A Thought on the Aftemath of the Election

Emily Dickinson wanted to be a politician.

The Beginnings of Theater

I just got back from Greece and had some heart throbbing experiences in theater. First of all my husband and I went to Delphi the home of one of the ancient oracles. There, there was a Greek theater nestled into the side of a mountain. It seated an audience of 5,000 which looked down on the orchestra where the chorus took place and looked out on a breath stopping view of the valley below. The Greeks liked to have the audience look down on the actors like the gods look on us and have the audience realize the foibles of mankind. It's kind of like the Buddhist blue skying technique where when you are mired in troubles you are supposed to spend time looking at the sky. Perspective. Perspective. What we loose so often. So I walked out onto the central spot of the orchestra and started doing one of my monologues from my play, a bit under my breath since I didn't want to impinge on other people who were there. I felt something I haven't felt in a theater before. I felt held, taken care of. The curve of the audience as it was placed in the hill was the perfect curve for the "stage". The proportions were perfect. I felt like I could do no wrong on that "stage". I made "mistakes", but they were ok and I took my time. My words came from myself from my being present in the moment. Now that's good acting, but here I didn't have to do any preparation to get there. The space did it for me. I didn't have to "do" anything.

The second theater I went to was in Epidaurus and that theater's capacity was 15,000 people though I heard that when Maria Callus sang there they squeezed in 17,000. There the ethos was for people to stand in the center spot of the orchestra and speak, sing, do whatever you wanted. I stood there and spoke with a sending out voice. Not pushing, or speaking loudly. Just sending my voice out to the audience. I spoke three monologues out loud and the acoustics were such that my voice both echoed back to myself and soared to the uppermost reaches of the audience. I was pulled into a heightened sense of theater that you can get from performing from a great play. The enormity of the theater plus it's astounding acoustics plus it's perfect shape created the physical container for drama. It's a place where every word is literally heard and literally supported. I sent my words out and they came back to me and fed me. Thrilling.

Later a guide came and struck a match on the center stone. It rang throughout. Imagine Maria Callas singing there.

The Greeks: no microphones no acting techniques. They used location and use of space in location to create the effects they wanted. Feng Shui experts.

Clown of God

I just figured out that I'd love for the Saint Francis actor to have a strong clowning background (comedia dell'arte, buffoon). St. Francis in his humility thought of himself that way. I kept getting stuck with how am I going to find a male actor with a movement background who loves poetry. There aren't that many out there, so this is perfect. Everything I know about St. Francis was that he was a physical physical man who threw himself into everything he came across- sometimes literally. I even had a children’s book about St. Francis called “The Clown of God.” DO YOU KNOW ANY CLOWNS?

vowels and consonants

Well my eldest was reading about Daniel Radcliffe (you know, the actor who played Harry Potter) and his preparation for the main role in EQUUS. He did some intense training since it's quite a jump from film to stage. One of the exercises he loved was reading the text through by just pronouncing the vowels and then reading it through by just reading the consonants and then reading the complete text. I tried it with my play and the results in one pass through was astonishing. The unconscious comes through with much stronger articulation and rhythmic sense. It made the poetic sections stronger and more differentiated from the prose pieces. My voice became stronger with no physical effort. I got to know my work directly on a whole different level. It felt like diving into the ocean.

In the Telling

I’m learning so much by memorizing Emily Dickinson's poems and saying them out loud. Yesterday saying the words “inebriate” I could feel a propulsion of breath bursting out of my mouth to be sucked in by the words “of air”. Leaning into the words and letting them create sensations and then feelings in the body. (Check the August 1 post for the poem: "I taste a liquor never brewed.")

I'm beginning to read a book by Cicely Barry called "From Word to Play: A Handbook for Directors." In the beginning she says there is no difference between words to action and action to words. Now I'm beginning to feel it. The body speaking is a moving instrument. Barry says we must bring sound back into theater. It reminds me of what I learned from studying with Shakespeare and Company in the Berkshires. They pointed out that before written language the sounds in the oral traditions were so graphic that the TELLING evoked intense feelings. That's why Shakespeare's language is so visceral and compelling. When really spoken the consonants clang, burst, throb, ssssss's slither and lisp; lll's be liquid lilting waves. Sounds go straight to the "body" of the audience.

Makes me understand why theater is so wonderful. To hear a live actor reverberating on stage with all the nuances and minute tellings...

This is Hard to Write,

but I said I'd report on the progress of my play. So here it goes: I've read the play with my husband, read it with an actor Douglas Kenning, and now have gotten it critiqued by my assistant, and they all confirmed this tiny but insistent voice inside of me about certain parts of my play. It needs to be rewritten. I didn't want to cop to it. I wanted to cut to the chase, get it up... But I noticed that all these different points of view often corollated with a slightly nauseous pulling sensation I'd feel inside when I'd read certain sections. So tag I'm it and I have to rewrite. I also realize that part of my reluctance was my nervousness about whether or not I could do it. The play came through me in two weeks. It was a gift. How could I go back and find the inner threads to reweave places where the fabric was stretched too thin? How could I cut some of the imagery without destroying the integrity? Now I know I can do it. I was writing so fast that I skipped stuff. And my listening wasn't quite as acute on some days.

One of the scary parts of being an artist is sometimes you've got to break some eggs and the risk is sometimes you can't put it back together if you don't like it. It's scary, but as the egg breaks I'm going to try and let in the excitement too.

So my plan is to spend the next while listening to my play in as many different ways as I can so I can feel the core and let the core tell me what to write. I find myself taking a deep breath.

A Definition of Emily Dickinson

I know this sounds like an oxymoron. I didn't know you could define a person, particularly Miss Emily, but this one fell into my lap while I was reading a review of "A Summer of Hummingbirds": "Emily Dickinson was fierce and enigmatic, an exotic genius disguised as a New England spinster."

This epiphany came from a fairly damning review of the book by Laura Miller in the "New York Times." I could agree with her if the book was supposed to be the type she was reviewing. But as you can read in my last post, the book offers something else and I think more important. I'm so glad I stumbled upon it in a bookstore and didn't listen to the review.