Quaker-Theatre

Here is the prayer I say backstage, before my first entrance in Jason: “God be with me, God be through me. I am the faucet, turn me on”. Repeat until centered. Enter, and look for the light.

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

Speaking of careers, the whole issue of “what ifs” came nosing out of it dirty little hole the other night. I had just finished watching “Lost”, a T.V. series Susan and I are addicted to. Really, it’s a fascinating series, in which a group of people are stranded on a tropical island, and all sorts of inexplicable things begin to happen to them. The second season is gathering around a conflict between Jack, the doctor and de-facto leader of the group, and a character named Locke, who, after being wheel chair bound, mysteriously regained the use of his legs after their plane crashed on the island. The conflict between Jack and Locke is about faith. Jack doesn’t want to deal with it if it can’t be logically explained. Locke talks a great deal about “destiny”, and enters into the situations the island leads him to with a sense of wonder and unquestioning faith, faith that this is what was meant to be. How could I not be gripped?

The actor playing Locke is named Terry O’Quinn, and he and I share a resemblance. Knowing that this series was cast with an ensemble of newcomers and relative unknowns (except for Dominic Monegan, the actor who played Pippin in the Lord of The Rings movies), I was suddenly seized with envy of Terry, thinking: that could have been me. If I had been a bit more adventurous and had given L.A. a try, if I hadn’t been paralyzed with alcoholism, if, if if . . . How I fantasize about acting in a hit T.V. series shot in Hawaii, and how easily I forget that if it were true, Griffen and Ella wouldn’t be alive, and the struggles I endure now would be replaced by others, like the ones Terry had to endure on the way to playing Locke. The darkness says, you’re a loser Ben, and what’s worse, you could have been a winner, like Terry.

What pulls me back into the light is my family and my work. Pulling on the costumes I wear for Jason and exploring these wild and wonderful characters, hearing the extraordinary sound of intergenerational laughter from the audience, feeling my kinship to the artists I work with and to the audience I serve. It’s a kinship I share with Terry O’Quinn, and with actors everywhere, and I am comforted by the truth that it doesn’t matter where you act, it matters that you act at all, and act well.

This morning, we played for a school group of about 12 kids and a handful of teachers (the theater holds 175). Peter, who plays a bunch of roles in the play, was grumpy about having to put on all his make-up for such a small group. I was surprised to find that I wasn’t. Something has changed in me. Others have witnessed it. This summer, my friend Kathryn who was my partner on stage in two of the three short plays I acted in for 30Fest, said to me during a tech rehearsal, “So what’s up with you? You’re different – good different”. Abbey, during a conference about the upcoming season at the theater, commented, “People have been glad to have you around Ben. Please take this in the best possible way, they tell me, ‘It’s like the good Ben is here!’” Here’s what I told Kathryn, but couldn’t say to Abbey: I have God in my life now.

I think, very quietly, and with no fanfare, I have been born again. It took about 13 years, beginning with my surrender to my addiction and having its apotheosis through The Religious Society of Friends. It has been a slow motion conversion. And I feel in my struggle and pain around being denied tenure, I have passed through a rite of purification, and what had been closed up inside has finally unfolded on the outside. It is private – I don’t talk about it unless asked, and then only to those who I feel can hear it without alarm or confusion. And it’s not scripture based. It’s not even Christocentric by any conventional standard, although I was deeply moved by Anne Lamott's account of her conversion. In it, she imagined Christ following her around as a stray dog, and then sitting in the corner of her room, a hunched and shadowy figure, until finally she stood up in her misery and said, “Okay! You can come in!”. Nothing that dramatic for me, but I relate to the sense of being pursued by Something with enormous spiritual goodness. For me, S/He hovers, or sits near me like the angels in Wenders’ movie Wings of Desire. I feel renewed by my Suitor, and I have held the image of Jesus in my mind during meeting for worship, seeing Him sit amongst us, occasionally sliding off his bench to wash someone’s feet.

I have just finished reading the 19th century journal of American Quaker John Woolman. I figured, if I have set out to write a 21st century Quaker journal, I might as well read the most famous one I can find from the past. Woolman’s journal is even more widely read that Fox’s, in part because he articulates spirit-based positions on economic justice that were far ahead of his time, in part because his ministry to abolish slavery is so forceful and so personal, in part because the quality of his faith is overpowering. I confess, friends, I felt ashamed at my puny faith when I hold it against John’s, who could not meet a moment in his life without being completely aware of the spiritual implications of it. He took the principal of living one’s faith to the logical extreme, and famously refused to wear dyed clothes because he felt the use of dyes to be both ostentatious, and leading to the oppression of those forced to make them. I fear that if poor John were alive today, her would throw himself from the Ben Franklin bridge in despair, so deeply into the darkness – by his definition - we have drifted as country.

But I also saw that I can’t be an 18th century Quaker in the 21st century. I feel I am called to Quaker ministry in the terms of my own time, and live in the world I have been given. Too often, I fear, Quakers use examples like Woolman as ways to prop up defeatist positions. The only way John is useful to us today is if he propels us forward into action. We cannot wallow in regret at the sad state of the world, and the inability of our Society to bring Divine Light more fully to earth. We must trust in continuing revelation – that we are just as much agents of God’s will as was John Woolman, each to our own measure.

My God, I’ve forgotten how overwhelming acting is. I am playing two relatively small supporting roles in Jason, and still I haven’t been able to focus on anything else for the past two weeks. I have been scratching notes in my notebook, frantically looking for time to sit down and record what’s been going on. I have a half an hour now, I’ll see how far I can go.

We’ve been in tech, and tonight is first preview. It’s going well. I thought I had injured myself playing Inos, but I made an adjustment in the way I slither around the stage and now my shoulder doesn’t hurt anymore.

Jason observations:

The character Hypsypole sows doubt, but Jason chooses faith. He chooses it. Not because he knows he’ll reach Colchis, but because he chooses to believe he will. Choose to believe: a recovery catchphrase. This is where the evangelicals have it so wrong. No one knows that God exists. Some of us believe it, some of us don’t. My hunch is that actors are good at believing in things, especially in things that matter. The cynic will say, no – actors are good at fooling themselves. Whatever. It’s like my Russian acting teacher Slava said, when I asked him about spirituality and the actor: “Acting is isn't for smart people”. What he meant was, it takes a kind of foolishness to believe in anything, especially in things that you can’t see or prove, like God, or the success of your improbable trip to Colchis. At a moment of crisis at the end of act one, Jason prays a sort of, “help me, help me, help me” prayer. A bird appears and guide him and the Argonauts to safety. He says, “Thank you”.

Jason is a great deal about the hero’s journey, in the great cycle that Joseph Campbell mapped out. I find myself relating to the title character a lot: facing great doubt and forging ahead; relying on my friends to get him through, trying to choose ideals to follow, even when they aren’t expedient.

Jason is a leader. So am I. Does that sound grandiose, friends? I don’t mean it to be. But you live with yourself for a while and you begin to accept who you are. I am always jumping to the head of the line. I enjoy making things and inviting others in. I am comfortable with responsibility. I’m good at making decisions. I think innovatively. I encourage input from others. God gives us each different gifts, and we must be able to name them and celebrate them in ourselves. There are plenty of things I’m not good at, and part of what Jason shows us is that we need to gather people around us to fill in our blanks. A shadow aspect of mine is an unease with institutions, with hierarchies. I am part anarchist: I’m prone to tearing it down and starting over. This can make me hard to work with.

And there is in loneliness in leadership. There is a prophet-like quality in it, in which at the outset people call you a fool a lot. Prophets go against the current and buck the trend. I think Phineus was such a prophet, it. What got him into trouble with God was his tendency to tell people exactly how thing were going to turn out. Phineus began to operate as if he was God, and God said, “Um, no”. I think God much prefers to work in suggestions and symbols. God makes it possible, we make it happen. Leadership has the aspect of moving forward even when you can’t clearly see where you’re going, but if you have a quality of faith about you that is compelling, others will sense your prophetic power and peel off from the main stream to follow you. Rufus Jones, a great Quaker who worshipped at my meeting in the early 20th century, writes about this kind of prophetic leadership in his book Spiritual Energies in Daily Life:

The prophet has a very different task. He cannot give people what they want. He is under an unescapable compulsion to give them what he believes to be true. He cannot take lines of least resistance; he must work straight up against the current. He cannot work for quick effects; he must slowly educate his people and compel them to see what they have not seen before. The amens are very slow to come to his words, and he cannot look for emotional thrills. he must risk all that is dear to himself, except the truth, as he sets himself to his task . . . .

But this is not all there is to say. It is not possible to teach the new effectively without linking it up with the old. The wholly new is generally not true. New, fresh truth emerges out of ancient experience; it does not drop like the shooting star from the distant skies. The great prophets of all ages have lived close to the people. They have not had their "ears to the ground” . . . but have understood the human heart.

I reflect on my constant sense of “otherness” I have carried around with me in my life, how I have always chosen rooms away from the rest of the family to sleep in. I know this is born from my strange childhood, but maybe it also something from another Source. Maybe it is who I am – and being who I am makes me best.

I reflect on my first prayer. In a moment of unbearable anguish, after having received a thrashing from both my father and my stepmother (physical from him, verbal form her) I was left alone to cry in my room. I was 10 or 11. Sobbing, I buried my face in my pillow and said, “Please help me. Please help me. I won’t let them beat me. I won’t let them”. I must have been imitating something I had seen in a movie or a T.V. show. I had no religious instruction as a child. And abuse like that was very rare. I remember this episode being shocking because of its suddenness and disproportion to whatever I had done to trigger it. But the grief I felt was real, and so was the prayer. My next prayer was 18 years later, in a similar darkness, only I was the one administering the beating, me and my mistress, drink. The form was similarly borrowed, but again, the grief was very real. Out of these borrowed forms a true faith emerged, forged in despair.

We have to be careful when we say we have discerned God’s voice in our lives. The patterns and sequences are often mis-leading, and God works on eternal time, our lives being nano-blips on the divine radar screen. Just before I got my letter from Villanova, I was in a silly Irish play playing a Catholic priest. “Ah ha”, I thought, “surely God is telling me that I will be granted tenure by the Catholic university I work for”. And so I am wary of saying that through Shannon and Abbey, God is urging me along in my Quaker theatrical exploration. But I am certain of this: I am finding no resistance to it, and the signs, if that is what they are, are good ones. Certainly, I am grateful that the people I work with know what I am about, and support me. At the very least, I am sure of this blessing: I work in a community in which the people are bound together by something far greater than the thing being made. The theatre we make is right size.

Thursday Shannon split us into two groups and asked us to create a movement theatre piece illustrating the background myth to Jason: that of Phrixus and Hellas being saved by the golden ram who flies them to safety before being sacrificed, thereby transforming into the golden fleece. Here was an example of the practical payoff of maintaining a company of actors familiar with each other. I couldn’t imagine working with a group of strangers the way I instantly began working with my little group. In less than hour, each group had a three-minute play with movement and sound, which we performed for each other, Shannon and stage management. Chris, who is designing sound and creating music for the production, had us underscore the other groups’ play with spontaneously created music using a variety of simple instruments and noise makers. Both Shannon and Chris received a bunch of ideas from both groups about how to stage this little play within the play, which appears in our production as a Goddess’s vision. It also jumped out at me as an example of the kind of group theatre that Revival might lead to.

Saturday I got to work on Phineas on my feet, with playwright John Olive present. It’s always an honor to work on a new play in front of the playwright, and a bit intimidating. There’s a part of me that fears him standing up abruptly and shouting, “No, no, no! What are you doing to my play?!” But John is a quiet and friendly presence, and instantly begins making changes and handing out re-writes, partly based on the work he’s watching us do in rehearsal. “So where does Inos come from? I ask him.

“Oh, I think I had Calaban dancing around in my head when I wrote him” he replies.

I decide to work with two canes as the feeble, bent over, blind Phineas, in a kind of homage to Anthony Sher and his memorable Richard III, a process of actor discovery beautifully documented in his journal, The Year of The King. He and his book have been on my mind a lot, since it’s the only example I’ve read of an actor linking his personal life with his creatively so intimately in print. I’m no Tony Sher, but at least there’s a precedent. My favorite line I have to say in the play belongs to Phineas, as he tries to dissuade Jason from receiving a prophecy from him: “The truly courageous face the future blind”.

Sunday arrives and I have miss meeting for worship because of rehearsal. This always makes me grumpy, but Shannon has gone so out of her way for me, letting me go early three days a week, I can’t ask her for any more favors. In my dream theatre, any artist is unconditionally released for any religious observance. Actually, in my dream theatre, we all work the same hours as the rest of the world, 9 – 5 Monday through Friday and weekends off until tech week and performances.

The morning is spent staging and working on some new pages John has given us. He has to leave this evening and so is now dictating small changes to us, rather than having the assistant stage manager run and make copies of new pages. It is through the playwright’s presence that I feel something new is coming to life. It really is special.

In the afternoon, we perform our “assignments”. I have gone around the bend on mine – the prophesies. I came to Shannon in a panic about it Saturday, and she assured me she was just as interested in hearing about the panic and the failure on Sunday, as she was in having actual prophecies handed out. So I outlined what I was up against to share with the cast. I decided that I would take this assignment seriously, and not come in and pretend to read someone’s palm and tell them they were going to come into money. I realized this was an opening to bring the Revival work in to the Jason setting. Looking at Quakerism, I realized that there is a prophetic tradition. Fox and some of the Valiant Sixty had pure visions which they describe in their journals and pamphlets. Since then, Quaker prophesy has come through the powerful vocal ministry of Friends gathered with others in meetings for worship. In Jason there are exact prophesies (a man with one sandal on will overthrow you), inexact prophesies (you won’t die by drowning and you’ll live into old age) and suggestive prophesies (here’s an image – a beautiful yet threatening woman calling out for you). Friends tend to work in the latter two, but will be moved to change the entire course of their lives if they discern that God is speaking to them directly and powerfully. The test for Friends is the response that prophetic witness receives from that Friend’s meeting. Friends don’t let Friends change their whole lives without a thorough threshing of the prophesy at hand.

So I determined that I would lay all of this out for the group, my process in working on this task, as well as my misgivings. The first question you have to answer is, do you think prophecy is possible at all? If the answer is no, then that’s it. No point in going forward. I decided that I thought it was possible. Then you have to ask, well what exactly is prophecy then? Psychological empathy? Statistical expertise? God? And if God, what does that mean to you and how does God become involved in prophecy? Because here’s the big problem if you really think it’s possible: you might see something in your friend’s future which is horrifying. This is exactly the situation Phineas encounters with Jason. Luckily for Phineas anyway, Jason breaks out of the prophesy when the beautiful woman Phineas channels to him spooks him. This is, of course, Medea, and so Phineas gets off the hook without having to transmit the unpleasant business of her killing Jason’s children and all that.

Other cast members presented other assignments. The actor playing Orpheus recited a hilarious poem he had written about coming to the first day of rehearsal. The actor playing Jason gave a political speech. When my turn came, I essentially recited to the cast what you’ve just read, and then invited them to have 15 minutes of worship in the manner of Friends with me. I asked for any who wished to be the focus of that worship to come into the center of the circle, and we would see if any prophecy came out of that worship. I stressed that no one need say or do anything. Mary Beth and Miles came forward and sat in chairs in the middle of our circle. Revival had begun, in a completely unexpected way.

Friends, there was rich, though perhaps too quick, ministry. What I remember of it was one of us rising to say that he felt both of them may have to leave us for a time, but that he hoped they would return, and that we would welcome them. Another rose and spoke about both of them being embraced by this small circle, which was embraced by a larger circle: circles embracing the uncertainty they both faced. And lo and behold, e.e. cummings made another appearance, but through a different poem. Afterwards, there was that paradoxical sense of calm exhilaration one feels after genuine worship. There was a general feeling that “something happened”, that the energy in the room had changed. Miles cried and had to leave the room to regain composure. When he returned, he said, “I knew this was going to happen. I just knew it”, and he smiled. Someone said, how can I take this feeling home with me? Another agreed, I want this rehearsal to go on forever. And I thought, these are glad tidings indeed.