June 12, 2013: Fool for Love

Seven weeks ago, I closed Fool for Love by Sam Shepard.  I played May, a bucket-list role of obsessive intensity that first got me truly hooked on acting during a scene study class when I was 19.  In that class, I remember rehearsing with my scene partner as our professor had suggested, exploring what happened to the relationship when we were physically very near or very far from each other, and how closing or widening the distance affected us.  This is a simple idea that is easy to explore, but for me it was profound.  There’s something so visceral about these characters that a physical exploration like that can’t help but illuminate their 

connectedness.

I have been agonizing over how to write about Fool for Love.  I need to reflect on the journey, to help me move forward and continue to grow.  But this particular journey was so wrapped up in my personal life that it isn’t possible to reflect only on the process of the play.  If I want to write about this honestly, I have to get personal.

I don’t know if I’ll publish this, but I need to write it.

Maybe I’ll work backwards.  I’m in the middle of a divorce right now, a process I instigated, and for which (among other things) I’m in therapy for the first time in my life.  Like a baby giraffe dropped 6 feet onto a rocky ground, I’m trying to find my feet and keep walking, because life doesn’t stop and wait for me to figure things out.

A dear friend of mine observed that every relationship is different, and unless you’re inside it, you can’t possibly understand the intricacies involved.  It can even be hard to understand those intricacies from the inside.  But there really is no room for judgment, ever.  This thought offers me some small comfort as I struggle to explain to people why I have ripped two hearts to pieces, or refrain from trying to explain and worry that everyone is judging me.

And, I try to remember, too, that the world really does not revolve around me as I was convinced it did in high school.  People are not constantly staring and judging.  People have their own lives, their own problems and joys.  There’s so much more to life than me.

And at the same time, my world begins with me: it’s what I have and what I know.  I guess I’m learning to know my inner compass, to listen to my inner voice (the one that’s deeper than the surface of my brain; the one that originates in my soul).  I’m learning to trust that there’s something profound in letting go and trusting myself.

Somehow, Fool for Love taught me all of that.  I had the joy of exploring the obsession of a relationship that was completely wrong, of pushing the extremes of feeling: love, hate, jealousy, desire, fear.  In exploring those extremes, I began to discover the elasticity of the human spirit.  We are amazingly resilient, and there is so much beauty in vulnerability and risk.  It is only through risk and vulnerability that we can connect deeply: with ourselves, with each other, and with something bigger.

My God is Art.  I didn’t know that until really recently.  I am overwhelmed and broken and terrified; and I’m also supported and grounded and deeply calm – because, I have Art.  I can create.  I can express.  I can explore.  The journey has no end, and there’s something deeply humbling about that.  Even in my brokenness, I know in my soul that there’s a long path ahead of me, a path that is connected to many other paths, beautiful in its joys and perhaps even more beautiful in its sorrows.

We live.  We love.  We fall down and we pick ourselves back up.  We ask for help.  We carry each other.  We collaborate.  We create.  We dream.  We discover.

Goodbye, May.  Goodbye, Eddie and Martin and The Old Man.  Goodbye seedy Mojave motel, and endless lightning storms, and desert sage.  Thank you for teaching me.

February 15, 2013: Cinnamon and Cigarettes, or, A Bit of Moody Brooding

Two weeks ago yesterday, I closed my first one-woman show.  But I don’t think it’s closed for good.  And I’m wondering, deeply, how the experience will shape my life and my career going forward.

I wrote Cinnamon and Cigarettes in three days at the beginning of December, right after I got home from a semester teaching and directing at The College of Idaho.  I had done the research I required during the summer and early fall, and then set it all aside while I focused on Pericles, Theatre History, and Fundamentals of Acting.

The play poured out of me, or poured through me, during those early days in December, with terrifying force.  I didn’t know if I could trust it, but I knew that I must, since I was performing the play at the end of January.  Six months earlier, I had signed up for a “fully staged production” of this piece to be performed in January, which I had only named and barely begun.

What kept me driving forward was a deep-seated need to tell, as fully and honestly as I could, the story of my first best friend, who taught me about loyalty and trust as a child and wound up a toothless, sometimes-homeless drug and alcohol abuser who died in a train yard before age 30.  I had been living (and still live) with a fear that few people would remember him, and those who did would only remember his mistakes.

I didn’t want to glorify his life, or make him out to be some kind of saint or martyr.  I wanted to tell his story because it was beating against the walls of my body to be told.  He lives inside me, and I wanted to reawaken his spirit.

I realize, as I try to enumerate the reasons I wrote and performed the play, that it isn’t possible to fully explain the story I needed (and still need) to tell.  And that’s why I need to tell it: I can’t explain it any other way.

This feels like quite a revelation, and I’m having trouble remembering exactly why I thought I needed to be an actor before these last few months.  I know I have a passion for it, or else I’d have to be crazy to keep plugging away at something so terribly competitive, difficult, and financially unstable.  I know the artistic heights feed some kind of fire within me, that is painful and crushing whenever I veer away from this art for something that might be “easier” (like actuarial science, for example).  And yet, only two weeks out of this experience of solo creation and performance, I am plunged into a depth of questions that may have no concrete answers.

I think Cinnamon and Cigarettes was some of the best work I’ve ever done, and I think I followed it with a couple of really mediocre auditions.  Why?  Is it because I’m a bad actor?  I’ve become lazy?  The work of solo performance took all my artistic energy and I don’t have anything left?  Have I always been a mediocre auditioner and I’ve just gotten lucky a few times?

These questions aren’t fun nor particularly helpful, except that they bring me back around to why I’m doing this in the first place.  How can I build upon the sense of pride and connection this piece of art created in me, rather than slipping back to some lower, unhealthy place?  I loathe the cycle of rejection that even good (and especially mediocre) auditioning creates: "I didn't get this role.  Maybe I suck.  Maybe I'll never get another role.  Maybe I shouldn't even go to any more auditions because I'll never get another role..."

I have entered the play in three fringe festivals.  Perhaps it will be chosen for one, and I’ll have the privilege of figuring out how not to lose my day jobs, as I also figure out how to raise the money for 10 days of travel and venue rental, in order to share this story that seethes with immediacy in my innermost being.

Maybe I’m just a moody artist.  Sometimes I’m convinced that’s true.  But I think I’d rather deal with the issues of being a moody artist than let the most important stories go untold.  Because in the end, I believe that the threads of our stories, when they’re shared with naked vulnerability, bind us together as human beings, saving us, somehow, from falling apart.