Recovery

Dear Readers,

I have recently archived many entries from fall '05 through fall '06 which were orginally part of a journal I was keeping. They cover, among other things: my work on the following plays, Jason and The Golden Fleece, The Crucible and The Imaginary Invalid; reflections on the workshop I created called "Revival: Meetings for Theatre"; various pedagogical concerns related to teaching acting; the life of the "citizen actor"; my journey in recovery; thoughts about popular culture and various accounts of my Quaker and family experieinces.

I have expanded the categories to reflect these additions. These new posts can be accessed through the "older" tab in the "archives" section to the right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaking of gratitude:

Three shows performed: eight total roles.

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

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

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

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

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

Two children raised: Griffen and Ella.

One wife loved: Susan.

And the water rises . . .

One car lost: Ellex (the Accord).

One car purchased: Little Blue (the Civic).

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

One bridge mended.

And the water flows.

One father aided.

No toilets trained.

Birthdays celebrated.

Anniversaries squeezed in.

Important moments overlooked.

Mistakes made, apologies offered.

Moments of transcendent meaning seized and released.

Bitchy vendettas enacted.

Movements begun and left dangling.

I am the faucet . . .

Awesome circles of community created.

Whispers of quiet affirmation passed along.

Sleepless nights of anxiety passed through.

Doubt and despair wrestled with.

Doubt and despair vanquished quizzically.

Poems written and tears shed.

Gales of laughter.

Farts and awkwardness.

Faith considered and pursued.

God under all, through everything,

and I am the faucet

turn me on turn me on

be with me, be through me,

up from mother earth, Your water,

I am the faucet, you are the Source,

be through me, flowing,

running down streams,

filling ponds to drink from

and the heartbreak of emptiness everywhere,

filling us all to overflow,

so our waters mingle and roll

in great warm rivers,

one water

out -

out into the unfathomable sea.

The other Disney movie Ella is obsessed with – even more than Lion King – is Beauty and The Beast. This was not on my mind when I wrote the Spring integration, but the Spring integration was on mind the other day when I found myself alone with Ella for a few hours, and we played “Beauty and The Beast.”

I screwed up face and jutted my lower teeth out. I dropped my voice in to a raspy growl. I lumbered around like a giant ape, and all the while Ella played Belle. I tried to engineer the scenes so that, for some reason, Beast had to take a lot of naps. Ella liked this, because it allowed her to play out the “going to sleep” scenario with her on the powerful end, as the one putting some else to bed.

“Go to sleep now Beast. No crying.” she would tell me, before planting the world’s most tender little kiss on my lips. Within a minute she would wake me up. Some nap. I would pretend to cry.

“I’m hideous.”

“No, no Beast. You not hideous.” And she would kiss me some more. She pronounced “hideous” remarkably well for a three year old.

At least I’m not so hideous I can’t be on the radio. I had an interview about The Actor’s Way last Wednesday. It was for a local public radio show called “Radio Times”, which Susan and I listen to a lot. So when I showed up at the studio and was greeted by the host Marty Moss-Coane, I felt as though I was going to hang out with my cool aunt Marty in the radio station where she works and chat about some stuff we were both interested in.

I had spent the previous two weeks “rehearsing” this interview: playing out questions she might ask and answering them with glittering charm and intelligence, fielding awkward subjects (like alcoholism and tenure) with aplomb. But of course, Marty was way too sensitive to ask anything approaching an awkward question, and the questions she did ask were so germane to the book and my concerns, my effort was to pare down the 14 responses which lined up in front of me to the one or two which seemed most urgent. Marty asked questions about psychodrama and the wounded actor, about the criticism thread in the book and about what happens in acting classes. We got some call ins from all over. I left feeling kind of high from whole thing.

In the hallway afterwards, I had a comical talk with Marty’s producer, the red-haired Devora, about toilet training. It turns out she has kids about the age of mine, and had some good advice for Ella’s challenging relationship to her own poop.

“Have you tried just letting her sit in her shit for while?” she asked with charming bluntness. God I love strong women. I replied that Ella seemed to not mind that, or at least preferred it to sitting on the potty. “How about rewards?” she asked. “One piece of candy for just sitting, two for pee-pee, three for poop.”

Marty and Devora are a part of the community I serve. How I love my community.

The next day, The Crucible returned in the form of a horribly mishandled “evaluation” meeting at People’s Light. The issue at hand was my conduct in those difficult rehearsals of 2.2, in the jail, and my attachment to my initial vision of Hale the shattered man. Without getting into the whole thing, the meeting was based on second-hand information – essentially “he said, she said” stuff – and had the wounding quality of a reproach, although Abbey and Steve kept telling it wasn’t. I left feeling very hurt and confused, and resolved to go back to continue the conversation.

That night, Sooz left me and the ids to go to the Cape to be with her dad again. The end is near, I think, and death is like the haze of hot day in our lives, draping us in discomfort, blurring our vision slightly and making us want to just stay inside.

I took night off from child care top go see a festival of ten minute plays downtown, one of them by friend Michael and directed by my friend Joe, another featuring Jenny, one of our babysitters. It was a festival of the smaller companies in town, and it had the quality of a plate of hors d’oerves made by different kitchens. Some made you wanted another taste, others didn’t. One of my favorites was Heavy Metal Dance Fag, pt 2 – a riotous piece of physical theatre in which the title character did comical choreography to the likes of Guns ‘n Roses.

Then I went to a fundraiser for two local companies a The Khyber, a notorious local dive bar and music venue. There I got hang out with my “tribe”, seeing friends from the theater community who I had lost touch with, and just be a part of the merriment. To my shame, I smoked a few cigarettes that night, I strategy I frequently employ to make myself feel more “with it” when I go to bars, but, of course, don’t drink.

While there, I had my first fantasy-author moment. I was talking to a friend when a young girl, moving through the crowd at the bar, suddenly turned and stared at me.

“You’re Ben Lloyd aren’t you?” she asked. I said I was. “OhmiGod! You wrote The Actor’s Way! I’m only half way through and that book is changing my life!” I grabbed her hands and told her she had just made my whole night. She told me her name was Amanda, she was telling all her friends about the book and we talked about it for a while. You know that scene in The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, when the Grinch’s heart grows three sizes to big? Yeah. That was me. Now I have to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to my head.

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.