The Crucible

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.

I need to record something that happened at the end of The Crucible. It was significant to me and it didn’t make it into this blog. During the talkbacks, a frequent question would be, “Why is the play named The Crucible?”

“Well,” I would reply, with great authority, “the word ‘crucible’ means a tipping point. Imagine a seesaw. The place where it balances is the crucible. So Miller is using the word to illustrate the way the choices in the play can go one way or the other.” Sounds good doesn’t it? The only problem is that it’s complete bullshit. I have no idea where I got this idea from. But I know I didn’t make it up. I had this distinct memory of someone telling me this. Recently, I heard a piece from the radio show This American Life about the dangers of a little bit of information. In the show, a person talks about writing for “Jackass Magazine” when they go on and on about something they know very little about. I was writing for Jackass Magazine, in front of my peers and thousands of young people, for about two months.

By the end of the run, some in the cast began gingerly approaching me. “Ben?” they would say, “I checked up on it and I can’t find that definition of the word ‘crucible’ anywhere.” My first reaction was bluster.

“Bosh! I’ll find it and bring it in for you.” Then I went looking. Imagine my distress.
So after the very last show, I gathered everyone together and made a comical and public apology for my mistake.

This was significant for two reasons. One was that no one ever told me I was mistaken. I think this had to do with the authority I generated when I spoke. This is a dangerous ability, the ability to sound authoritative even when one is full of it. I could raise some questions about politicians and academics, but I won’t. You get my drift. I was alarmed that I had fallen into this trap myself, and it was a useful warning.

The second reason it was significant was that I apologized for it. This is relatively new behavior for me. I hate admitting I’m wrong. I’d rather eat something disgusting, all the while proclaiming it’s tastiness, than admit someone’s assessment of it was better than mine. I am proud of that confession and apology. It is a sign of progress for me.

“Whore!” screams Proctor, and he rushes to take down Abigail, who is shaking from a “chill wind” she says Mary has sent upon her. In the ensuing speech, after Willard has pulled him off her, Hale gets the answer: “I have known her!” screams Proctor. With this admission, Hale’s search is over. He suddenly understands the entire proceeding in a way he never could before. Standing in the midst of the courtroom chaos, images flash back before me of my visit to the Proctors: Elizabeth’s strange behavior whenever Abigail is mentioned, Proctor blanking on the adultery commandment, Mary Warren’s recounting of Abbey watching her make the poppit. Worse, I think back to my own arrival, and Abigail listening to what I say about the signs of witchcraft, and watching the drama of my effort with Tituba. It’s too much to say that Hale thinks he is to blame right then, but there begins a creeping sense of responsibility - and his new objective: save the innocent. This is his first objective in 2.1, he discovers it at the very end of the scene and it drives him through to the end of the play. And like all good objectives, he fails to achieve it.

Searching, searching. It is what I am doing in my life . It what Hale is doing in his. The actor and the character are enjoined. I want to know what God wants of me, how I may I best be of service to Him? This is precisely Hale’s mission too, but on different terms. I am full of portent, I live in the sense of something about to happen that will affect me and ones I love deeply. So does Hale. But his sense has more fear in it than mine, though we are both ride on the spiritual cusp of the unknown.

Also in 2.1 I witnessed some the worst actor behavior in performance ever. Suffice to say that there were private agendas and aesthetic vendettas being executed on stage in front of audiences against other actors and witnessed by the whole company. That the play didn’t come grinding to a halt and a fight break out between actors was miraculous. It took some stern lectures from Chaz to put an end to it all. The gossip around it backstage nearly became intolerable. I was not immune. But I finally had to let someone know that I wasn’t interested in passing judgment on others. Of course I do pass judgment on others, but only with my wife and closest friends, and not while the play is up and running. We make light of the different ways actors work. But these differences can manifest in antagonistic ways, and simmering conflicts over process can evolve into bizarre ad libs and warped staging in performance. It is my observation that older actors are particularly prone to this, as convinced and set in their ways as they are.

I had about five ten minutes between my 2.1 exit and my 2.2 entrance – less for the morning shows. I change shirts and return to the blue great coat, flipping my hair forward now so it cascades around my head down to the top of my chest, giving me an oddly effeminate air. Hale is changed when he enters the jail. I’ve already told you, friends, about my desire to have him arrive shattered. The compromise we have come to is a kind of end-of the-rope directness. The word “gibbet” is my cue, and for the forth time, I enter the wings, passing my wife in the greenroom as she covers herself in stage dirt for her final scene. Only Proctor and Hale are in all four scenes: the insider and the outsider. Jeb comes up behind me in the darkness, but there is no ass-slapping now. All is quiet focus and marshalling of resources.

I barge into an outburst of Parris’. Danforth nails me with an icy blue stare. Here begins a rapid fire exchange of tactics. He compliments me. I make a demand: pardon them. He bristles. I beg him. He lectures me. I am defeated, until – he wants Elizabeth here, to plead with her husband. A ray of light. I sooth him. He condescends to me. The straw breaks. I challenge him. He faces off with me. I release, shaming him, slamming him. He defies me. I scare him. He retreats, I heap it on – and there’s Elizabeth. He entreats me to speak with her, this woman covered in the shit of the jail, this woman who was so strong and proud three months ago. This woman who’s life, I think, I’ve ruined. I beg her. I plead with her. Nothing. Then Danforth goes to her and – surprise – she relents. Proctor comes, a bent and twisted piece of wreckage. Guantonimo Bay, I think. The jails of Bagdad. We leave the Proctors alone.

In the green room, Graham wants to talk about the scene. I don’t. Ceal sits as Rebecca in quiet contemplation. I am sure she is in Quaker worship. I sit near her in spiritual affinity. Something is either building in me or it isn’t. Either way I want to be still and open to its arrival if it comes.

“Proctor will confess!” shouts Hathorne and we gather offstage. A moment and we stream on, Danforth in the lead. I am transfixed by Proctor, this beaten man. Here begins another long passage of watching and listening for me. Some nights it is like a slow-motion wave of feeling, cresting with Proctor’s howl “Because it is my name!” and then tears spilling down my cheeks, choking me as I watch he and Rebecca clutch each other on their way to the gallows. Some nights, when Sooz and I are left on stage together alone for the final image of the play, my last line is a sobbing mess of snot and tears, and my collapse to the stage is pure and genuine exhaustion. But other nights the wave does not crest, the tears do not fall, and all is splendid pretence; the skill of sensitive dissembling all actors must make their peace with (indeed, there are some who feel this is better than the great emotional release, and I have shared the stage with them). Either way, one hopes the audience leaves feeling that they have not been taken by shysters, but rather taken by artists to someplace terrible and true, and haunting in its familiarity.

My emotional relationship to this final moment waned as the production went on. This is natural. The thing that reliably moves you to tears will grow common through repetition, no matter how skillfully it is brought to life. And yet there was a constant opening that happened to me in these final awful moments, even though it was not reliably manifest in tears, and its consistency was bred from the love of the actors I was on stage with more than the story being told. It was the look on Chris’s face, and Ceal’s that knocked the wind of out of me. It was the personal connections between these human beings that generated the feeling. The night before the final show, Chaz read a selection about community. There are two communities at work in those final moments: Salem’s and People’s Light’s. And the interplay between them makes something greater than the sum of its parts. That final show, I was a mess at the end.

But I was also led to this thought: that just as the emotion of a moment dims for an actor over time, so too the repetitive witness of horror leads to numbing in us all, and this has implications in our culture, in which horror is the stuff of mass entertainment, and our children are raised watching dramatized killings. Part of what was so poignant about The Crucible was inhabiting the innocence of these people, for whom a child who sleeps a lot may be in the Devil’s grasp. We are numb to horror now, and so there is barely a horror left that will move us to action, and along with horror, we have lost our wonder: of the earth, it’s creatures and of each other. Acting asks us to find that wonder again, to hold it and light it ablaze, and warm the weary who come to see it. Acting asks us to enchant an audience often resistant to enchantment.

We have banished mystery in favor of the comfort of logical answers and rational processes. We are slaves to the tyranny of judgment, in which God’s glorious grey is separated into clear and boring black and white by the tincture of intellectualism. This dry approach has crept into our creative lives as well, leading us to the error that we can understand a creative act before we enact it. Our minds trick us into comfort, but it is a false comfort, and the faithful cannot abide it. Because faith explores mystery, admits doubt, seeks wonder. Faith says there is something bigger than my brain, and I worship it.

During a talkback with a high school audience after the show, a young person asked: “How has this show affected you spiritually?” Somehow, over the course of the talkbacks, I became the One who answers the God questions, and on that day I surprised myself by saying the following: “As a Christian, I found this play deeply challenging”. As a Christian. The words just flew out of me, so many little birds bursting from the bush. I have been born again. He is mine, I claim Him, I am his Friend.

Sooz and I are out of costume and climbing back into the car. I drive now, the designated one, as she sips a beer or glass off wine. We speak of tragedy. A person in our extended artistic community was killed in a car crash coming home from seeing The Crucible. Neither Sooz or I knew her well, but I can’t stop thinking about possibly of being part of the last images she held inside, and about Caesar’s molecules. On the ides of March, in physics classrooms across the country, they talk about Caesar’s molecules. It is apparently a statistical certainty each time we inhale, we breath in a few of the molecules that Caesar exhaled just after saying “Et tu, Brute?”

The Pennsylvania countryside slips by under the warm spring night, and I inhale from an open window, trying to taste the molecules that left my dead comrade’s lungs in her last moment, trying to taste the ones that floated about Golgotha on a hot day in Palestine some 2,000 years ago, or the ones that left Burbage’s lips on the banks of the Thames, the first time he played the Dane. We are all One. Revival will return soon, and I have interviews with institutions which may result in us packing up our things and leaving this community behind us. But tonight, warm in the glow of a job well done, grateful to be alive with my wife by my side, I cannot fathom anywhere else I’d rather be.

Faith is being blindfolded and led to a diving board. “It’s nothing but pillows and mattresses below!” shout persuasive and familiar voices. “Jump!” I keep thinking I’ve arrived at the diving board. But then He leads me to a new one. And I don’t think I’ve jumped . . . yet. Or have I?