Showman/Shaman - Jason & The Golden Fleece

Integration

nospam@example.com (Benjamin Lloyd) — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 18:28:00 -0800

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.

On Quacting - Reflections on Revival

nospam@example.com (Benjamin Lloyd) — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 10:33:00 -0800

We have been steeped in process, without regard to result, and this has been liberating. We were free to wallow in the unknown, and as we became more comfortable with following leadings to ministry, we traced pathways into the process that others could follow and deviate from. From a carefully nurtured collective trust, we began to witness how much our process could hold, and it held anything we brought into it. Even with a constantly changing group, with no two sessions having the same people attending, there was a gathering energy. This I believe speaks to the spiritual nature of the work: something that was beyond our bodies was at play and flowing through us. We carried that Something into our explorations, and it was witnessed by the people present who recognized it and welcomed it.

The language we use to describe what we do has a direct effect on what we do, and the quality of our participation in it. It mattered that we tried to call our gatherings “meetings for theatre”, and not “workshops” or “classes”. It mattered that we spoke of “leadings” as opposed to “impulses”. It mattered that we wrestled with “discernment” and not “choices”. It mattered that we “offered ministry”, rather than “improvised” or “performed”. And it mattered that we were willing to speak of God, the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Inner Teacher, the Inner Light, the Inner Director. It mattered that we invited holy language into our work. Using this new language forced us to carefully consider our actions and words in a way we are not used to as theatre artists. And it gave our work a Holy Implication which was both baffling and provocative. I believe it led us to a deeper place than we are used to going as actors, a place we tend to stumble upon through a curious combination of circumstances in class or rehearsal, a place we long for. We were led to the place our souls speak from.

In Woolman’s journal, he describes meeting for worship with Native Americans in their tribal dwellings. There was an interpreter there, who translated the English ministry offered for the tribe’s understanding. But the chief told the interpreter this was unnecessary. When Woolman asked why, the interpreter related what the chief said: “I like to feel where the words come from”. And Woolman understood, and I think we have witnessed in Revival, that true ministry travels on something other than words; that words are seeds, but the revelation of ministry is the flower, and it comes to life not through any intellectual understanding, but rather through the sunlight and water of the Eternal passing between us, which is experienced as something more than a thought. It has powerful feeling in it. This same opening led George Fox to preach against “head learning”, and to de-emphasize Biblical interpretation in Quaker worship. And so with Revival: we used a text (Nathan The Wise) as a source of inspiration, but were free to receive the Holy Spirit through its continuing revelation to us in the very moments of our existence.

Mary Beth pointed out that, unlike conventional acting classes, it was the sharing of our experience which was the priority, rather than having the experience itself. We spend a great deal of time as actors “squeezing” – trying to have an experience on stage that feels authentic. But what we so often overlook is that we are having that experience in order to give it away. This is why understanding acting as a kind of ministry is so transforming. A minister serves something to a congregation. Paradoxically, when the actor shifts her attention from the effort to generate an experience, and instead witnesses something flowing through her to others, that authenticity is born without effort, and the artifice so often witnessed in “squeezing” actors is avoided. Here is one way in which our work may have pedagogical implications. In ignoring the vital, symbiotic relationship we have to audience, have we been teaching our young actors to rehearse, but not to perform? In other words, have we been keeping the circle closed, when we should be looking for ways to open it, so our students can offer their work to strangers, and perhaps feel Stanislavsky’s Rays flowing through them? Here is a word Peter D. instructed us on: entertain, which comes from two French words which mean “to hold between”. For the ministry to be real, it must be held by both speaker and witness.

We began our research in Quaker stillness, and this had enormous implications. We began as seekers, waiting to receive something rising up within us, or to receive something offered to us by another. This receptive state opened us and calmed us, and - for me at least - showed us the degree to which we are used to charging in to creative situations like rehearsals full of choices to share, and points of view to express. Quaker worship allowed what was essential (another important Revival word) to rise up and find expression. And what rose up seemed to come from something that was held, and then released, collectively, finding expression through the minister most ready to give it life. The stillness also generated surprise. We never knew what was going to happen. The unplanned aspect of our meetings led us to a tingling expectation. When I am well prepared, this is how I feel when entering first day meeting for worship. Can we make room for more stillness in our lives as theatre artists? This is one of the many ways our research is almost oppositional to contemporary theatre practice, driven as it is by tight schedules and the need for financial efficiency.

Revival offers an interesting investigation into the ways in which both the theatre and religion use ritual, repetition and spontaneity. The Religious Society of Friends was founded partly in reaction against the ritualized customs of the English church of the 17th century. Fox and his followers wanted to do away with “empty forms” , and he and his followers went to the opposite extreme: an absolute abolition of anything planned, read or prepared in any way. If ornate church liturgy represents the well-rehearsed musical, then Fox’s liturgy represents spiritual improvisation. To borrow a term form the ‘60s, he created a kind of holy “happening”. So the very notion of introducing something theatrical to Quaker worship is, on the face of it, contrary to original intent. When Stefan described Revival to his undergraduate Quaker theatre professor, the professor replied wryly, “You know, don’t you, that this is heresy”.

But what was Fox really objecting to? When I began coming to Quaker meetings in 1995, I was instantly struck by the theatrical tension of it: the waiting, the dramatic rise to one’s feet, the speaking to the hushed congregation, the sitting down and reflecting, sometimes in the midst of tears. I think Fox was under the common misconception that “theatrical” means “fake”. It’s the same today. Tell someone you’re an actor and many will assume you’re a good liar. Wrong – the best actors are lousy liars, because they are trained to tell the truth. Secondly, I think Fox wasn’t really objecting to the “performed” aspect of ministry at all. He himself was an astonishing speaker, if we are to believe the accounts of his ministry which have come down to us. Here is a man who burst into churches to debate the priests holding services there. Don’t tell me the man wasn’t theatrical. So what he objected to wasn’t the theatricality of ministry, but its lack of truth, its hollowness.

Some believe that the reason actors have been so reviled by so many religious traditions is that the priests felt threatened by the power of the actor’s art. The priests knew the power of performance, indeed they embraced it, and actors represented a skilled level of competition the priests wanted to eliminate. Almost all religious liturgy is theatrical in some way. Catholic mass is high theatre, and it is no wonder that many Catholic universities also have thriving theatre training programs, with priests teaching the classes. Protestant services employ theatricality and pageantry to various degrees depending on the denomination. The call and response portions of much Jewish and Christian liturgy is akin to the protagonist and chorus in a classical Greek drama. In both traditions, Jewish and Christian, music is used as means of generating spiritual energy. These are theatrical devices and create a “congregation-minister” bond analogous to the audience-actor bond described earlier. At a Unitarian Christmas service I attended, the minister sang as part of his sermon. It was moving, not in spite of his unpolished singing, but because of it. He became exquisitely human and vulnerable, and I felt the tenderness of the Advent sweep over me.

But the problem Fox identified remains. When too much attention is paid to the spectacle being made, and not on the truth being administered, you have a hollow form. It is as true in the church as it is the theater. The evangelical movement has turned some its services into productions clearly meant to entertain on a mass cultural scale. Some use Christian rock bands during the service, and anyone who has witnessed a Baptist or Pentecostal or Charismatic minister in full throat is surely witnessing performance of the highest degree. The televised services of many evangelical churches are, perhaps, the apotheosis of performed ministry in a 21st century context.

As one not raised in any faith, in any liturgy, I always felt embarrassed by the religious services I infrequently attended as a child. I felt a fraud for being there at all, and I felt that what was happening had nothing to say to me. One remarkable exception to this general experience was a Christmas service I attended with Kate, the former girlfriend I wrote about very early on. We went to her Episcopal church for Christmas Eve service while on break from college, and the minister read A Child’s Christmas in Wales aloud from the pulpit. I had never heard a work of fiction read aloud like that in a church, and it affected me deeply. Having a bit of Welsh in my blood and being an alcoholic, I have always felt close to that that magnificent disaster of a poet, Dylan Thomas. After reading, the minister asked each of us to embrace the person to our left and our right. A tidal wave of emotion swept over me and I was convulsed in sobs. It is one of my first memories of the Holy Spirit sweeping through me. It left me wiped out, and Kate’s Mom a bit distressed. It was a precursor to Revival, and the Unitarian minister I just witnessed a parallel: performed art as spiritual ministry, lighting extraordinary feeling in me.

What sets unprogrammed Quaker worship apart from much contemporary liturgy is that it does not rely on thought as much as feeling to propel its ministry. This may reflect my own bias, and I must quickly add that some in my Yearly Meeting do not share this view. In fact, my beloved meeting, being attached to a college, has long been known as a place where Quaker professors may come to meeting for worship with something thoughtful selected to read and then reflect on. To me, this is the heresy. I am perhaps extreme in this, but I regard any preparation to speak in Quaker meeting for worship as a violation of the worship itself. Preparing in this way eliminates the possibility of the intercession of the Holy Spirit, for a person has taken it upon himself to decide what will be heard in worship that morning. I believe it was Fox’s position that only God should decide what ministry is heard in meeting, a point of view I agree with.

Liturgy that uses repeated forms and customs does not need a felt experience to propel it. Let me be clear: those forms and customs may be filled with great feeling, but it is not a requirement. One can execute the stations of the cross and be thinking about lunch, if one has done it many times. In ideal Quaker worship, the felt experience is the touchstone which begins the discernment process leading to the expression of true ministry. Without feeling something quickening inside, an experienced Quaker will sit contentedly in the quiet, waiting and listening. Paid clergy, on the other hand, must show up each Sunday with something to say whether they feel like it or not. The best are able to connect to the Holy Spirit regardless, and there are many rabbis, priests and ministers who are able to make themselves available to Divine light regularly. But Quakers have traditionally felt wary of “hireling ministry”, worrying that the genuine nudge of the Inner Teacher must inevitably give way to the grind of obligation. What Revival did was remove the obligation entirely, and what we were left with were only leadings urgent enough to send us into ministry, leadings which lifted us over the obstacles of our lives, our weariness, and our fear.

That grind of obligation is an ever-present challenge for the professional actor. Towards the end of Jason, Peter turned to me one night and said, “I just don’t have it tonight”. What he meant was he had lost the joy that night – he was punching the clock. Luckily for the audience, Peter is one of many actors who has the craft to perform well anyway, and I’m sure no one in that audience that night leaned over to their seat mate and whispered “What’s the matter with that guy?” Actors fear “phoning it in”, a kind of automatic recitation of a learned pattern devoid of inner life. We are always faced with the possibility of participating in a hollow form, simply through the naked fact of doing the same play eight times a week for four to six weeks (That’s an average regional theatre run. A Broadway or touring contract can go on for years. There were actors in Cats on Broadway that were in the chorus for as long as five years.) The actor doesn’t have the Quaker option of waiting in the quiet until he feels like performing. So how can Revival help the working actor?

For me, it gets back to Mary Beth’s observation of the ministry offered in Revival – we have to connect with the service of it. As I noted before, I am a notorious audience peeker. I used to be embarrassed about this, because it used to be more about trying to see if there was someone in the audience that night who I really wanted to impress. If there was, I usually stank up the joint that night, being much more concerned with what a certain person might be thinking of me, than with the artistic life in front of me onstage. It is a mark of my spiritual evolution to report that now I peek because I dearly need to witness the assembly of the ones I am serving. It’s like gassing up before a long a road trip. The audience has always been the fuel for me: first for my vanity and ego, now for a sense of spiritual connectedness. I imagine that the best ministers in any church feel the same way: you can’t be a good minister without a congregation. And sometimes, when you’re sure you don’t have thing to offer, they show up and – woosh! – you become the faucet, turned on and pouring.

Revival reminds us that that the community being served should be the locus of our attention. Revival helps us become more and more sensitive to the divine nudge: the same one that launches into that sparkling moment on stage, the same one that lifts us to our feet in meeting for worship. Revival wards off “me acting”, since it is the sharing of it that matters. Me acting breeds the kind of fatigue we all feel backstage some nights. Me acting relies only on me to generate the effect of my performance. The theatre reminds us that we have a job to do, even when we aren’t “feeling it”, but Revival reminds us that there is still an act of spiritual exchange taking place, and if we feel that exchange happening, sometimes the Spirit will catch up with us a few minutes in to act one. Revival clarified the necessary differences between what I do for a living (act) and how I worship. I like the way the two worlds remain separate, while deeply informing each other.

And I do think the theatre, as explored in Revival, may change the way we worship. Revival showed many of us Quakers in the meetings for theatre that we hunger for a more expressive way to transmit our ministry. We hunger for a ministry which is not exclusively language-based, which lives in the illogical, in poems, symbols and movement. For so many of us, divine experience defies articulation, and feeling that with our ministry we must somehow rise and speak clearly about it relegates some of us to perpetual sitting. We might as well become Buddhists. We discovered in Revival how fully the Spirit can live in the body, and express Itself through movement. How we thrilled to full-body ministry! How deeply felt it was, both in the giving and the receiving. There is a great worry in my Yearly Meeting about attracting and keeping younger members. I have a vision of theatrical ministry, of the kind explored in Revival, being embraced and nurtured by a younger generation of Quakers. I have a vision of Quaker meetings alive with ministry both spoken and performed, glimpses of clarity and waves of mystery in a sea of continuing revelation, Sunday mornings at 10:30 a.m.

Most fulfilling for me was the way Revival confirmed the lineage of the spiritual actor. This is the tradition of the ancient Athenian performances – equal mixtures of civic dialogue, gripping drama and corporate prayer – and of the medieval passion plays. This is the tradition of the tribal shaman and radical street performer, who’s art transforms the culture that witnesses it. True, the actors who shared Revival with me self-selected as ones who were interested in our proposition: that there is a link between spiritual exploration and actor creativity. But that does not diminish the way that exploration unleashed both rich theatrical ministry in the form of the spiritual improvisations shared during meetings for theatre, as well as the soul-searching worship sharing afterwards, in which the participants bore witness to the life of the Spirit as it had manifested itself during the meeting.

Jasonpost 5: the prayer

nospam@example.com (Benjamin Lloyd) — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 18:20:00 -0800

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

Jasonpost 4: talkback

nospam@example.com (Benjamin Lloyd) — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 18:17:00 -0800

Jason and the Golden Fleece rolls along. We have just crossed the half-way point in our run. When I arrived at People’s Light, I was skeptical about the family theatre thing, and I even though I said the opposite, I felt, deep inside, that it wasn’t “serious” enough for a highly developed artist like me. But I am finding my experience with Jason to be very meaningful. The change is in me.

One of my rituals is peeking through a seam in flat which covers a stage-left entrance. I love to watch the children watching. I love to see their guileless, wide open receptivity, their open appreciation of magic, their complete giving over of their experience into our care. Even the middle-schoolers, who are so often tormented by the just-appearing concerns of being cool, sit with mouths open as Pelius comes quite close to stabbing the hero early in the first act.

When I enter as Phineus, I fall in his weakness, and had a worry early on that this would create a great laugh from the kids, who, as we know, can find humor in the misfortune of others (don’t we all from time to time?) I love the absence of that laugh, the way I feel them gathered around me both in fear of this ghostly old man, and in concern for his feebleness. And of course, I love the laughter I hear as I perform Inos, the swamp creature, who has become a consistent favorite among the ten and under crowd who see the play. There is something very child-like about Inos, and that, combined with his outrageous appearance and absurd behavior make him irresistible to children. I love that.

We have “talk backs” after each performance of Jason. This is unheard of in modern theatre, in which talk backs – fora in which the audience meet the artists – happen at most once a week, usually once a run. But it is an example of People’s Light’s commitment to its community, and especially to the children who come to the plays, that we do this after every show in the family series. It’s not required of the actors, but no one in the cast has missed one yet.

I have felt ambivalent about this feature of the family series too, worrying that it dispels the magic of the experience they have just witnessed. And in my ideal theatre, I might have the talkbacks in the lobby perhaps, except our lobby can’t hold everyone. But I have grown very fond of these actor-audience encounters. Certainly, there is an ego thrill to be on the receiving end of compliments from the audience you have just performed for. But I have also felt quite clearly that I am changing these children’s lives in very important way. When one considers the assault arts education is under in our culture, and the few opportunities most children have to see live theatre, I feel we are participating not only in an act of community bonding, but also in a ritual meant to assist in the survival of our very art form.

Recently, we had a talk back in which Inos was practically the sole topic. It’s not always this way. Sometimes it’s the Argonauts, or the boat, or Medea. But this night it was Inos. The kids wanted to know about the walk, about the noises I make. So I led the group in an “Inos master class”, demonstrating the movement I developed for the creature, getting a kid up on stage to join me, and then leading everyone in making Inos noises. That night, driving out of the parking lot, I passed three girls with a Dad, the girls chasing each other as Inos. They caught sight of me as I passed and squealed with excitement. I gave them a beaming thumbs up. I thanked God for my career, Hollywood by damned.

At another talk back, an adult asked “Why did you want to be actors?” Sometimes we get these dumbfounding questions, and usually the actor leading the talk back will toss it to someone else. That night, Peter tossed it to me. To my surprise, I answered honestly: “Well, I’m a recovering narcissist and ego maniac, “ I began, as I felt my dear actor friends around me freeze. “I was also incredibly insecure, “ I continued ‘and I needed more attention than everyone else to compensate. I found out I had a knack for acting, and that everyone lavished praise on me for it, so it was natural fit. Later, I went to New York to become famous. I really had no clearer goal than to have a version of Tom Cruise’s career.“ This was when Michael, who plays Jason, dissolved into hysterical laughter. I shot him a comically dirty look. Then I went on. “When it slowly dawned on me that the Tom Cruise career wasn’t looking likely, I crashed and burned. If I had a version of Tom Cruise’s career, I might have seen a lot of things, but I never would have seen those three girls running like Inos in the parking lot. We mustn’t desecrate our blessings by ignoring them in favor of ones that only live in our diseased fantasies. By the way, I’d still drop everything to by in a movie with Tom (I think). But I’m okay about it not happening. That’s huge progress for an actor like me.

Then I came to Philly to do a show, and was astonished to meet actors like Peter D. here, who were staying in one place, raising families and doing really interesting work. To make a long story short, I decided that’s what I wanted. And that’s what I have today. It’s a huge blessing”. The poor woman who asked the question had a deer in the headlights look, and several actors on stage were just staring at me with mouths open. It’s interesting to notice what happens in the theatre when you tell the truth.

Jason has not been reviewed, and will not be. I think the theatre has elected not to chance the impact a bad review might have, and instead relies on word of mouth and it’s own advertising efforts, which have been compromised by a fiscal crisis the theatre has been working through this year. I have a similar relationship to reviews that I have with alcohol: they render me powerless. I know they’re bad for me, but I can’t stop looking for them, reading them, feeling puffed up by the good ones and outraged by the bad ones. I have developed a reputation in town as an actor who will take on a critic: a reputation I worry has left a bad taste in some mouths, both inside and outside the theaters. I wish there was a recovery program for review junkies.

But I have come to realize that I am not alone. By and large, it’s the theater professionals who care the most about the reviews. The theatre aficionados (and I am fortunate to live in metropolitan area with a large audience of them) will generally see what they want to see, regardless of what the papers say. It’s a sad but true commentary on the state of criticism in this country that People’s Light is so sure that a production like Jason and The Golden Fleece will be misunderstood by critics that it declines to invite critics to see it. It is a wise choice. I have not met a critic yet who values nor understands the goals of theatre for families. In the pecking order of the theatre, theatre for families lurks just below fluffy musicals in terms of the respect it gets. But it is a testament to the investment People’s Light has made in its community that it can mount a production like Jason, make a little money on it and never have it reviewed. Perhaps this is the wave of the future: theatres and their communities rendering the judgments of critics irrelevant. There’s a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Jasonpost 3: Lost

nospam@example.com (Benjamin Lloyd) — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 18:09:00 -0700

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.