Theatre

Mid way through our second ten out of twelve. The company is in good spirits. The zany energy of the play has infected us all, and even the ridiculous six-second costume changes don't get us down. John and I frequently come off stage and look at Jess and Angela in a panic, having no idea who we're supposed to be changing into. The girls tend to steer us into our next costumes and position us for our entrances. John is finding some comic gold, especially with two of his drag performances: Charlene and Vera. I struck my own gold as R.R. yesterday, when I chased a "U.F.O" lighting effect around the stage like a deranged house cat. Leonard Childers is so fat I resemble a Macy's Day parade blimp, and Bertha's buns are padded right down the backs of my thighs. I display said buns prominently at my first Bertha entrance. For the first time today, I got through the Rev. Spike's eulogy without calling for a line. I'm not saying I got 'em all right, I just didn't ask for 'em.

Greater Tuna is the kind of play looked down on by the theateratti. It is low-brow comedy in the best American tradition: populist, self-effacing, uncomplicated in its message. There is barely a plot - it's really a series of comic sketches loosely strung together through the conceit of a day at the local radio station. Its value lies in the performance of it, and so it claims its place as pure comic theatre along the lines of commedia dell'Arte, successful only if a talented enough company can bring it to life, meeting the transformational challenges it presents with brio. I hope we are up to it. I sense we are, but we will learn a lot as we add audiences in previews next week.

The Walnut Street theatre, which is producing this production, is Philadelphia's great populist theatre. Long sneered at by our local theateratti, it has never-the-less maintained the most robust subscription base of any local theatre. It thrives by knowing who its audience is, giving them what they want and doing it well - at least well enough that the theatre remains fiscally sound. I sneered at the theatre myself when I arrived I arrived in town some thirteen years ago. I raised my nose at its consistent menu of American musicals and "old chestnuts". But as I have matured, my nose has lowered and my perspective has shifted. I now admire this theatre for being what it is unapologetically, and am grateful for the work I have been offered here (three shows in four years). Interestingly, Greater Tuna is a collaboration between one of Philly's most outrageous theatre artists (Madi diStefano, our director) and its most conservative theatres, in terms of play selection. Madi is founder of Brat Productions and well-know for both her direction of gritty, site-specific Conor McPherson plays in local bars, as well as her theatrical performances in her own plays, Popsicle's Departure and Sweetie Pie. But she has made a useful alliance with Walnut Street, having appeared in at least one of Neil Simon's Broadway Bound plays here. Bernard Havard, the artistic director here, has taken a shine to her, and I remember being in auditions watching the two them - Bernard in tweedy British jacket-and-tie style and Madi in post-punk black leather and bleached white hair - and laughing inwardly at the pair they make.

Tonight, peering out from backstage during a break, I took in Madi and our designers sitting in the dark house, their faces lit by the pale ambient light of computer screens and small note-taking lights. Each is doing what they love, I thought, and isn't that a measure of success? I am particularly fond of Elisa's costumes (all 20 of them) and Christopher Coluccci's sound design. He's picked some great southern rock for accompanying music, and given us a variety of goofy sound effects to use as Thurston and Arles in the radio station. Turning my head, I saw Jess and Angela scurrying around and getting the next change set up, and John dressed half in Petey and half in Arles. I felt proud to count myself one of them: an artist at work, hell-bent on making people I don't know laugh as much as possible.

I long for an end to the snooty judgments. But as I have written here before, I fear our academic institutions are too deeply invested in passing judgments, and they pass on that tendency to the students they instruct. And so we get a division along an ancient fault-line: on one side the academic intellectual aesthetes, on the other the populist, pragmatic workers. For years I have been trying to live on both sides of that line simultaneously, and the result has been a certain amount of stress and academic professional disappointment. It's as if I am being led again and again away from colleges and universities, led backstage and into costumes and out in front of audiences. But I am stubborn and head-strong. I refuse to leave my students. I refuse to believe I can't have it both ways. There must be a way to lift up Greater Tuna next to Antigone and say "both/and" rather than "either/or".

Making people laugh is serious business. Indeed, in this wounded war-torn world, one might argue it is more urgent than the business of making people cry. So just watch it if you lift your nose at me about Greater Tuna. I just might poke it.

Tech looms. We are working through the insanely quick costume changes in the rehearsal room. It's both fun and demanding, taking an enormous amount of patience and preparation, and utilizing the skills of the ASM (Angela) and the dresser (Jess) to help us backstage. The two of them have a "costume change playbook" that would make some NFL coaches proud. They are the kind of unsung heros the theatre doesn't recognize enough. This play would not be possible without them. I suggested, aloud, that Angela and Jess should take a curtain call.

Madi is deeply involved in the process, having acted in Irma Vep in this slot in this theatre last year. It's another two-actor, costume change parade. We tease her, and she teases herself, about how many times she says something that begins with "It's like in Irma Vep last year . . . " I make a joke about not saying things like "Well, when I was in this play before . . . " Today, Madi was felled by a mysterious malaise which led her to direct us from an Equity cot, like some diva auteur, which, of course, she is. Madi is also eminently focused and clearly a theatre artist to her core. It's been great to get to know her better.

And everyone got to know John and I pretty well today, as we traipsed around the rehearsal room in our skivvies. Jess would turn to one of us in between changes and say matter of factly "Clothes off, please." It's another reason actors are held in suspicion by some. Stripping to our underware in front of people we hardly know is par for the course. But isn't really a sign of health? I often think that actors instruct in ways we are hardly aware of, as in, here's my body. I'm not ashamed of it so don't be ashamed of yours.

At the beginning of the second week of rehearsing my second go-round with the little comedy that could: Greater Tuna. In 1996, I appeared in the "Arles track" at the Gretna Playhouse in Lancaster County, PA. That summer, I acted in the play with Pearce Bunting, my best friend, and was directed by Ken Marini. The three of us were about to go to Scotland to produce my play Psychodrama at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with some others, one of whom would later become my wife.

Now, at The Walnut Street Theatre in Philly, I am playing the other 10 roles in the "Thurston track". Already it is clear that a great deal of my performance will be an homage to Pearce, especially his portrayal of Pearl Burras, which I have essentially stolen outright. John Zak is Arles and Madi diStefano is directing, and we make a jolly trio. We are doing "straight sixes" - six continuous hours of rehearsal a day, as opposed to eight with a lunch break. It's a more efficient use of time and it helps enormously with child care, but boy, am I feeling my age. The play is a high-voltage parade of quick changes, with both actors going from one broad comic role to another. Besides the line-learning required in the short time allotted us by the theatre, I have felt daunted by the energy expended slowly bringing these characters to life. Fighting off the cold Ella brought home from school last week doesn't help either.

I am also experiencing a curious ennui about acting generally. As usually happens when I begin a project, I am made aware of all the things I can't do because I am an actor: go to Quaker meeting, attend weekend events with my kids, participate in volunteer activities. More than ever, I am smarting at the strange professional schedule of actors, which eats up the weekends and gives us Mondays off. Mondays off? Sorry, I have to teach, and the do all the things I couldn't do on thee weekend because I was rehearsing. I am under-prepared for my week of teaching because by the time I get home, I am too spent to do anything but put the kids to bed.

But perhaps it is larger than that. Perhaps I am finally wearying beneath the endless insecurity of my profession. Now, at 45, I find myself fantasizing about managing a Starbucks, owning a franchise, or driving a bus. A regular schedule, with regular income, and no particular emotional attachment to what I do - it sounds dreamy. My domestic situation is in a state of flux, the swirl of which is stimulated by the unpredictability of my professional life.

Perhaps it is mortality. Perhaps the weariness is the weariness of middle age, and the ennui comes from a creeping sense that now is the time for doing what is essential, what calls to me, what leads me. The phrase "I'm too old for this" has meaning for me now. I'm not too old for Greater Tuna - it's actually great fun and requires comic bravery and precision which thrills and challenges me. But I sense the clock ticking away, and I wonder . . . how much longer do I have to do the things I really want to do? And what are those things?

I sat crying in the Ursinus College parking lot to day. I had just listened to a pod-cast of an episode of my favorite public radio show, This American Life. This episode is called "Act V" and is about the work of the Prison Performing Arts project and the extraordinary Agnes Wilcox.

Agnes believes theatre can change people's lives. Not only those who see it, but also and especially those who make it. So - after racking up an impressive career directing professional regional theatre - she began working with inmates. That's right, the incarcerated. "Act V" describes Agnes's production of Hamlet in one of Missouri's maximum security prisons. Because prisoners are not allowed to congregate for any reason longer than one hour, Agnes decided to do one act every two months or so. She cast four Hamlets and had a full supporting cast. She could only meet with the prisoners for brief times, and each prisoner had to be strip-searched before coming into rehearsal and when leaving. Jack Hitt, the TAL writer presenting the show, was given a "screamer": he carried in his pocket a small black box with a string to pull if he was attacked, whereupon guards would descend from all directions.

She was rehearsing Hamlet with murderers, child molesters and rapists. Or was she?

One of the most compelling aspects of "Act V" is that it asks the question: are we forever defined by one act we commit, no matter how hideous? And do we actually believe that human beings can change for the better after committing such an act? And if we think someone has been deeply and profoundly changed, then what? And these men were deeply changed as a result of their work with Agnes. Acting changed them. Shakespeare changed them. And they changed themselves.

What is prison for?

If you listen to "Act V" I hope you will be convinced, as I am, that the ultimate purpose of prison must be rehabilitation. Another affecting part of the story is hearing the inmates talk about working on Hamlet, and with Agnes. Many of the comments are along the lines of "she made me feel human again". Even more astonishing is how this most high-brow of high-brow plays is illuminated by actors who have actually experienced violence, the giving and the receiving of it. The discussions they have with Jack about Hamlet, about character motivation, about the meaning of lines (an encounter with fog is "scarfed in my sea-cloak") are as deep as any I've had with students in my 15 years of teaching in higher education.

Many of us struggle with how to bring more meaning to our lives in the theatre. This was Agnes's solution. It might be mine too.

So there's been a phrase jumping around in my head since working on LEAP which I feel like writing. But I can't be sure if it's authentic or if it's just hyperbole to get a rise out of readers. The phrase is:

I have seen the future of theatre, and it is long-form improvisation.

After wrestling with this for a bit, I have refined it:

I have seen the future of my theatre, and it is long-form improvisation.

Over the last several years I have been exploring actor-generated theatre in a variety of guises. I have been creating it, studying it, performing it: meetings for theatre, commedia dell'Arte, long-form. A great deal of my professional life has been spent teaching actors to make artistically empowering choices. A great deal of the artistic friction in my life has come from my exploration of the actor/director relationship and my resistance to hierarchical power structures. All of this is rooted in family-of-origin issues which have made me who I am. My creativity as an actor has been an ongoing journey of self-actualization through the guise of theatre. I am most delighted and provoked when a role reveals something about my self to me. Sometimes this revelation is painful and sometimes joyful. Recently, it has dawned on me that the more solipsistic the journey is the more damaging to me. So in order for the journey to bring me to well-being the discoveries must be shared, must serve a purpose greater than my own betterment, and that purpose is service to my community.

This journey finds its apotheosis in long-form improv. Absent the dictates of the conventional theatre script and the conventional theatre director, the actor is left to find his way through an outrageous and spontaneous balancing act: on one side his own creative impulses and visions; on the other his complete willingness to follow someone else's creative impulse. In this - the central creative dynamic in long-form improv - the paradox of actor creativity is brought to life on stage. It's all about me and it's all about you, and we don't cancel each other out.

But what narcissistic crap it would be if it was all just a means to perform our own therapy. And so we must be conjoined with the audience, and it is their secrets and unspoken desires which form the foundation of what we make. The initial union is not between actors, but between actor and audience. This union binds the experience in a way that makes it uniquely personal for audience and actor alike. In doing so, long-form capitalizes on the essential feature which makes theatre distinct from film and TV: we are all in the same room together. What is made and witnessed over the course of a performance will never be made or witnessed again. Long-form takes this essential aspect of theatre and puts it in bold face with a line underneath it.

Don't get me wrong: there is something indisputably theraputic about long-form, especially for the performers. But I have always maintained that creativity in any form is theraputic, in that it focuses life-energy outward and assists the person in feeling useful. Long-form just brings the stuff to the fore: you know, all your stuff, your fears, issues, desires and wishes. And when all your stuff is heard and affirmed by a warm and supportive company of fellow artists, as mine was, you almost don't need to perform at all to be a little healed. But then, when you perform, and you sense your stuff being shook out and flapped around the stage in different ways by you and others, it stops having such a hold on you.

And don't get me wrong here either: we had a director. She gave us notes, provoked us forward, reigned us in, adjusted our impuses (or tried to), negotiated situations - in short, she functioned in all the ways a conventional director functions, except one. She had very little to do with the stories we told on stage, or the choices we made while telling them. Whereas a conventional director assumes a kind of ultimate responsibility for the thing presented, our director had almost no responsibility for the thing presented. She had responsibilty for the form it took and our training in that form. But on the night itself, we were on our own.

What do we crave in theatre? Well, the answer to that question will be different for each of us. Certainly, for those who crave the elegantly crafted two-hour story, the beautifully choreographed ensemble, the knock-out show tune or the gorgeous marriage of poetry and idea, long-form will come up short. And yet, I have seen and participated in moments in long-form in which each of these virtues was evident (well, maybe not the knock-out show tune). And the fact that everyone in the room knows it is being made right in front of them makes its genesis electrifying. But underneath the variety of theatre we crave, I think we each crave the same thing: the communal experience. It is simply this experience which has kept the theatre alive, I'm convinced: warm bodies together in the same big room, elbow to elbow, witnessing other warm bodies doing something fabulous. The same air being passed around. The same laughter being shared. The same Spirit being worshipped.

In this modern era we live in, in which we are in continual danger of being permanently attached to our digital devices, in which we spend more and more hours each day stimulating ourselves and our children with electronic media, in which we the time spent amongst each other shrinks each year until, sadly, we will only see people outside our tight little circle in emergencies. Even universities - once the the place where we met the rest of the world - are being offered now through computers, and some parents, convinced their children will be taught heresy in actual schools, or worse, gunned down by some cyber-depressed adolescent, keep their children at home and school them there. This is the age of isolation. No wonder so many young people are depressed. No wonder so many of us are on Prozac.

Communion is the antidote. Communion is the solution. Somehow, joy is created when we are together, even when the thing we see is sad. We are reassured that the world is safe, that others have feelings like ours, that we needn't be ashamed of who we are, or who you are. In the immediacy of of the theatrical experience, our isolation is melted and we soothe each other. This is why, after seeing LEAP, my friend Chris told me he felt like he been to church. It wasn't because he was made aware that he was seeing and hearing something holy being delivered to him by holy people. It was because he felt joined to the common everyone in the room with him, and the feeling of being joined reminded him of God. I say, it was God doing the joining. But that's just me.