Culture

Beauty, the Beast

The little boy looks out the window on to the noisy avenue. He is three and has only just learned to walk. Pulling the little chair to the window and looking out is his favorite new adventure. In the early January evening, from three stories up, he looks down on what seems to him a dark river. Giant fishes with bright eyes, white and red, swim in straight lines. So many people hurry along the concrete river banks. The boy wonders who they are, where they’re going. The boy wonders if they have homes, and if those homes are happy. The lights attract him. Beautiful and frightening, they beckon.

He looks out because the world calls to him, but also because it distracts him from what’s behind him, in his home. The world of lights and strangers is better than turning and seeing his little world fall apart, the one contained in the small apartment, the one with a population of three. He doesn’t think of it as falling apart – how could he? In its damaged state it is still all he has ever known. But deep in his heart there is a murmur which tells him, no, there’s something wrong here. He worries that the wrong thing is himself. But the faintest whisper says, no, you are beautiful, whole and close to angels.

And yet a cancer has just begun to grow inside him. This cancer is not biological, not attached to any organ. It is attached to love. In his life now, where there is love, so will there be this cancer, this misshapen form, this shadow, clinging.

The boy looks out the window and feels his heart longing, reaching, and wonders, will someone down there reach back? Will someone down there catch me if I fall?

Later, in his stroller, the world seems to tumble down at him. He rides the sidewalk at the bottom of deep canyons, bracing himself for an accidental blow, glittering windowed walls rising up on either side. All these faces rushing by, sometimes stopping, stooping, peering at him. Angel, they say, what beautiful eyes you have. Sometimes he forgets who’s pushing him, so fearful and so huge is his experience.

Then they were apart, the two that made him, and his world diminished by one. The man stood by him and the woman wandered off, his queen, his goddess. And the cancer throbbed, an angry mass now, urging him to darkness, a darkness with a female shape. It urged him to destruction. But small as he was, he couldn’t destroy anything but himself, a skill he began to refine in different ways, a skill which would become an occupation later in his life. And though he didn’t know it then, there was another growth inside him, stronger than the first. It was his own light, liquid and luminous. It kept him company and fed him.

At ten, in the subways of the great city, he feels he is in the belly of a great fish now. He is Jonah but he has his companions – the strange congregation he wades through, these myriad faces of longing, dreaming and mystery. Under the city, the great fish is a rumbling chapel, full of thoughtful, silent prayers, rushing towards destinations stretched between euphoria and heartbreak.

In his teens, love becomes his own, not something borrowed or observed. He is drawn to particular girls: each had a misshapen mass like his own. Each is beautiful and deformed with darkness, and in loving them, he hopes to love his own deformation into rightness. In each other, the wounded boy and the girl recognize darkness and couple, trying to burn the wounds away with passion, only inflaming them more.

About this time he discovers a magical place where the lights point at him, obliterating the darkness for a time, and he can dance and delight those who came to watch. It is a place that allows him to hide his deformity. When he stands there, he glitters too, the way the city glitters, the way stars and beauty glitter. This place is his salvation, and he lives out a temporary respite there, a circular escape, which tragically brings him back to himself at its end.

At this time too, the pain becomes unbearable and he cries out in his solitary room. He might have said -

I call to the Lord out of my distress, and he answers me; out of the belly of Sheol I cry, and You hear my voice. You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounds me; all your waves and your billows pass over me.

He does not receive relief, he receives resolution in the person of a real Jonah, a young Jonah who swings on a rope over a river, slips and falls, his young body following the downward trajectory to the shallow rocks, rather than swinging up in the hopeful arc. Jonah drops in a wet thud and lays motionless in the rocks like something beached and gasping. With Jonah’s family wailing behind him, the boy – now almost a man - runs into the woods seeking help, begging Something for help. Then comes the man in the Jeep. “I am a paramedic - is there trouble?” And the boy leads him to Jonah. Later, as Jonah flies through the air to the hospital, the boy feels his calling seize him. Seeing that life might be taken from him suddenly he thinks, God, I want to be an actor. The moisture in his eyes, the tremor in his upper lip is a sign that it is more than a thought. It is his second prayer of that day.

Still his shadow grows. Not understanding his dark cancer, but feeling that something is terribly wrong with him, the teenage boy becomes frantic. Forced to become aware of his own deformity, he rips and tears at himself. He cuts and abuses himself. Finally he casts the shadow in front of him and says, what are you?

My name is legion, and we are many, it answers. You may put me down, but you may never leave me. And so the shadow follows the boy everywhere, even as he dances under the lights and grows into a man. Even now as he writes these words, the lumpy shadow is always there.

In the place where the cancer had been, there is now a hollow. The young man feels a vacancy inside. So he pours all kinds of salves into himself to fill the empty place up. He rubs tinctures on his love until it aches. He stuffs himself with dirt and contaminations trying to be full and whole. But the salves evaporate, and the tinctures wear away, and whatever he puts inside himself becomes him, until finally he is contamination walking. Whatever he does, after the ritual comes to its embarrassing conclusion, he always ends up with his nightmare: himself.

Good, says the shadow, consume. You have found the means of your own destruction.

But the little light will not be extinguished.

Then came a night when he finds himself crawling through a dark forest. He doesn’t know why, or where he’s going. He is polluted with shame, remorse, bitterness. In fact, he is barely there, so dimmed has he become by his relentless self-abuse and punishment. The shadow he had cast away once is upon him again, riding him like some dreadful succubus, whispering lies in his ear. The poisons slosh inside him.

He comes upon an empty lake. He stares dumbly into the great dark expanse, and he sees that it is not really empty. In its great void is grief invisible, but palpable, like a midnight mist you cannot see but taste. It is a maw of sadness and desolation. The man puts his fingers in where water should be and feels despair lap against his skin. It sucks at him, and he feels drowsy as he thinks of swimming in it. He is jolted when his light pulses inside him, splashing up against his ribs, and he recognizes that the lake forms the same hollowness as his own wound, but visited upon the world. He sees that the world is wounded too, and the light inside splashes again, brighter. And he becomes aware that he is not alone.

Around the lake’s edges he sees small groups, and solitary individuals. The groups are talking softly together and the individuals stare into the empty lake silently. Go to them, the murmur says. You dare not, say the shadow, you are deformed and filthy, stare into the emptiness and be still. The light leaps, the shadow cowers, the man stands.

He its quietly among a little group of others. He sees that each contains the hollowness of a different shape. But in most it is not hollow. His light is boiling now as he sees that in most gathered by the empty lake, the hollow place is full. In the glow of other’s light he sees their features too. He is struck by how beautiful and brave they seem to him. And then, suddenly, he is speaking. And the others turn to him. And in their faces he sees the illumination of his own light, light which is slowly, slowly filling up his void as it creeps towards the light of others. And all around the edges of that gathering the shadows wait, patient, cynical, so many dark lumps of disease, sullen at being cast aside by their masters.

After talking with them for a while, he looks around the lake again and sees little gatherings of light, and wonders why he has not seen them before. Your shadow was upon you, said another, you cannot take it off by yourself, and so you were blind before, but now you see.

Tell us your story, said another.

And as he does, he feels his light streaming out to others, mixing with ones who are full, and filling up ones that are empty, pushing his own poison out. But in a strange paradox he couldn’t fathom, as he fills others, he was also being filled. He is not left with a deficit; rather, in filling others, his pool of light is increased.

Look, says another. And they turn and see one of the solitary ones fall into the empty lake, not in a graceful dive, but tossed grotesquely, like some doll tormented by a sadistic child. The man stares into the lake, and sees that it is a bone yard at bottom. Look, says another, and one is wanders towards them out of the shadows by the shore, as the man had before.

Come, said another, there is work for us.

And they come to another empty lake, much smaller than the first, barely more than a drained turtle pond. Gathering around the empty pond, some work with their hands shoring up the edges, some draw designs for small huts for the little shore, some cook so others could work, some care for the bumps and bruises the work produces. And when they tire from all the work, the man feels ashamed that he has not helped them in any way. But to his shock he sees them gather before him. And all their lights shine on him in a familiar blinding wash, and in an instant he knows why he is there.

He tells them a story, he sings for them, he dances. And the little pond fills with water.

He leaves the woods and makes a little family of his own. Hollow no longer, and with new sight, he sees all the wounds and shadows on everyone he meets – even on his mother and father, wounds he could not see when a boy. And all through his life, he would meet others with the hollow wound, some more full than others, and there would be a recognition.

And he looked for the light inside them, and his light answered.

And he listened to Francis Dunnery sing:

You can hear me call your name and I haven’t said a single word tonight
Like a bird that sails the thermal sky trusting the invisible
How can I fall? How can I fail?
When I’m Jonah Jonah Jonah
Inside the whale
So I cry out like a baby and I know you hear my words
And I can get to tomorrow if you hold on to this heart of mine
Jonah, Jonah, Jonah
Inside the whale
You can hear my cry for freedom as I learn to trust the living that’s inside
In a world that sells a pack of lies and draws me to my ego
How can I fall? How can I fail?
When I’m Jonah Jonah Jonah,
Inside the whale
And I know you’re always with me even though you can’t be heard
A perfect understanding as you breath into this heart of mine
Jonah, Jonah, Jonah
Inside the whale
So the fox is in the hole again, the hounds are at the door
Newspaper stories lying more and more
There’s a little girl starting school today to learn the whole thing over
How can she fall? How can she fail?
When she’s Jonah Jonah Jonah
Inside the whale

And he rode the subway whales, and saw the angels there, with their wings of desire.

And he witnessed his life in patterns and poems, streaming from a Source, the Source which sent him his liquid light.

And he embraced the paradoxes - that his joy was born out of grief, that his light swelled like a tide out of darkness, that his fusion with others came from the loneliness of the little boy he once was.

And in the words of the songs he loved, he heard the singing Source, and felt its ministry:

That beauty was a beast before, and was transformed.

And that strangers are not strangers – he has seen them all before, underground, on the avenues, in the woods, in countless rooms all across the world. He sees them across the lip of the stage, beneath the blinding wash of light. He falls and they catch him, hold him, heal him. And now he is the healer. And there is a big lake to fill.

I just finished Anne Rice’s Christ The Lord. I think it is a remarkable achievement, as much for the deep humanity in it, as for the clear vision she presents of 1st century Judea. Some observations:

I am struck by as similarity between her novel and another great book of scholarship I have read recently, Steven Greenblatt’s Will in the World, about the life and times of William Shakespeare. Both books unabashedly use creative means to bring the main characters to life. In both books, the life circumstances of Jesus and Will are described with great care and sympathy, and so the reader slowly falls in love with them, following the author’s lead. In her note at the end of the book, Rice describes an almost palpable dislike for Jesus in much of the scholarship she read about him. It made me think of that unpleasant academic characteristic, which is to look down one’s nose at jus about everything, even the subject you’re supposed to be expert at. She and Greenblatt so obviously love their subject matter, and that love evaporates off the pages and surrounds the reader in feelings, as well as thoughts. This is the mark of academic greatness – the ability to impart feelings which do not detract from the intellectual exercise one is undertaking, but enrich it.

In her note – an autobiographical essay at the end of the book, really – she describes two powerful life journeys which relate to Christ the Lord. The first is sweeping. It is the arc of her faith: the initial indoctrination, the long adult doubt, and the delicate return after a life rich with success and blessings. The second is short and devastating. Her husband of 41 years was felled rapidly by a brain tumor just months after Anne first conceived of the form of this novel. I thought of Lessing, losing his wife so soon after marrying her, then writing Nathan. I thought of Mozart, facing his own mortality, and writing the Requiem. Great artists have this terrible ability to use the despair of tragedy as the fuel for creativity. Anne implies that writing this book through her husband’s death kept her sane. I wonder if she was asking Jesus some powerful questions as she brought his little figure to life. I’m certain the passion in the book tastes of the Anne’s life as surely as Hamlet smacks of Shakespeare’s grief.

Her Jesus is a child, and beautifully child-like. Sent by God to earth, he has a wonderful curiosity about everything he sees, and is prone to find a quiet place in the grass, lie down and listen to the bugs humming nearby. This is my kind of Jesus. He experiences every emotion, and clings to his family for love and support, even though, through most of the book, he is aware that they are hiding something from him, something about his birth. What touched me the most is that, after all the miracles, the super-natural events, his great revelation at the end of the book is two-fold: he was sent to earth to live, and like all living things, he will eventually die. It is his human-ness which continually overwhelms him, not his divinity. Reading her book, I wanted to be there next to him, to shelter him, to play with him, to learn from him. She makes him seem beautifully fragile amidst a rugged and sometimes violent landscape.

I really don’t care much about the historical Jesus. Anne writes that Christ scholarship is so divided and rancorous it’s impossible to settle on anything without picking a side in a gigantic theocratic/academic turf battle. A bit like Will Shakespeare, we’re just going to have to live with not knowing, and bring to life the Will and Jesus we want to see in the world, hoping others will do the same. I’m sure, if I was somehow time-transported back to the first century, and met the historical Jesus, I’m sure I’d be disappointed. It would be like meeting that rock star you idolize. It’s better when you can’t smell them.

Singing Tiny Dancer to Ella tonight, I inadvertently switched the genders:

Blue jean baby, L.A. lady, seamstress for the band
Pretty eyed, pirate smile, you'll marry a music man
Ballerina, you must have seen her dancing in the sand
And now he’s in me, always with me, tiny dancer in my hand

Jesus freaks out in the street
Handing tickets out for God
Turning back he just laughs
The boulevard is not that bad

Piano man he makes his stand
In the auditorium
Looking on she sings the songs
The words he knows, the tune he hums

But oh how it feels so real
Lying here with no one near
Only you and you can hear me
When I say softly, slowly

Hold me closer tiny dancer
Count the headlights on the highway
Lay me down in sheets of linen
you had a busy day today


Right around the “Jesus freaks” line, I heard what I had done. Oh no, I thought, it’s happening – I’m becoming a Jesus freak. I knew that tonight I was singing to Ella about a new Tiny Dancer, one I had just inherited from Anne Rice. But Ella didn’t care. She snuggled in close to me in her warm dark room, and I just kept singing.

It is the season of solstice, of pagan rituals of death and re-birth; and it is the Christian season of Advent, of the celebration of the deliverance of a magical, divine child in to our care. I have moved from Anne Lamott to Anne Rice. I am now reading Rice’s novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. It is a creative imagining of the seven year old Jesus’ life during his return to Nazareth. It is told from his point of view, as he wonders about who he is and begins to understand the world he is living in. It is compelling to me because Griffen is about to be seven, and I hear him asking the same kinds of questions young Jesus asks in the book: why do they fight? Why is there death? And versions of: who am I becoming? What is God? The book is helping me develop a relationship to Jesus I can celebrate, especially since it is the “Annes”, two creative writers, who have helped me fashion a Jesus in my imagination, who is a friend and contemporary, someone who laughs and cries. The Annes have helped me see that this titanic character has been stolen from me by fundamentalists, and my misgivings about him have been misgivings about them. The Jesus I believe in is all spirit now, and as such he has no gender, no race, no age. But if it helps me, he doesn’t mind if I imagine him as a young man sitting in my meeting for worship with me, arms stretched out across the back of the bench, staring thoughtfully up at the ceiling.

I imagine him sitting in the house at People’s Light watching the Panto with me and my children, laughing and gently stroking Ella’s hair, before lifting her on to his lap. She sticks her finger in her mouth and looks at me, a little nervous about being so close to this stranger. But his warmth and laughter sooth her, and I smile at her reassuringly, and she leans back, resting against his chest. We glance at each other in the darkened theatre, He and I, and wonder together about this season of darkness, sleep, and mysterious portent. Then we turn our attention to the light.

I am calling this post an integration. I wish to synthesize the events in my life into an integrated witness of God at work through one man. I have recorded a process, now I want to try to identify some results, some discoveries, some leadings. I wanted to get to work on this a month ago, but God told me to wait, and put a series of challenges in my way which needed attention. They had mostly to do with the severe financial crisis facing my monthly meeting, it’s difficult relationship to the school under it’s care, as well as nine pages of narration I had to memorize for a holiday show I am in downtown for two nights in early December. It’s called Colonial Holiday and it features a chamber orchestra, a choir, a high-end slide show, and me, taking the audience on a “tour” of Christmas music in colonial Philadelphia. And so this journal has had to wait. It has occurred to me that this was God’s way of telling me to see my life from a little distance, before trying to make any kind of sense out of it.

In these pages, I have set out to imitate Quaker journals, recording my experiences and bringing my focus continually to my witness of God’s energy in my unfolding life. It is an act of exhibitionism, as were the early Quaker journals, exposing the inner lives of the authors in an unusual way for the period. I have found it necessary to draw a line of privacy around some issues, only hinting (for instance) at the strife I am experiencing with my family of origin, and using a kind of code to describe my ongoing recovery from alcoholism, out of deference to the traditions of the group which has saved my life. So looking back at the fall, what do I see?

Dear friends, imagine a bow-tie. Imagine it represents a time period, beginning at the left and going to the right. See how it begins broadly, then narrows and compresses at the knot, before expanding again. Now imagine that that the cloth on the left is muddy, grey and brown; imagine the knot is a rich golden yellow, and the expanding wing to the right an abstract mix of bright colors. That is the image of my fall up to this point. To the left is August and September, finding my way through the murky beginnings of rehearsal, and trying to articulate my goals for Revival. The knot represents the last two weeks of October, when I was in the thick of Jason, sending off job applications to universities and beginning the Meetings for Theatre. The bright colors swirl about me now, and seem to suggest patterns, but only fleetingly, like the work of the great Russian abstract artist Kandinsky.

Susan is acting in the holiday show at People’s Light, a rollicking English Panto of Jack and The Beanstalk. During the last weekend of Jason, I had dinner on Saturday in the green room of the Main Stage where she was in final tech. I had one of those exquisite moments of deep gratitude for my life, seeing myself in the middle of this beehive theatrical creativity. Mark, who plays the Dame in the Panto, was standing in the green room in work boots chatting with Chaz the stage manager, a vast tutu wrapped around his big belly and wearing a monstrous set of falsies contained by a girdle which, unfurled, might sail a fair schooner. He batted his false eyelashes at me and said in his resonant baritone, “Hey, Ben”. I am surrounded by extraordinary friends:

• Peter, who joined me briefly at dinner, played several nasty characters in Jason, and his wife Ceal, both company actors at the theatre and perhaps more than any others, role models for me and Susan. Ceal and Peter raised two adopted children while working for People’s Light (and many other local theatres). They are both multi-talented, Peter arranging music for his cello on his laptop in the dressing room, and Ceal, a gifted teacher and editor, who vetted early drafts of my book being published next spring, The Actor’s Way (though it was then called Letters to Alice). Ceal is an astonishing actor as well.

• Kathryn, wandering through and offering words of encouragement to the Panto actors, was the actress I played opposite of in two of the short plays I was in during 30Fest last summer. Kathryn was luminous as Kate, the main role in Donald Margulies’ play July 7th, 1994. I played her husband and we had a kind of actor-connection that no training can create. I am convinced that Kathryn and I are spiritually linked somehow, that we share a past life or something. Actors who work together frequently, who share their lives with each other, have a much better shot at experiencing something like this than the typical vagabond American actor. Kathryn is a playwright too– she wrote the Panto Susan is now in. Her husband is Christopher, who wrote and arranged the wonderful music that underscored most of Jason. I want him to teach Griffen to play the guitar.

• Scott, a young actor in the Panto, whose wife Molly gave birth to Eli their first-born the day after my visit. Scott and my wife and I share a guilty pleasure: the Fox TV series 24. He and Molly are two young actors who I see as following in this new paradigm I call the Citizen Actor. Ceal and Peter, me and Sooz, Scott and Molly – the lineage in action.

• And Susan, my wife, who met me in the green room that Saturday all dolled up in her silly ice cream parlor outfit (it has to do with the Panto – don’t ask – all I can say is, it works). I fell in love with her all over again. As she goes about her business as an actor, I can’t believe she’s the same woman I had breakfast with this morning, the same woman I witness mothering my children, the same woman I have lived with for ten years. It’s a great perq, marrying an actress: you feel like you’re having an affair with someone, but it turns out it’s your wife. Later, I watch her do things on stage I will never be able to do. She’s damn good – technically skilled and so full of joy in her work. She fills the theatre with it.

During the talk-backs for Jason, we frequently heard comments from adults, who would begin with a phrase like, “We’ve seen you all in a bunch of plays here, and I’ve got to ask . . . “. Many theatres are afraid of employing the same actors over and over, fearing that audiences will get tired of the same faces in different costumes. But my experience at People’s Light, and in Philadelphia theatre generally, is just the opposite. Audiences love recognizing the actors from one play to another, and marveling at the transformation. It is an actor-audience connection over time that creates a comforting continuity for the audience, and it is instructional in the best possible way about the art of acting. It says, acting is about transformation. It also says, these are our artists, yours (the audience’s) and mine (the theatre’s). They are cultural assets that we are investing in. You are watching that investment grow over time. They are not only set dressing for the plays you see. They are people just like you in careers that matter.

I call this relationship “audience-actor bonding”. People’s Light, being one of only a few American theatres with an ensemble of returning actors, has built a strong subscriber base not only on the quality of its shows, but on this relationship. I think it could do more to build on that relationship marketing-wise, but I digress. It’s the same relationship that drives television. We rush home as much to spend an hour with Jack Bauer and his fellow anti-terrorism agents, as we do to see what happens in that episode of 24. Seinfeld is great example of a TV show that was built on this actor-audience relationship, since it openly proclaimed itself to be about “nothing”. My connection to Lost has as much to do with the actors I see week after week, as it does with the exotic locale and great writing. For me, it has mostly to do with actors.

Friends, in most TV and film, we aren’t watching characters, at least not in the same sense as they are brought to life in, say, Jason and the Golden Fleece, in which the actors playing the extreme characters (like me) were attempting to disappear. In most TV and film, the actors chosen are the ones that most resemble the characters. So there is very little character transformation at all. Seinfeld is again an extreme example of this, in which the main “character” is in essence the actor himself. Same with Everyone Loves Raymond. It’s small step to the dramatic series from that extreme. I would wager that if I had coffee with the actor I wrote about earlier, Terry O’Quinn, who plays Locke on Lost, I would be struck by how much alike he is to his character. We don’t fall in love with the characters in film and TV. We fall in love with the actors.

The current list of Hollywood actors we witness in various combinations in movie after movie perform a very similar function on a larger scale. I am soothed by the notion that I am going to see Jim Carrey, or Jodie Foster in a movie, as much as I am entertained (or not) by the movies themselves. There is a kind of mass-cultural glue created by the community of A-List actors that binds us all together as one great American audience. In some strange way, Jim and Jodie become the conduit through which I connect to people I will never meet, but if I did, I could say “Did you see the Jim Carrey movie?” and we would have a common thread with which to begin a relationship. With the success of film series like The Lord of The Rings and Harry Potter, Hollywood has realized the potential for long term actor-audience relationship. I couldn’t wait to see The Return of the King, and watch Viggo kick some Orc-ish ass. (That series actually does contain some radical character acting though, notably John Rys-Davies as Gimli and Ian MacKellen as Gandolf. I did not look forward to watching Ian. He had rightfully vanished. But Gandolf will forever have a face like his when I read those books again, so affected was I by Ian’s performance.) Yesterday I saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which I had read with my son the summer before, and thought – my God, I’m watching these young actors grow up on the screen right in front of me.

Why does the theatre tend to shy away from this audience-actor bonding? I think it stems in part from an inferiority complex we have in relation to film and TV. We in the theatre tend to think of ourselves as the poor stepchild, and film and TV as the favored sons and daughters. Hmmmm . . . interesting that I chose that metaphor. I think we in the theatre feel that since we can’t come close to the locations we are transported to in film and television, that we have to stimulate our audiences in other ways, partly by parading an ever-changing cast of actors I front of them. The other reason we don’t build the audience-actor bond is that it’s very hard to find actors willing to commit to the theatre, remain relatively impoverished, and say farewell to the dream of fame – the narcotic bought and sold mostly in New York and L.A. The citizen - actors I’m surrounded by in Philadelphia are unusual in America. They have chosen to stay in one place, whereas most are driven to restlessly move up what ever phantom ladder they are sold.

But my experience in Jason has led me to believe that it is imperative that we actively foster the Citizen Actor paradigm. We need to give actors hope that there is a meaningful and valuable life for us right where we choose to live. Once free of the crushing obsession to become the next Jim Carrey or Jodie Foster, we can be free become the actors we were meant to become, and to enjoy the work of Hollywood, feeling bound to movie actors as fellow craftsmen, part of the wide fraternity, and sorority, of actors. In the Rooms, we might call adopting the Citizen Actor paradigm being “right size” – we let go of an inflated, false self and live in the world as we actually are. This is a concept which has nation-wide implications. I think of all the children entrapped in ghettos, brainwashed by media into believing that their only hope is to become a star of some kind. Our culture instructs us that there is no middle-ground, You either command the attention of millions or you are a failure. Our work in Jason, at People’s Light and in other theatres in the Philadelphia area is a way to say, no – I am just as common, and just as precious, as any who come to see me perform.

Inos’ last gag was to almost sit in the lap of an audience member sitting stage left, then turn and see that person, shriek in horror, and scamper off. At one of the last performances of Jason, I really landed on the kid in that particular seat. When I turned around to see who I had sat on, I remember this young boy looking at me with a strangely empty stare. Usually the kids (I almost never sat on an adult) would have these wide-eyed expressions of delight and surprise, but I remember this kid looking bored, and slightly hostile. Later in the dressing room, Ahren, who played Orpheus, said “”Good for you for squashing that little brat”.

“Why?” I asked, “Did he throw something at you?”

“No. “ Ahren replied. “He was playing a portable Playstation during the entire show”.

I remembered noticing that boy during the talk-back, staring into his lap, jabbing at a piece of plastic with the same vacant look he had given me in performance. Leaving aside the appalling fact that he was at the play with an adult who was ostensibly responsible for him, who allowed him to sit in the front row and choose his toy over us, and who should have her parenting license revoked, he represents yet another reason why theatre is so important.

The New York Times recently published a disturbing article documenting the progress of a lonely young boy from computer enthusiast to child pornography business person, using his body as bait for on-line pedophiles. Through this boy, the reporter uncovered a large network of children who were in the same business, receiving gifts from pedophiles in exchange for disrobing, and worse, in front of computer cameras. These children were frequently lured into live encounters with the pedophiles, and suffered the horrible consequences. I believe our children are in danger from childhoods of increasing isolation, in which the opportunity to gather in groups, to be witnessed by the communities they live in, and to feel what it is to bound in common experience, is under siege. The principal siege gun is the computer, aided by the vast array of other electronic equipment which allow us to live singular lives, taking care of the kinds of business we used to have do through live human beings. Children used to be members of neighborhoods, and played on the streets on the stoops with other kids, and were cared for the parents of those kids. And yes, some were preyed upon by pedophiles there too. But my point is this: the poor boy in the article is on record as saying that essential reason for his becoming a sexual object was that he craved attention. Like so many, he confused the desire of the sick people he encountered online with actual love, which was something he needed more of in his actual life. Coming to the theatre repels the loneliness bombarding our children. It used to be so much more common. All the more reason to celebrate when a group of artists commits to the spiritual exchange the theatre offers.

I believe we are sustained by the mere experience of breathing together in the same room, and this experience, which is spiritual (spirit, inspire, from the same root word meaning breath) is increased exponentially when that breath becomes rapid from excitement, or bursts into laughter, or dissolves into tears, as it frequently did this summer during July 7th, 1994 - both on stage and in the audience. In fact, I believe we are healed by this shared experience. I write in The Actor’s Way about Stanislavsky’s Rays – the spiritual energy he describes which moves from actor to actor. But they are not just for the actor. They are for the audience as well. So, in being an actor, I take part in healing some of the people in my community. I hope by sitting in that little boy’s lap, I loosened the grip of his little electronic prison. The actor-audience bond brings me back to my shamanistic lineage, and I embrace it. I am an agent of spiritual transformation.

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.