the theatricality of ministry, but its lack of truth, its hollowness.

Some believe that the reason actors have been so reviled by so many religious traditions is that the priests felt threatened by the power of the actor’s art. The priests knew the power of performance, indeed they embraced it, and actors represented a skilled level of competition the priests wanted to eliminate. Almost all religious liturgy is theatrical in some way. Catholic mass is high theatre, and it is no wonder that many Catholic universities also have thriving theatre training programs, with priests teaching the classes. Protestant services employ theatricality and pageantry to various degrees depending on the denomination. The call and response portions of much Jewish and Christian liturgy is akin to the protagonist and chorus in a classical Greek drama. In both traditions, Jewish and Christian, music is used as means of generating spiritual energy. These are theatrical devices and create a “congregation-minister” bond analogous to the audience-actor bond described earlier. At a Unitarian Christmas service I attended, the minister sang as part of his sermon. It was moving, not in spite of his unpolished singing, but because of it. He became exquisitely human and vulnerable, and I felt the tenderness of the Advent sweep over me.

But the problem Fox identified remains. When too much attention is paid to the spectacle being made, and not on the truth being administered, you have a hollow form. It is as true in the church as it is the theater. The evangelical movement has turned some its services into productions clearly meant to entertain on a mass cultural scale. Some use Christian rock bands during the service, and anyone who has witnessed a Baptist or Pentecostal or Charismatic minister in full throat is surely witnessing performance of the highest degree. The televised services of many evangelical churches are, perhaps, the apotheosis of performed ministry in a 21st century context.

As one not raised in any faith, in any liturgy, I always felt embarrassed by the religious services I infrequently attended as a child. I felt a fraud for being there at all, and I felt that what was happening had nothing to say to me. One remarkable exception to this general experience was a Christmas service I attended with Kate, the former girlfriend I wrote about very early on. We went to her Episcopal church for Christmas Eve service while on break from college, and the minister read A Child’s Christmas in Wales aloud from the pulpit. I had never heard a work of fiction read aloud like that in a church, and it affected me deeply. Having a bit of Welsh in my blood and being an alcoholic, I have always felt close to that that magnificent disaster of a poet, Dylan Thomas. After reading, the minister asked each of us to embrace the person to our left and our right. A tidal wave of emotion swept over me and I was convulsed in sobs. It is one of my first memories of the Holy Spirit sweeping through me. It left me wiped out, and Kate’s Mom a bit distressed. It was a precursor to Revival, and the Unitarian minister I just witnessed a parallel: performed art as spiritual ministry, lighting extraordinary feeling in me.

What sets unprogrammed Quaker worship apart from much contemporary liturgy is that it does not rely on thought as much as feeling to propel its ministry. This may reflect my own bias, and I must quickly add that some in my Yearly Meeting do not share this view. In fact, my beloved meeting, being attached to a college, has long been known as a place where Quaker professors may come to meeting for worship with something thoughtful selected to read and then reflect on. To me, this is the heresy. I am perhaps extreme in this, but I regard any preparation to speak in Quaker meeting for worship as a violation of the worship itself. Preparing in this way eliminates the possibility of the intercession of the Holy Spirit, for a person has taken it upon himself to decide what will be heard in worship that morning. I believe it was Fox’s position that only God should decide what ministry is heard in meeting, a point of view I agree with.

Liturgy that uses repeated forms and customs does not need a felt experience to propel it. Let me be clear: those forms and customs may be filled with great feeling, but it is not a requirement. One can execute the stations of the cross and be thinking about lunch, if one has done it many times. In ideal Quaker worship, the felt experience is the touchstone which begins the discernment process leading to the expression of true ministry. Without feeling something quickening inside, an experienced Quaker will sit contentedly in the quiet, waiting and listening. Paid clergy, on the other hand, must show up each Sunday with something to say whether they feel like it or not. The best are able to connect to the Holy Spirit regardless, and there are many rabbis, priests and ministers who are able to make themselves available to Divine light regularly. But Quakers have traditionally felt wary of “hireling ministry”, worrying that the genuine nudge of the Inner Teacher must inevitably give way to the grind of obligation. What Revival did was remove the obligation entirely, and what we were left with were only leadings urgent enough to send us into ministry, leadings which lifted us over the obstacles of our lives, our weariness, and our fear.

That grind of obligation is an ever-present challenge for the professional actor. Towards the end of Jason, Peter turned to me one night and said, “I just don’t have it tonight”. What he meant was he had lost the joy that night – he was punching the clock. Luckily for the audience, Peter is one of many actors who has the craft to perform well anyway, and I’m sure no one in that audience that night leaned over to their seat mate and whispered “What’s the matter with that guy?” Actors fear “phoning it in”, a kind of automatic recitation of a learned pattern devoid of inner life. We are always faced with the possibility of participating in a hollow form, simply through the naked fact of doing the same play eight times a week for four to six weeks (That’s an average regional theatre run. A Broadway or touring contract can go on for years. There were actors in Cats on Broadway that were in the chorus for as long as five years.) The actor doesn’t have the Quaker option of waiting in the quiet until he feels like performing. So how can Revival help the working actor?

For me, it gets back to Mary Beth’s observation of the ministry offered in Revival – we have to connect with the service of it. As I noted before, I am a notorious audience peeker. I used to be embarrassed about this, because it used to be more about trying to see if there was someone in the audience that night who I really wanted to impress. If there was, I usually stank up the joint that night, being much more concerned with what a certain person might be thinking of me, than with the artistic life in front of me onstage. It is a mark of my spiritual evolution to report that now I peek because I dearly need to witness the assembly of the ones I am serving. It’s like gassing up before a long a road trip. The audience has always been the fuel for me: first for my vanity and ego, now for a sense of spiritual connectedness. I imagine that the best ministers in any church feel the same way: you can’t be a good minister without a congregation. And sometimes, when you’re sure you don’t have thing to offer, they show up and – woosh! – you become the faucet, turned on and pouring.

Revival reminds us that that the community being served should be the locus of our attention. Revival helps us become more and more sensitive to the divine nudge: the same one that launches into that sparkling moment on stage, the same one that lifts us to our feet in meeting for worship. Revival wards off “me acting”, since it is the sharing of it that matters. Me acting breeds the kind of fatigue we all feel backstage some nights. Me acting relies only on me to generate the effect of my performance. The theatre reminds us that we have a job to do, even when we aren’t “feeling it”, but Revival reminds us that there is still an act of spiritual exchange taking place, and if we feel that exchange happening, sometimes the Spirit will catch up with us a few minutes in to act one. Revival clarified the necessary differences between what I do for a living (act) and how I worship. I like the way the two worlds remain separate, while deeply informing each other.

And I do think the theatre, as explored in Revival, may change the way we worship. Revival showed many of us Quakers in the meetings for theatre that we hunger for a more expressive way to transmit our ministry. We hunger for a ministry which is not exclusively language-based, which lives in the illogical, in poems, symbols and movement. For so many of us, divine experience defies articulation, and feeling that with our ministry we must somehow rise and speak clearly about it relegates some of us to perpetual sitting. We might as well become Buddhists. We discovered in Revival how fully the Spirit can live in the body, and express Itself through movement. How we thrilled to full-body ministry! How deeply felt it was, both in the giving and the receiving. There is a great worry in my Yearly Meeting about attracting and keeping younger members. I have a vision of theatrical ministry, of the kind explored in Revival, being embraced and nurtured by a younger generation of Quakers. I have a vision of Quaker meetings alive with ministry both spoken and performed, glimpses of clarity and waves of mystery in a sea of continuing revelation, Sunday mornings at 10:30 a.m.

Most fulfilling for me was the way Revival confirmed the lineage of the spiritual actor. This is the tradition of the ancient Athenian performances – equal mixtures of civic dialogue, gripping drama and corporate prayer – and of the medieval passion plays. This is the tradition of the tribal shaman and radical street performer, who’s art transforms the culture that witnesses it. True, the actors who shared Revival with me self-selected as ones who were interested in our proposition: that there is a link between spiritual exploration and actor creativity. But that does not diminish the way that exploration unleashed both rich theatrical ministry in the form of the spiritual improvisations shared during meetings for theatre, as well as the soul-searching worship sharing afterwards, in which the participants bore witness to the life of the Spirit as it had manifested itself during the meeting.

In preparation for our work together it may be useful to have some understanding of group theatrical experiences within the larger context of the history of theatre production structures.

When we refer to production structures we encounter two basic ideas. One involves systems of education, methods for passing information from those who conceive the idea to those who enact it—as a collaborative art, theatre requires a degree of such systems. The other involves systems of creation. This is, perhaps, the more fundamental of the two ideas as there is an element of creation in the necessary mutation of an idea as it is conveyed from creator to performer whether the conveyance is a script, a rehearsal note or even a marionette string. Systems of creation may also involve responses to subtle or overt stimuli from the production environment including fellow performers, attenders and even the weather or society at large. Revival may have applications in both categories.

The hierarchical structure of theatre production as we know it today (designers, cast and crew all ultimately organized by a single director working with a codified script and sometimes its playwright) is a very new concept. Most credit a man name Kronegk, the producer of the theatre company under the German Duke of Meiningen which traveled and performed in Europe in the late 19th century. Stanislavsky described Kronegk as a “producer-autocrat” whose influence led to a generation of “managers who treated their actors as if they were props” (Magarshack, Stanislavsky: A Life. London: Faber & Faber, 1950. p 71). Leaving Kronegk’s personality aside, he clearly created as system of creating theater that was based on authority and efficiency. Preceding this development were a number of other production forms most involving a weak organizing force in the person of the playwright, lead actor or, as in the European passion plays, a maitre de jeu, effectively a stage manager.

In her article on The Emergence of the Director (Directors on Directing. The Bobbs-Merrill Co. Inc., Indianapolis 1953 revised ed. 1963) Helen Krich Chinoy suggests that these loose organizing structures and the diffused and dis-integrated works they produced were possible only because they were organized within a clear and absolute social structure. With the spread of democratic political systems and the dismantling of rigid social structures, greater intention was necessary in theatre-making in order to retain some semblance of artistic unity on the stage in a world in which social unity appeared to be failing rapidly. Thus the rise of the director and the system of production with which we are familiar today.

The other force at work supporting the dominance of the hierarchical format is commerce. Decisions get made much more quickly when one person is doing the deciding, and therefore less money is spent, because it is spent more efficiently. The triangular shape of the hierarchical decision making model at work beneath modern directors leads (ideally) to clear lines of authority. Decisions about how money is spent, and who decides, are easier to make when one person is at the top. If time is money, then the hierarchical format will always be more appealing to producers. Collective decision making always takes time. There is also accountability in hierarchical format. The modern director bears the ultimate responsibility for the success or failure of the theatrical endeavors they command. In group theatre, these decision making processes and lines of authority are much murkier, and the responsibility for the thing made is more shared.

Focusing only on the western tradition, a history of collective theatre may have many starting points. Excluding forms that cross into ritual and those with which our current understanding is confined entirely to dramatic text and contemporary writings, commedia dell’arte may best serve as an origin. Commedia dell’arte came to prominence in the 16th century and remained popular into the 18th century. It was performed in Italy by traveling theatre troupes, possibly descended from Greek and Roman mime troupes. The performances were highly physical, full of stock plots and characters, aided by masks and actors’ tendency to specialize in the same few characters—as in the eastern theatre traditions. Scripts consisted of a series of scenarios that were improvised both physically and verbally by the company. The improvisational nature of the performances kept it fresh, current and able to speak to the condition of the community. While little is known of the management processes of commedia troupes, they are generally accepted as theatre collectives, often organized around the blood relatives of a founding family.

Commedia’s influence can be seen in the works of Moliere, the Marx Brothers, Bill Irwin and across the spectrum of today’s avant garde. The more recent iterations of the tradition stem from a revival commedia dell’arte as manifested in the work of Jacques Lecoq. As with commedia, Locoq’s focus on the physical aspects of acting led to production methods that de-emphasized set text in favor of physical expression and collective improvisation. Lecoq set up a school in Paris influencing several generations of theatre practitioners. Companies such as Philadelphia’s Pig Iron Theatre come out of this tradition with a strong focus on the collective production structure.

It should be mentioned in passing that Shakespeare’s company, while under the patronage of a member of the royal court, was a collective theatre structure. In this case, the company was a frank business venture, with actors buying shares, and both profiting from its success and assisting in any way during times of struggle. There were no directors, such as we understand them today, when Shakespeare was writing and performing. Stefan points out that this may have been more of an administrative collective than an artistic one; Ben feels that within a collective, the two areas are inextricably bound.

Modern collective theatre production structures didn’t come into their own until the mid - 20th century. The Group Theatre of the 1930s in America began as a theatre collective, guided by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford. Swept up in a fascination with socialism and the emergence of the Labor Movement in America, these artists envisioned a collective theatre where decisions were made through democratic process. The history of the Group Theatre, the triumph of personalities over principals within it and the difficulty of applying group process to the demands of commercial theater serve as a cautionary tale to anyone venturing into group theatre exploration. This story is wonderfully told in Wendy Smith’s book Real Life Drama.

In the 1960’s, The Living Theatre, and the blossoming of experimental theatre in the 60s and 70s in America led to the current resurgence of theatre collectives. Founded in 1947 as a theatre dedicated to theories of Antonin Artaud, the Living Theatre took up a collective production structure and became well known for diminishing the line between performers and attenders. Today they remain an anarchist organization, making all their decisions through consensus—though co-founder Judith Malina and her husband, Hanon Reznikov are given the respect and weight of Friends’ elders or weighty Quakers. The theatre remains Artaudian.

Most collective theatre making today follows a method developed primarily in England in the 50s and 60s where its best known proponent was the Joint Stock Theatre Group. Joint Stock was founded in 1975 by David Aukin, Max Stafford-Clark and David Hare. It collaborated with playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Wallace Shawn and David Hare himself. The production structure of this collective or “group theatre”, as Brian Clark calls it in his book of that name, is succinctly described by one of the structure’s more recent adherents, the Central Works Theater Ensemble. From the Central Works Theater Ensemble website:

After the company collectively commits to a topic of common interest, the collaborators enter a "Workshop Phase," exploring the subject matter through research assignments, interviews with experts or character models, field research, group discussions, exercises and improvisations. These are all incorporated to generate material for the rough draft of the play. During the second stage of the process, the writer rewrites, refines and polishes the script. In the final stage, the new script goes into a more traditional rehearsal process, although further revisions and expected to come out of the rehearsal experience. All collaborators, regardless of their specific roles in the productions, are creatively and collectively involved and invested in the development of the project.

http://www.centralworks.org/about_history.html

In addition to the method described above group theatre may work out of a specific text, adapting it to their circumstances and inclinations or even work within a specific text, using the author’s language as fits their circumstances and inclinations. These structures are increasingly popular, and Moises Kaufman recently employed variations of them with Tectonic Theatre, giving birth to the plays The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project.

Few major metropolitan areas in America are without their own theatre collective, or ensemble theater. The September 2005 issue of American Theatre magazine contains an article about America’s first Ensemble Theatre Festival, organized by the Network of Ensemble Theaters and held at Blue Lake, CA. Of the challenges of collective theatre making, Joan Schirl of the Dell’Arte Theatre says “It calls for both generosity and strength of ego, a desire to serve something higher than your own self-expression. We’re training the artist as citizen” (italics added – Ben). This aspect of viewing the theatre artist as larger than the role s/he’s playing, of lifting theatre-making into a context beyond the boundaries of the production being created, is a point of view generally shared by group theatre collectives.

Because group theatres tend to interface more immediately with the communities they live in, they tend to create original works that speak more directly to the condition of those communities. The Cornerstone Theatre is an example of a traveling theatre collective who’s main purpose is to make theatre based on the lives of the people in the communities they visit.

The innovations of Revival in the context of group theatre structures revolve around two points. The first is that we have no artistic or political agenda. Most group theatres are organized around such agendas, the San Francisco Mime Troupe being a perfect example of a group theatre organized around a political agenda. Peter Brook famously adopted the group theatre model for a number of his political productions including US, which dealt with the then current conflict in Vietnam including a section reenacting a Friends’ memorial meeting for a Quaker protestor who immolated himself in front of the Pentagon. The group theatres in the lineage of Lecoq may be seen as organized around artistic agendas. While Revival may discover an agenda (or a corporate concern in Quaker parlance), arising out of the collective worship of its members, it does not begin with one. This leads to the second innovation. We have found no evidence of a group theatre that was organized around Quaker worship and practices.

© 2005 Benjamin Lloyd and Stefan Dreisbach-Williams

Up to this point we have been dealing with the external, visible, physical process of communion . . . [b]ut there is another, important aspect which is inner, invisible and spiritual. My difficulty here is I have to talk to you about something I feel but do not know. It is something I have experienced and yet I cannot theorize about it. I have no ready-made phrases for something I can explain only by a hint, and by trying to make you feel, for yourselves, [these] sensations . . . . What name can we give to these invisible currents, which we use to communicate to one another? Some day this phenomenon will be the subject of scientific research. Meantime let us call them rays. Now let us see what we can find out about them through study and making notes of our own sensations.

Constantine Stanislavsky
An Actor Prepares, pp. 199-201

From the Revival Invitation:

For a long time, I have suspected a connection between my experience as a Quaker in worship and as an actor rehearsing and performing. I have written about this connection in an article for last December’s issue of Friends Journal and in a book I have written to be published next year by Allworth Press. I have explored it in workshops I have offered to several Quaker meetings wishing to explore vocal ministry (what happens when a person speaks at a Quaker meeting for worship). But now I feel led to explore this divine/creative connection in a theatrical context with theatre people. And so I invite you to participate in “Revival”: group research exploring theatre creativity using Quaker process as a foundation, gathered initially around the work of the actor. There will be no charge for your participation since you will be, in essence, a co-creator. At the outset, we will invite participants to use scenes from Edward Kemp’s translation of Lessing’s Nathan The Wise, but also leave room for improvisational participation. Later, we hope to be able to expand our focus, and perhaps use our evolving process to create new work.

One of the basic ideas in Quaker worship is that the impulse to rise and speak is divine, and it is felt. I believe that this “divine nudge”, this “inner movement”, is also present in moments of good acting. Quakers believe that God speaks to us through each other. I believe this is true in a variety of situations, Quaker worship being one possible venue, the theatre being another. I am seeking a way to test these ideas theatrically in a more spiritual context than the conventional classroom.

I am calling our gatherings “meetings for theatre” in the same way Quakers use the term “meetings for business”, which are meetings for worship during which the business of the meeting is conducted. In our case, we will have meetings for worship in which theatre is created. The basic format will begin with Quaker worship. Out of that worship, a participant may feel moved to create theatrically: perhaps using language memorized from Nathan The Wise, perhaps using the ideas and images from Nathan as inspiration for something improvised, perhaps offering something unrelated to Nathan. Even though some will have memorized roles from scenes from Nathan, we will ask all participants to come neither determined to offer work, nor to remain silent, but to be open to God’s prompting. This is consistent with the approach to Quaker worship. How the work unfolds from such beginnings, how we return to worship, and what kind of creative ministry may emerge is all part of our exploration together. The worship session - and the work which may be offered from it - will end, there will be a short break, and we will reconvene for “worship sharing”, focusing on what has transpired at that meeting.

I have no idea what this workshop will create, or where it will take us. I suspect we will learn something valuable, but I offer no guarantees. I only offer questions, and Rilke’s suggestion that we live in them:

• do the forms of Quaker worship and discernment lend themselves to theatrical creativity?
• can Quakerism offer a way for theatre artists to grow both as artists and as spiritual beings?
• can these two journeys – artistic and spiritual – stimulate and enrich each other?
• can we invite God into our art using Quaker worship as a form, and will a divine presence make itself felt to us and influence our choices?
• how might our discoveries be applied in a classroom within a more conventional curriculum? how might they be offered to existing producing theatres?
• how might we adapt this work to offer it to artists of other genres?

I believe that the act of artistic creation is divine in nature, and that the most meaningful theatrical events, for the practitioner and the witness, both comic and dramatic, are transmitted and received as spiritual events. This is not a new idea. Some of our greatest theatre thinkers – Stanislavsky and Grotowski to name only two – were deeply interested in the artistic/spiritual connection. Peter Brook explores this connection in the chapter called “The Holy Theatre” in his great book The Empty Space.

I think we as theatre artists have been orphaned from our spiritual lineage. I believe we want to act as spiritual agents in the world, but have lost the language and the means to do so, in part because fundamentalists have hijacked spiritual language, and made some of us afraid to use it for fear of being labeled zealots. I propose that thinking about “God” and inviting overt spiritual investigation into one’s artistic process need not threaten anyone, and may lead us back to the essential and vital energy we crave. Obviously, this is not a workshop for atheists. But one of the wonderful things about Quakerism is its universalism: you need not be a Quaker to worship with us; you need not even be a Quaker to bring divine ministry into the world. Anyone, from any faith tradition, theistic or non-theistic, or with no defined faith tradition at all but at least a willingness to do some spiritual seeking, may join us.

From the Revival Prep Doc:

Revival Foundation (common Quaker words or phrases are in italics)

Here’s the basic idea in a nutshell: no one offers anything unless moved by the Spirit to offer it.

The Quaker proposition is that God can be felt through deep listening. And we do mean felt. Look for physical, visceral sensations arising out of the stillness which propel you to action. Our experience has shown us that this kind of listening can be enhanced when we gather to listen, or worship, as a community.

How do you know it is the Spirit moving you into action, and not, say, that cup of coffee you had just before arriving? Initially, if you’re not a seasoned Friend, you don’t. This is why the emphasis is on waiting. Sit it out until you absolutely can’t. This deep listening for, or waiting on the Spirit is called discernment. The seasoned Friend is looking for an impulse which is connected, somehow, to the group. The seasoned friend is looking to discern ministry arising out of the noise or quiet of his/her mind.

Ministry tends to lead us to action. So we are seeking to be led. We come to meeting for theatre neither determined to offer something, nor determined not to. This is one of the first relationships I discovered between ideal Quaker experience and ideal actor experience: in both we are completely present.

Let our ministry during meeting for theatre, and our conversation afterward, be guided principally by these Quaker testimonies:

• Simplicity. Strive for simple gesture and speech. Let your offering be no more than what is necessary, and no less than what is sufficient.

• Integrity. Seek wholeness in your offering and your responses. Be loving, sincere and truthful.

• Community. Rejoice in our being together. Seek first to support the other.

Friends believe in continuing revelation, which is the idea that the Divine is unfolding before our eyes every moment of every day. This idea has deep implications with the way we work with texts, which we believe cannot be fully appreciated unless interpreted through our contemporary experience. Friends also believe that there is that of God in each of us. Holding on to these two ideas, let us look for the Divine aspect in each of us to see what is revealed through it.

In Quaker worship, structured experience can be seen on a continuum. On the unstructured end, there is meeting for worship, which is, theoretically, completely free and open to the promptings of the Spirit. On the structured end, there is meeting for business, which begins in worship, but which has a fairly conventional agenda and which proceeds in most cases the way a group gathered to make administrative decisions would, except there is no voting. Meeting for theatre is attempting to place itself in the middle of these two experiences in terms of structure. Stefan pointed out that meeting for business is properly called “meeting for worship for business” and so too for us, we are actually holding meetings for worship for theatre.

A description of a Meeting for Theatre:

A group of people sit in stillness in a circle. They are worshipping in the manner of Friends, seeking a calm and centered state of mind from which to discern the voice or nudge of God. The quiet has substance and potential; it is like a bright bell before ringing. Worshippers move in their seats, lean forward to hold their face in their hands, stretch ever so lightly, take furtive glances around the room, stare in to space with inscrutable concentration, sit with eyes closed, at peace. In the context of meeting for theatre, each of these states attains significance, as if each worshipper is performing their own worship in absolute unselfconsciousness.

A person speaks, seated. He uses some text from the play we have selected as our vehicle. He then moves to his own words, gently urging us not to wait in the desert.

Time passes.

A woman stands and moves into the center of the circle. She seems to be dancing, slowly. She speaks softly, and claims us all as her children. She reaches out. A collective, palpitating expectation sweeps over us, like the moment before a great sneeze. Another woman stands and comes to her. They embrace and dance slowly. We release into them. Then they lock eyes. I feel a jolt of electricity shoot up my spine. I want to avert my gaze, so private, so intimate is their gaze. But I am called to witness. Then they sit, these two women who have known each other for just three days.

Time passes. I notice a friend crying, quietly, in her seat. Our eyes meet. She looks away.

A woman speaks about seeking an ancient energy, an ancient archetype she feels she needs and can’t find – the Crone.

Time passes. We’ve been at worship for about 40 minutes. The unselfconscious group performance of quiet worshipping is at it’s peak now: great longing stares into the infinite, heads buried in hands, frozen gestures caught in the moment just before acting, glances of longing and curiosity from friend to friend.

A man rises and does a slow dance, gently tapping his chest. In a startling example of prophetic ministry, he says “You are not the Crone,” answering the ministry that had come before. “You are the Mother. The Crone speaks through me, and she says: when you are ready for her, she will come for you”. He dances some more, before sitting. The friend who had spoke of the Crone before weeps quietly.

Time passes.

Feeling our worship has run its course, I reach for the person next to me. We shake hands, as do the others, and meeting for theatre takes a break. Friends stand, stretch, go to the bathroom, huddle together in quiet counsel, hugging, holding hands.

We return for the worship sharing portion of the meeting. After some quiet worship, we begin a discussion of sorts about what we have just witnessed and experienced, mindful that we are still a part of a holy assembly, avoiding argumentative or impulsive responses and judgments.

The discussion is rich. Many who are there testify to the hunger they have felt for a way to explore the connection they believe in, between the divine and the creative. Some are moved to speak about how the experience has opened them up as Quakers, and perhaps helped them understand themselves as Quaker ministers, perhaps given them a confidence they have lacked before. Some ask general questions of the group: how did it feel when this happened, when you heard that? Others sit quietly, listening, watching, soaking it all up.

I find myself caught in the struggle of being both a participant and an observer, self-consciously scratching notes into my notebook during both the worship and the worship sharing. But I am also filled with the sense that there is something exciting happening here, something needed. I wouldn’t call it a certainty, I still feel very much like the Argonauts: sailing into the unknown. But like them, I feel great happiness at the group gathered around me, and a queer faith in the Great Hand that guides us.

Last night, my friend Miles W. called to offer me a job teaching improvisation classes at Arcadia University. The regular teacher has been busted under suspicion of running a bicycle currier service to deliver marijuana to people. After having a good laugh about where we were going to buy our pot now, we got to talking about the opportunity. It seemed obvious: take the two classes, it’s a foot in the door at another local University, one where dear friends work in a growing theatre department. But after a closer look, I passed. I would have had to drop out of the two shows I’ve already been cast in this fall. This appointment would be as an adjunct faculty member, and though I’d make a little more money, I would have no benefits. Through Actor’s Equity, the union I’m a member of, I get health insurance as long as I keep working. So taking the teaching job would have meant giving up health insurance. And the course I’d be teaching – two semester-long sections on improvisation – is not a curriculum I have a lot of experience in.

I had to turn down two other adjunct job offers this summer from the University of the Arts, another place I’d really like to teach. They offered me two positions I wasn’t qualified to teach. In that case, I’d have made less money and had to give up my health benefits. But this is how higher education stays afloat, on the backs of a small army of teachers working for peanuts and no benefits, while tenured faculty with bloated salaries coast along. Yes friends, I have a chip on my shoulder. But really, it’s an awful situation.

And it was no small issue to me that I would have had to give up acting. I would have had to drop out of productions I had made commitments to, putting a theatre company that has stood by me in a time of crisis in a tough spot. But it was the letting go of the acting that was really gnawing at me. In spite of the hardships we are working through, I am really looking forward to being a working actor again this year. At a central place in me, it is who I am: an actor. And not a teacher? No, my mission is to prove that I can do both. The mission isn’t going so well these days.

Friends, it’s not just the thrill of performing and the sweet sound of applause that draws me. Certainly that’s an attraction – I couldn’t be an actor if it wasn’t. But now at mid life, I see that acting has engraved some virtues into my being. Acting has made me who I am in some vital and important ways, and I feel as attached to acting as, say, an E.R. doctor feels to her calling, or a priest to his vocation. Not only for the good it does in the world and the delight one feels from doing it well, but out of a sense of supporting a noble tradition, a lineage that has given me so much, and deserves attention in return.

Acting has made me brave in the face of fear. Acting has made me tough in the face of disappointment. Acting has made me faithful in the face of the unknown. Acting has made me love laughter, the way one loves a home, as a source of strength and renewal. Acting has taught me compassion and tolerance through the roles I’ve played and the situations I’ve encountered on stage. Acting has taught me to play well with others. Acting has shown me that I must make choices, and that the making and enacting them is often much more important than their “rightness” or “wrongness”. Acting has made me love myself, showing me that I am best when I am true to who I am. Then, paradoxically, I can become anyone you want me to be.

I am being led to a pedagogy of actor training which is based on identifying and nurturing virtues, rather than analyzing scripts. Do you see, friends, how this is connected to my Quakerism? I don’t believe the answer is in the text. The answer – if such a thing actually exists – is in the person. And for the actor, that answer lies more in the heart than in the mind. So my query now is: how to teach acting from the heart?

The attraction of teaching from the mind, what I call “intellect-based” actor training, and the main reason it dominates higher education is that it can be written about and articulated much more easily. Intellectual activity is the province of words and ideas, which can be put down on paper and understood. This is at the center of university learning: the ability to take something off a page and acquire it as insight or understanding. Certainly, there are other forms of learning in higher education: more experiential learning modes in the natural and social sciences, for instance. But on the whole, we want approaches to teaching that fit the page. If it fits the page, it can be judged and assessed.

The kind of actor training I’m thinking about is very hard to describe, harder to assess. When one attaches words to it, it instantly sounds trite. I want my students to discover their own innate courage through the process of acting. I want them grow tolerant and compassionate of other human experience through the roles they play. I want them to place acting and theatre in a world-wide context, as an artistic discipline that has the potential to make the world a better place. How does one assemble a collection of virtues and use them to guide creative process? Then it occurred to me that one of the other places in which virtues are promoted and used as guiding principles is religion. Revival, then, is my attempt to apply some Quaker virtues to theatrical creative process, and see if the mix results in anything interesting. Revival is my first foray into teaching acting from the heart.