The Crucible

Sooz and I are in the car. It’s either 8:45 a.m., or 6:45 p.m. Either we’ve just dropped Griff and Ella off at school and day care, or we’ve left them with the babysitter. We are on our way to the woods of Salem, 1692, again.

Listen.

I’m chattering away about The Actor’s Way – fretting about the slow-motion publishing process. I’ve finished the appendix, which came in at around 310 entries. Three tremendous blurbs have come in about the book from three heroes of mine: Doug Wright, playwright; Earle Gister, acting teaching and Parker J. Palmer, writer, teacher and Quaker. I’ve posted the blurbs on a website I’ve set up to market the book and myself as a teacher and workshop leader. It is my new entrepreneurial effort, though it is drifting, unnoticed, in cyberspace right now. Like so much else in m y life, it is embryonic, growing in amniotic darkness, it’s birth some uncertain time in the future, the baby’s shape unknown.

Sooz is driving and I’m thinking out loud about the workshops I want to create based on the book, and worrying that I may not have the time to see them come to life if I get one of the teaching jobs I’m suddenly up for. Two secondary schools, one in Annapolis one in Lancaster, PA have sought me out, and for the first time I have interviews lined up. It will need to be an extraordinary offer to have us move to Annapolis, but I am in no position to turn down interest like this. Then there’s Arcadia, and the possibility of an adjunct position there, while I apply to the full time position they’re supposed to advertise for 2007. That plus the Actor’s Way workshops might make for a great fall, but no acting. Unless I get cast in Imaginary Invalid, which I had a surprisingly good audition for. Sooz and I auditioned together for a director she’d work for and I had not, and Sooz thinks I’m going to get cast and she isn’t. How might that impact the teaching, the workshops, the moving? Fret, fret, fret.

But we’re not moving. At least not for financial downsizing reasons. It’s become clear that we love out little home too much, and we are blessed, absolutely blessed by a family willing to subsidize us for a bit longer. I have to swallow my pride and accept the help, in spite of my profound desire to be self-sufficient. This is artistic subsidy in America, I think. The lucky ones have families that help them. The less lucky have unemployment insurance. When there is no work, these are our options: families and the dole. If I take one of these secondary school jobs, we’ll move. The Lancaster school is one hour west of the theatre, an hour and a half from home. I could work there and we could stay connected to our communities, but live a little further west. Annapolis means making new connections to new communities.

I have always loved the drive to the theatre. In spite of the encroaching McMansions, there are still some places where the rural beauty of this old farmland still glows in rich browns. It’s warm, (“warm as blood beneath the clods” say Proctor in one of my favorite lines) and Sooz and I soak in the soft eruption of spring. The magnolias are squeezing out their petals through furry buds, the most erotic vegetative event I know.

Sooz tells me a dream. She was in Edinburgh, a place we both love. She discovered she had cancer on her tongue. She recalls feeling in the dream a fierce determination to get through it, to fight her way to health and well being. It seems significant, I tell her, that the cancer was on her tongue. What a ghastly image, and it seems strongly connected to her work as an actor. Or possibly it has to do with a block she feels in speaking something she feels she needs to speak. But it was her will to get through that was most significant, she tells me. This is the feeling she has retained.

We pass a Toyota Prius – the fantasy car of the moment. “Look!” says Sooz, “isn’t that Susan McKey driving that Prius?”

“Yep,” I reply “and damn she looks fine.” This is one of the financial fantasy games we play. The other popular one is when we drive by some great beautiful old house.

“Hey,” I’ll say, “isn’t that the one the rich Quakers are going to leave us in their will?”

We resist the call of caffeine, and arrive at the theatre about an hour before curtain. I check us both in (she never remembers). I change into sweats and go to the stage to stretch and warm up. The sweats are both practical and psychological. I hate rolling around on the floor in my street clothes, I like the way the sweats hide the shape of my body, and allow me to release and pooch out in the right places. They also help me begin the gradual transformation into the Reverend John Hale. They make me less identifiably Ben. They are a transitional uniform.

There are a group of us who regularly meet on the stage for our warm up rituals. We are warming up the stage as much as ourselves, tuning it like an enormous wooden instrument waiting to be strummed. Each of us has a different ritual. Sooz goes off to one side, stretches and whoops her way in to full vocal fettle. Peter and Ceal do what looks like a kind of Tai Chi, accompanied by fully supported wailing arpeggios. Chris goes out into the house and lies down between the seats and makes noises like a Tibetan monk’s chant, all low and growly and monosyllabic, but when you listen more closely you hear the words to some if his lines. I begin on my back, feet against the wall of the set, and drop my knees over into diagonal stretches. Then over to the folded leaf, then all fours and more back stretches, with the legs reaching out behind me in alternation. Then the slow uncurl to standing, then jiggling, neck rolls and gentle arpeggios, possibly some resonator work, though with the length of the run, the fatigue of the schedule and the demands of the role, I am careful not to push any part of my vocal warm up. Then I use some of Hale’s speeches for articulation warm up. I think I am driving some of my cast mates a bit nutty with the repetition of the speeches I use. Jeb came up to me the other day and said with playful sarcasm, “Glad you’re still working on the that one, Ben!” But I need to use Hale’s language. I need to get it in my mouth, to feel its sound rolling around my tongue and teeth like food.

Looking at my friends and fellow artists bouncing and rolling around on the stage like a bunch of asylum inmates, I think of what my accountant said to Sooz and me as he helped us untangle our financial situation. In the midst of a great combined fret from both of us, he took us off guard by leaning forward to us both and saying, “You know, I handle about 20 theatre artists in this community, as well as a wide variety of other types. People with tons of money, people with very little, professionals of all kinds. But you guys, I mean you theatre types, are the most dedicated to your work, the most organized with your finances and the most underpaid an under-appreciated of any of my clients.” That night during the warm-up, I felt like stopping everyone and telling them this story, but instead held it close and basked in the warm sensation of our group.

At half-hour, I usually open my iBook and check email. Sometimes I plug in the headphones and rock out to something. Speed of Sound returned to my life recently again. I was cranking it in the car with Griff, who listened intently. “What’s flying at the speed of sound Dad?” he asked.

“Planets.” I answered. “Planets are flying at the speed of sound”. Griff asked if he could borrow X&Y, then played “Speed of Sound” in his room for a few days. Have I told you, friends, about my spiritual song of the moment? “Clarity” by John Mayer

I worry
I weigh three times my body
I worry
I throw my fear around
But this morning
There's a calm I can't explain
The rock candy's melted, only diamonds now remain

By the time I recognize this moment
This moment will be gone
But I will bend the light pretending
That it somehow lingered on

And I will wait to find
If this will last forever
And I will wait to find
If this will last forever
And I will pay no mind
Well it won't and it won't because it can't
It just can't
(It's not supposed to)

Was there a second of time I looked around?
Did I sail through or drop my anchor down?
Was anything enough to kiss the ground
And say I'm here now?
And she is here now

So much wasted in the afternoon
So much sacred in the month of June
How bout you?

And I will wait to find
If this will last forever
And I will wait to find
That it won't and it won't and it won't
And I will pay no mind
Worried bout no rainy weather
And I will waste no time
Remaining in our lives together

I play it whenever I need a lift. It speaks to me of the mysterious intersession of the Holy Spirit, what we in recovery call serenity. It comes unannounced and seemingly undeserved. And, like all things we love, it whispers of its immanent departure as it arrives, making the time it lingers so much sweeter. The song calls me to be present, just in the moment I’m in, and available to God. I fantasize about standing in meeting for worship and singing it a capella. I have also recently come back to Blue. I discovered Joni Mitchell backwards, beginning with Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm, and Blue is so personal I have to be careful not to listen to it when I’m going to meet people. I arrive altered and odd. I had another one of those crying-while-driving jags listening to “The Last Time I Saw Richard” the other day and came to a therapy session with tear stains on my cheeks. But backstage it’s usually the Head Banger playlist, or one called Funky Nuts (James Brown, Earth Wind & Fire, Prince, etc.)

Chris pretends I’m not wearing headphones and will tell me a joke as if they’re not in my ears. Sometimes I worry that the guys in the dressing room think I’m anti-social. But I have realized with this play how there is a very private aspect to my experience as an actor which I guard and cherish. And the mysterious approach to that first step on stage has a sequence for all of us, and mine is a bit solitary. I feel like an airplane leaving the gate and heading for the runway. I’m not the pilot, or a passenger. I’m the airplane. Chris absolutely needs to be a jester in the dressing room – and he is delightful. It’s so strange to be convulsed in laughs at something he’s said backstage, and then moments later be onstage with him as Proctor, all scowling fear and smoldering violence. I have most of the costume on by five minutes to places.

When Chaz, the stage manager, shouts “Places!” the wig goes one, spirit gum in big dots beneath my widow’s peak and on both temples. Lenny, who plays Tituba, shouts “Take wings, everyone!” Hale enters about 20 minutes into the first scene. There’s usually a cup of coffee for me in there somewhere backstage. As the play begins, I begin “background listening” to the voices coming over the monitor into the dressing room, charting the play’s forward motion, and synchronizing it to the airplane’s journey to lift off.

“Where is my wood, then?” demands Rev. Parris, and backstage I put on my greatcoat and hat. I flip my mane of auburn hair over the back of the collar. This beautiful coat was built for me by the costume shop. It is made of a rich blue wool, and based on a pattern Marla used for a coat she made for me when I played Lucio in Measure for Measure eight years ago. So the Rev. Hale’s coat is part pimp. I like that for reasons I cannot explain. I move to the green room and being pacing. This is part habit, part warm-up ritual, part prep for Hale, who comes barging into the Parris house after riding five miles from Beverly. He enters carrying a great stack of heavy books. I need to feel like I’ve been moving. I shake out my hands and mutter some of my lines, keeping the food fresh in my mouth. Lenny sits quietly, getting ready to come on as the slave and be scape-goated, the most vulnerable person in the community branded the first witch.

If it’s a morning show, my cue is Parris: “What, are we Quakers?” It’s an authentic Quaker joke written by Miller (though I’m not sure he intended it as such). Philadelphia audiences give it a hearty laugh at night, but the kids don’t get it. If it’s an evening show the cue is Putnam: “A moment, Mr. Proctor . . . “ I sweep the stack of books off the props table and head into the darkness of the wings. The airplane is pointing down the empty expanse of runway now, engines going to full throttle. God be with me, God be through me, I whisper, I am your faucet, turn me on. Giles Corey: “Come on John, let’s drag your lumber home!” Four steps, through the door and bright lights. My wheels leave the earth. I take wings.

Submitted to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Never published.

***

What happens when a play gets panned by a critic? I have long suspected that, in our thriving artistic community in Philadelphia, the answer is: not much. We are blessed in this city by an audience community that seems not to sway with the critic’s bluster. Since I arrived on the scene in 1994, I am not aware of a play closing in Philadelphia because of a bad review. If you are a part of the theatre community – as I am – a bad review is read with a kind of horrified wonder as long as it’s not your play being panned. I read them guiltily. I can’t take my eyes off them, the way I stare at an awful car accident or a wounded animal. Quite often, I am outraged. More often than not it is my friends that are being pilloried. But more and more, I think: what’s the point? What purpose does art criticism serve in the 21st century? More specifically, how does it serve the community of art makers and art viewers a newspaper serves? From what I can tell, most newspapers view art criticism as simply the expression of their critic’s opinion about something he or she saw. But then I am led to ask, why is this worth printing? What is it about critics that makes their opinions worth taking note of? And, what else might be possible, were the simple expression of an opinion deemed not enough?

When a play you are in is panned, it’s gut-check time. One of the great challenges for the actor (at least actors who read reviews – like me) is that we still have to go on. I had the opportunity to witness this phenomenon recently after reading this paper’s nasty review of People’s Light & Theatre’s production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, in which I play the Reverend Hale (for the record, I was not mentioned in the review). I use the word nasty intentionally, as intentionally as the critic sought to wound various artists associated with the production, and impugn the theatre which mounted it. I use the word nasty since an editor at this paper signed off on the headline of the review: “’Crucible’: a puny production of a powerful play”. I use the word nasty since in her review, the critic never acknowledged the subjective nature of her response to the piece, but rather used the declamatory language of most criticism with which to pass judgment. This kind of language leads to two deceits perpetrated upon the readers: 1) the notion that any work of art can be objectively judged “good” or “bad”, much less “puny”, “plodding” and “disappointing”, words she chose to describe our production, and 2) that the critic is the judge.

Newspapers seem to have a great deal invested in allowing their critics to simply pass judgments on what they see and then leave it at that, as if, because their paychecks say Knight-Ridder on them (for instance) their opinions automatically acquire a kind of infallibility. This follows a notorious tradition best exemplified by New York critics like John Simons and Clive Barnes, whose pans were works of vicious entertainment in themselves. Indeed, reading the review of The Crucible, it occurred to me that perhaps this is the point: to entertain readers by artfully maligning a local production with clever quips and surgically applied bitter wit. It’s the kind of entertainment that appeals to our baseness, in the same way that TV shows like The Apprentice or American Idol do, which trade on public humiliation.

We rallied the day after that review came out. We performed that morning for 400 high-school students from Norristown and Delaware Valley Friends School. That night, we played to a nearly full house of ticket buyers. In both shows, I was struck with the force of the performances. I have experienced this before: it’s a kind “shout out” to the critic, in which the ensemble gathers and releases it’s indignation in a more focused performance. In a perverse way, the critic inspires greater artistry through our shared loathing of what she wrote. I was also struck in those shows with the stillness with which the play was received. An actor learns to read audiences, and there is a kind of listening that has tension in it, like a taught string before it’s plucked. This is how our play is being heard. It is no small feat to keep teenagers still and engaged for two and half hours. That they were soaking up the ethical force of Miller’s play made their attention all the more rich, all the more compelling.

I am pleased to share the stage with some of Philadelphia’s brightest young actors, people like Jeb Kreager, Annie Berkowitz, Kim Carson, Kristy Chouniere and Julianna Zinkel. They have chosen to stay and work in our city because they believe in what Philadelphia has to offer artists: world class performance opportunities and the possibility of living the semblance of a normal life while you pursue your calling. What a shame if criticism will not grow up with them, evolving into something approaching a civil dialogue, in which the critic treats the thing criticized with respect at least, and perhaps even compassion, even when the thing is found wanting.

What happens when a play is panned? We bristle for a moment, then we shrug and say, the critic didn’t like it. The review then becomes irrelevant. It’s an empty event. And this emptiness carries over and informs the good reviews as well (also for the record, our production has gotten a couple of those too). None of it seems to matter anymore. It’s a shame, because I feel there is an opportunity being missed.

What if the critic spoke to a theatre’s history, it’s stated mission, the careers of one or two of the artists involved? What if the critic saw the thing reviewed against a wider sky, one in which the trajectory of the artist or the theatre might be witnessed and evaluated? What if the critic rose to the level of wise educator, who is able to speak to our successes and failures against what we have done before, and where we claim to be going? What if critics acknowledged the power they have to influence the tone of aesthetic dialogue in the community, and take responsibility for being leaders, setting an example we would be glad to follow? What if we were actually speaking to each other? Critics must criticize, and this is not a plea for nice-only reviews. But how are we in the theatre community to take a critic seriously when we aren’t treated with respect in print? What weight should we give one person’s opinion? After all, there’s a joke about opinions, and the punch-line goes like this: everyone has one.

We opened last night. It’s a word that Miller uses in a Quaker fashion in the play: “I want to open myself!” screams Abigail when begins to “confess” to seeing the devil. “Proctor, let you open with me now” I say to him in 2.1. The Quakers speak of openings a great deal, as a kind of spiritual peeling open, when God rushes in and revelation abounds.

Someone in the Crucible cast has approached me to talk about recovery from alcoholism. Last night I gave him a manual of sorts, wrapped in brown paper, as an opening night gift. Is it a sign that, in good Quaker fashion, I am letting my life speak? Our opening went well. I was a bit too careful through some sections, marking it so as to be sure I didn’t screw anything up. Susan has taken young Claire under her wing, and is teaching her how to warm up before each show. I am reminded of me and Mark in Jason. I had an interesting talk about crying with Julianna who plays Abigail. She is fresh in the revelation that it’s okay not to cry, and that we make way too big a deal about “drying up”. I have gone through a great journey with this. My inability to cry in a scene I selected to work on from The Seagull sent me into therapy in drama school.

I find myself crying occasionally at the end of the courtroom scene, when utter chaos has broken out, and the girls led by Abigail have succeeded in using hysteria to hijack the proceedings. Here was my small opening the other night: my reaction to this moment is somehow connected to a desperate woman I never knew, my grandmother Lillian Lehman Lloyd. She was my father’s mother, and was a deeply frustrated actress and, though there was no language for such a diagnosis at the time, she was also probably manic depressive at least, bi-polar at worst. Beginning when my father was in high school, she began to behave self-destructively and attempted suicide several times, finally succeeding while my father and mother were on their honeymoon. She put all of her dramatic aspiration into my Dad, who while not an actor, nevertheless translated her desires into a deep interest in stage management and production. I have always felt that my life as an actor is in some mysterious, D.N.A. kind of way connected to her thwarted dreams. As the girls whip around the courtroom in screaming possession, I feel Lillian’s insanity, born of her crushed creativity the world had no home for in the mid twentieth century.

I find myself crying more regularly at the end of the play, usually prompted by Proctor yelling “Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life!” It is a moment of great pathos which Chris delivers painfully. As in Quaker meeting, I am moved not only by Chris’s ministry, but also by my being surrounded by those I love: Ceal as Rebecca Nurse and of course Susan as Elizabeth, tears dripping down their faces. I am responding as much to the collective feeling around me as I am to anything I may be generating inside. My friends open me up and God rushes in.

Peering out into the audience through my tears last night, I noticed the grey hairs filling the first several rows of the theatre. The thought flitted through my mind: it looks like a Quaker meeting, all those grey hairs. The two gatherings I love the most, the theatre and meeting for worship, are populated mostly by the elderly. I must do something about that.

We have our first audience tonight, and my wig will finally arrive. It has been waylaid in some currier purgatory in Baltimore, so I have been one of two crew-cut men in a cast of Puritan long hair. I’m finally digging myself out of the grip of this dreadful cold I have had for a week, and which has spread through the cast. Mark, who plays Cheever and was the Dame in the Panto, listened to the hacking coughs from the dressing rooms and shouted “Jesus! We should do Long Day’s Journey while we’ve got the plague! It sounds like a TB ward back here!” Graham, who plays Danforth, has been hit hard by it. He and I have had an intense interaction, as we and David try to untangle the degree of animosity that develops between Hale and Danforth. David feels that making it too personal diminishes the play, making it somehow about a fight between two men. Playing the lines Miller gives Hale in the last scene, and experiencing the near contempt with which Hale is treated in the courtroom in the previous scene, I have a very hard time seeing it as anything but personal. Add to this the reality that Hale feels he is directly responsible for the deaths of people he knows are innocent, and it makes for a high-octane encounter.

You see, I think Miller meant to condemn Danforth, and meant to give Hale some lines of righteous indignation. But in an effort to “complicate” things, David is trying strenuously to work against Danforth being the “bad guy”. But he is the fucking bad guy, I want to shout. Because of him and his attachment to his own authority and the rigid principles it rests on, good people are being murdered! Of course, Graham doesn’t see it that way, nor should he, nor would I playing him. So we have two, smart, stubborn, forceful actors running full tilt at each other. Then it occurs to me that Danforth resembles the Full Professor I ranted about in these pages previously: full of himself and feeding his own ego by obliterating any point of view but his own. No wonder I want to leap at him in the jail. The smug asshole denied me tenure.

Graham is a good enough actor to meet me in that weird nether world actors work in sometimes, in which the fight on stage colors the relationship off stage. We both bring that much of ourselves to what we do. I worry that it’s affecting our friendship. We have taken to making choices on stage that we both know will incense the other – Graham apologized recently for imitating me to my face in the courtroom scene, and then seeing the blind fury pass like a shadow across my countenance. I delight in excoriating him in the jail and making him wait as I squeeze every bit of derision I can out some choice words. I tried once, in response to a note from David, to go for something more spiritual, more Christ-like, but then got the note that it was playing too slow, and when pace is put back into it, it becomes antagonistic again. We have been looking for the proper balance since we began working on it nearly a month ago. Recently, David has counseled me to invest more in Hale’s heart, in his genuine desire to help people, in his intuitive sense of the character of others. This is where we began, I think, but sometimes rehearsal is a journey with its own mysteries, ones we can’t divine until three weeks into the run.

David has spent a lot of time directing me with big ideas, ones that I have engaged in. But sometimes I wonder: is it good directing to have these kinds of soul-searching conversations with actors about their characters. Many directors have been taught not to “ask for results”, like “make it angrier/softer/more grief-stricken/more heart-felt”. But sometimes this is all the actor wants. David has a wonderful phrase, that goes something like “here’s what I’m looking for, you can organize it any way you like”. I love that – it makes his goals clear and respects the inner territory of the actor. To me it is the essence of the actor/director relationship: here’s what I’m looking for, you organize it any way you want. It needs clear and articulate directors and skillful, flexible actors to make it work.

I have had a lot of time to witness the way actors work. This is a sizable cast, and I have been struck by how different our methods, habits and processes are from each other. Basically, I discern two processes: the stop and go process, and the barge ahead process. I am of the latter. Some of us are inveterate cut-ups, and there is a hallowed place for fooling around in rehearsal. And yet, I have felt frustrated by the way such behavior wastes time, an especially sharp pain for me given the way I am missing my kids and all the other things I cannot get to in my life. Some actors are like creative surgeons, and proceed at a slow and thoughtful pace, pausing a great deal to consider the next move, asking the director a question which leads to million others. Here too, I grow impatient. And then I began to see in my reactions to others my own way: I am drawn to live in the moments uninterrupted, and explore in great swaths, before pausing to reflect on what has just transpired. I find it very hard to explore half-way.¬ I need to be in the thing as fully as I can. I feel my way through moments, as opposed to think my way through them, and I need to experience the kind of collective energy Mary Warren speaks of in order to sort it out creatively. I have also become aware of what a liability my impatience is, although I am getting better at masking it in rehearsal, so that I don’t groan and roll my eyes quite as much when something grinds to a halt.

I have been startled by Susan’s extraordinary work as Elizabeth. From the very beginning, she cannot play certain scenes and moments without the tears streaming down her face. She confided that she feels embarrassed by this, and I told her she has gift that many actors would give their eye-teeth for. She is like a solar flare when her feelings erupt out of her, and I have watched other actors shrink away from her in intimidation, or drop out of the scene because the emotion she brings to it is too much for them handle. It is one of the play’s great strengths that, in the midst of this historical drama set the 17th century, there is this strikingly modern marital relationship. In an exquisite bit of casting, Susan is working opposite the actor who just played her comic love interest in the Panto – Chris. Chris works very technically at first and is a born jester, but he brings a odd darkness to Proctor. Susan works more like me: instinctually, feeling her way through things and wanting to work uninterrupted. They have been a study in contrasts in rehearsal, but are making beautiful music together anyway.

Being in this play with Susan has been wonderful for us. Despite the financial uncertainty in our lives, we have returned to the life we were living when we first fell in love: two local actors making a go of it. The difference is that now, we have two kids, two cars and a mortgage. But traveling to the theatre together, talking about the play, about moments or people that frustrate us, all of it has been fulfilling. And sharing the stage and a couple of wonderful scenes together has been mutually inspiring. It’s remarkable how little I feel of my deep connection to her when I am Hale and she Elizabeth. It’s not that I ever “forget” I’m looking at my wife, but rather that Elizabeth Proctor and John Hale are so much more interesting then and there. She worried once about how I would feel watching her and Chris kiss. But far from feeling jealous, I remember a moment when they weren’t kissing and I thought they should have been. I almost shouted “Kiss her, you big dolt!”

The mentoring continues. Susan was intentionally put next to a young actress in the women’s dressing room to be a calming influence. Kristy wants to have dinner with me and Susan, and find out “how we do it”. It reminds me of Jenny saying she wants to be like me. The girls in the play have all bonded, and within this young group there is kind sisterhood occurring, in which older ones like Kristy frequently embrace the littler ones like Claire, who at 14 is playing Betty Parris. All of this multi-generational leading and following has made me feel the ancient form of the family companies, like the commedia companies of 16th century Italy. It’s no wonder so many actors make the theatre their surrogate family. For Citizen Actors who stay in one place, the bonds between artists are almost as deep (and depending on one’s family of origin, sometimes deeper).