Commedia dell'Arte

Late last week, I had a child care melt down in the middle of rehearsal. My cell phone vibrated in my pocket mid-scene - it was Ella's day care. During break I listened to the message: Ella had thrown up mid morning. Susan was out of town, and I was locked in till four. During the next break, I had a comic sequence of talking to Susan on the cell phone while the artistic director was waving the office phone at me, which I picked up, only to have the cell phone go off again. Ultimately, our super-sitter was able to pick her up. It turned out she was fine.

Remember when there were no cell phones?

I have extolled the virtues of the citizen actor, but this is the challenge, isn't it? You want a life that has more than your art, sometimes that "more" intrudes.

But on to the shrew.

Walking to rehearsal recently, I thought, Kate is the older sister I always wished I'd had. We could have made each other happy and staved off the other's particular misery. And so begins the work beneath the scansion, beneath the memorization. So begins the complex work of exploring this question: who is this woman to me? And then, following that question into jungle thickets, I find other ones, like: how do I feel about "woman", about femininity, about sexism, about courtship and marriage?

I will leave you dangling now, the public aspect of the blog having a self-censuring effect. But I will tell you this: these are dark pathways for me, moody, hot and tender. The personal energies around them for me now include both ancient wounds, and fresh, stinging jibes. Kate is a wounded woman, and I have been raised by, in love with and at war with wounded women much of my life.

There is an immediate connection I have to her. We finally have a rehearsal hoop skirt for me, and I while I love exploring it, I feel ridiculous in it. So the Ben-as-Kate sensation mirrors Kate's own sensation of being held up to public ridicule early in the play, especially if the initial cage entrance holds. Fiona Shaw, in the article of interviews I keep re-reading, talks about being the only woman in the room frequently in rehearsal, and how that informed many of the choices she made as an actress. I can relate to that sensation of feeling like "the other".

Re-reading that article, I realized that one advantage I have being a man playing Kate is that I don't feel the need to "represent all women" with my choices. How could I? Nor do I feel like I have to navigate some man's thinly veiled sexism in a working relationship, something the actresses talk about having to do frequently with male co-stars or male directors. Juliet Stevenson remarks that she felt her choices sometimes over-compensated for the sexist atmosphere she sensed in the rehearsal room.

These are brilliant actresses in this article - all British. It made me think again about the difference between American and British notions of "actress" (or "actor" for that matter). Certainly there are American actresses as smart and articulate, but I don't think we cultivate those qualities. Perhaps it's a generalization, but I worry "actress" in America leads to American Idol. Compare with Fiona Shaw, who has the confidence to complain about incompetent directors "who cram the area between the text and the performance with 'interpretation' and allow it to masquerade as creativity."

Another actress, Paola Italian Last Name, used a phrase about Katherine which jumped out at me: "the journey into laughter". Yes, this is the journey I want to embark on: out of the darkness of bitterness, grief and anger and into the freedom of humor and lightness, laughter and hope. But enough with these Brits, and back to the murky question I keep dodging: who will Ben's Kate be?

Commedia side-bar: Tranio and Biondello are directly descended from 1st and 2nd zanni. Baptista is a de-fanged Pantalone. Lucentio is the heroic lover, Biancha the Enamorata. Kate? She's a kind of twisted, dark Servetta, and Petruchio a heroicized Capitano.

Finally, today, we came to The Speech. "The speech is your friend, Ben" Ceal said smiling. Still un-memorized, I read it through exploring some of Ceal's staging ideas. I wasn't actually "doing" it. I was reciting it. It's actually a beautifully written and constructed speech, as long as you don't listen to what she's saying. Later, Ceal, Tom and I sat and talked about it.

"The most important idea in it to me, " I said, "is Kate's notion that fighting is wrong, that conflict solves nothing. And it feels like it needs to be something she's saying mostly to, or for, Petruchio." We agreed to devote an hour or two just to the speech later in the week. And I panicked. Next week is the week before tech.

I do not desire to prove anything. I do not wish to convince anyone of anything. This is only what I have come to believe. This is a choice I make.

As a Quaker, I listen. I listen to the sounds, and I listen to the quiet where I discern the rustle of God’s great robe. I am touched. I witness. I sense God everywhere: in the patterns of my life, in other people, in the music I listen to, in my students, in my family. But I must choose to be present, watch and listen, and I choose to give divine import to what I witness.

As an actor, I feel, move and speak. I reach across empty space towards other beating hearts. I move them and am moved by them. I serve the community I live in with my art. Each new role is the most important role I have ever played. Each new role is world premiere.

As a teacher, I walk the walk. I let my life speak, and I fill my students with hope and possibility, helping them find the necessary virtues in themselves to begin walking the beautiful and preposterous road of the American actor.

As a husband and a father, I am ever vigilant, never taking these three lives for granted, choosing again and again to be a loving presence in their lives, moving them always back to the center of everything.

As person in recovery, I am reminded that every day free from addiction is a gift and a miracle. I honor that miracle by taking care of that gift.

What I want is to change the world. When I am creative, I am closer to God, and when I am witnessed being closer to God, I am a minister, and when I am minister I am helping others get closer to God too. I have faith that when I am acting, teaching, worshiping and loving my family I am a minister and I am changing the world. I work on letting that be enough.

I cannot stop the war. But I can make people laugh. I can soften people’s hearts. I can bring people together where they can feel each other’s heat. I can give the young hope. I can raise strong and peaceful children. I can lift up an amazing woman. These are extraordinary powers. They are from God.

Here is a pattern I witness in my life: I am led by continuing revelation to explore new territories of Quaker worship. This leading is part of a larger whole, involving a love of youth, of the Society of Friends and of the divine mixture of actor and Quaker in my heart. I sense a chafing at our customs, and a need for new expressions. I am mindful of our traditions that lead us away from adherence to empty forms and rote rituals. I seek the courage to join others in choreographing Godly dances and composing new Spirit songs.

Another pattern: I sense a hunger in the artists I meet for a way to discover and embrace their own holiness away from conventional churches. And yet, I sense a slow growing closer together of my unconventional church – the Quakers – and our evangelical brethren.

And another: I begin in the middle and move to the outside looking in, yearning to be in the middle again. My life is an on-going movement from the center to the edge. Or maybe I am always at the edge, trying to pull the center towards me. In loving the eccentric, the anarchist, the prophet, the outcast, the maverick, I am loving this aspect of myself. It is an essential aspect, one I came in to the world with, and one that was groomed by the circumstances of my life: an only child of divorced parents, raised in a family that was never really mine. My transformation from defeated drunk to worker in the world was due in part to my decision not to be at war with this part of myself. I am no longer ashamed of who I am or where I’m from. This is huge.

My mother and father still continue to teach me: my mother about art, my father about family. I love and honor them. I witness them both in me in so many ways. I am glad I chose them.

And another: I mend the wounds of my real and imaginary exiles by burrowing into community and family. I am led to jump up and down like a silly cheerleader for both my communities – theatre and Quaker. I like to gently mingle those communities, it makes me happy. This is one of the things The Rooms taught me: let us love you until you can love yourself. I love you loving me, and I love me loving you back. I sense that my work is here where I live, and that in naming and celebrating that work – and the work of others here – I am breaking new ground.

And yet I have a strained relationship with institutions. I’m working on this, trying move from the edge a little bit back to the center, trying to ease my wounded suspicions.

Nowhere do I burrow more deeply than with my little family. In making them so very important to me, in choosing them over other things I might have done, I have missed some opportunities and compromised my professional possibilities. I now see this as an intentional choice, and when one of my children leaves their place at the table just so they can thrown themselves at me and hug me, saying I love you so much Daddy, I am certain of that choice. And when I am able step back from the chatter and the frustrations, and witness what my wife and I are doing in the world together, when we come together in embraces too deep for words, when I feel myself humbled by who she is and that she chose me, and that she keeps choosing me, I am certain of my choice. But I have to remind myself to pay attention. This is the only way to work through the doubts. When I pay attention, even in the darkest place, I can crawl back to gratitude. Then I can stand again.

Speaking of gratitude:

Three shows performed: eight total roles.

Forty or so meetings for worship. Ten to twelve meetings for theatre.

Two workshops created and offered: one on Quaker/actor creativity, one on teaching acting.

One book, one article, one pamphlet and two blogs published.

Four classes taught: one high school, two college, one adult.

Three workshops taken: Long Form Improv, Commedia, Psychodrama.

Two children raised: Griffen and Ella.

One wife loved: Susan.

And the water rises . . .

One car lost: Ellex (the Accord).

One car purchased: Little Blue (the Civic).

Song of the year: Speed of Sound, Coldplay. (Runners up: Clarity, John Mayer; Give up and let it go, Francis Dunnnery, Fix You, Coldplay)

One bridge mended.

And the water flows.

One father aided.

No toilets trained.

Birthdays celebrated.

Anniversaries squeezed in.

Important moments overlooked.

Mistakes made, apologies offered.

Moments of transcendent meaning seized and released.

Bitchy vendettas enacted.

Movements begun and left dangling.

I am the faucet . . .

Awesome circles of community created.

Whispers of quiet affirmation passed along.

Sleepless nights of anxiety passed through.

Doubt and despair wrestled with.

Doubt and despair vanquished quizzically.

Poems written and tears shed.

Gales of laughter.

Farts and awkwardness.

Faith considered and pursued.

God under all, through everything,

and I am the faucet

turn me on turn me on

be with me, be through me,

up from mother earth, Your water,

I am the faucet, you are the Source,

be through me, flowing,

running down streams,

filling ponds to drink from

and the heartbreak of emptiness everywhere,

filling us all to overflow,

so our waters mingle and roll

in great warm rivers,

one water

out -

out into the unfathomable sea.

Invalid has come and gone, I have begun teaching at UArts, co-teaching at Arcadia and running “The Barbara Lewis Acting Teacher’s Workshop” at the Wilma Theatre. Susan has begun rehearsing this year’s panto, Robin Hood, after having taken three trips up to Chatham to see her Dad during the run of Invalid. He is holding on in his new, fragile plateau, ensconced in his living room with his books, music and TV. He told Sooz he was going to try and make to Christmas, and then “take it from there”. People’s Light has taken the unusual step of having MB understudy Sooz, a sign that we all understand how unpredictable Dick’s future is.

Invalid was a romp, and though it didn’t get great notices we delivered the laughs at all the right places. t was an exhausting journey for me, being a combination of physical exertion and psychic focus, made all the more challenging by the fact that I smoked throughout the entire run. This I blame partially on Jud, who became my “smoking buddy”, and MB, who also smoked through the run. We would gather for a nightly cig outside the theatre after the shows, they sipping beers or whiskey, me sipping diet root beer. What a shitty example I am, I thought, puffing away, I hope none of my students surprise me after show.

Apparently, I stole the show. This is what trickled back to me through friends who paid me lavish compliments about Thomas and Louise. Louise frequently got a hand at the end of one or both her short scenes in act II, and I was astonished to occasionally receive a hand at the end of Thomas’s absurd speech after his entrance in act I.

I fell in love with Thomas, who adored playing with his red string, and was gleefully happy to hear the “Insolent Modern Opera” Jud and Joey performed hilariously towards the end of act 1. Blanka paid me the compliment I was looking for when she told me that she had to look in the program to figure out who was playing him. Louise was an exercise in pure comic precision and commitment. I was especially proud of my first two minutes on stage as Louise: I entered skipping rope, delivered my first line, turned around while skipping and doubled back to Steve, sat and executed a sequence of comic takes with him with lines while tying a noose out of the skipping rope hidden from the audience’s view, then displayed the noose on a punch line. I am clear that I was able to accomplish this in part because Lillian was demanding yet affirming, and because she made me and Steve drill it backwards and forwards.

Of course, I didn’t steal the show. But I got some wonderful feedback. And my success in Invalid was also connected to something that transpired with Fava. I had internalized something about the nature of comedy that both rooted and propelled me. I wish I could put into words what it was.

I was talking to Deb about a compliment paid to me recently, and acknowledged that something tectonic has shifted since being denied tenure.

“What do you think that was?” she asked.

“I think I’ve given myself permission” I replied.

“To do . . . ?”

“To do whatever I want.”

An enduring image from Imaginary Invalid is from the finale, when Steve as Argan puts the Pantalone mask on. This was Lillian’s invention, an attempt to link Argan finally with his company of actors (us behind him in faux commedia masks), and also with the commedia tradition which gave birth to the character Argan through Pantalone. It muddied the whole “Argan becomes a doctor” joke a bit, but never mind. Steve put the mask on and spoke a couplet, which ended with the words, “May my feelings last for centuries”. And several times I was overwhelmed with the sense that Moliere himself was with us onstage: Moliere, the young French actor brought up in the remnants of the commedia tradition, transplanted in the 17th century Parisian suburbs; Moliere, who was desperately ill when he wrote his last play, this comedy about a hypochondriac; Moliere, who died hours after his fourth performance of Argan. And there was Steve, a chain smoker, associate artistic director of our company, donning the Pantalone mask in Moliere’s play, the audience’s laughter still ringing off the walls. And a little prayer filled my heart: yes, may your feelings last for centuries, they already have and they will continue, feelings that lift and lighten a darkened world.

And this: around my neck now is small silver cross which I found at my dressing room table when I arrived there at the beginning of tech. I pinned it up above my mirror so it was obvious and visible to anyone who might have come looking for it. But no one did. So at the last performance I knew it was for me. It hangs around my neck on a silver chain next to another spiritual symbol: a small triangle inside a circle, the symbol of The Rooms.

The cross is the third spiritual symbol I have acquired through acting. The first was during my first show in Philadelphia – Travesties directed by Blanka. Sitting on stage as Lenin, I opened a prop book and a prayer card with the Blessed Virgin bathed in golden light dropped in my lap. As Lenin, I engaged in some Soviet heresy: I surreptitiously stuck it in my jacket pocket and took it home. Six years later, on opening night of Picasso at the Lapin Agile at the Arden Theatre, a cast member gave me a small portrait of Jesus in a little oval, gold metal frame. This was a joke, you see, because I played the Sagot the art dealer, who has a comic monologue about how he can never sell pictures of Jesus because they creep people out. This little Jesus, who shyly pulls open his gown to reveal a passionate heart on fire, sits on the bookcase next to my bed now. The prayer card has been lost. But six years after I acquired the portrait, I acquired the cross.

Tech is tense. Lillian has invented an elaborate comic dumb show as a prologue, in which we make the obligatory cell phone announcement, sponsor thanks and subscription beg entirely without words. She keeps using “commedia” as a stylistic guide: “Do the commedia bow!”, “Can you make the dance more commedia?” And I hear the lusty roar of Antonio Fava from across the ocean: “There is no such thiiiing!” He has made me a commedia purist, and I have been cringing a bit as I execute what I consider faux commedia, precisely the kind of generalized performance that will remind American audiences of something that seems vaguely European and “classical”, but actually refers to nothing specific. Still, what Lillian has invented is energetic, colorful and fun and a great improvement over the monotonous announcements that precede all plays in the regions these days. The problem is that it’s very complicated and we only began rehearsing it when we got to tech, and nobody on the technical staff had a clue it was coming. Consequently, this prologue which, when executed well, should last barely five minutes, has eaten up large swaths of time the tech staff thought we would be using for the bulk of the play. And we haven’t added costumes yet.

Lillian also gave me a big adjustment late in the game for Thomas, the lummox suitor. I had developed a series of comic gestures to over-illustrate these two speeches Thomas gives when he arrives, which are clearly meant to sound like something he learned from a manual. I got hoots of laughter throughout rehearsal with these speeches, and was proud of my comic invention. “Try it without the gestures” said Lillian to me abruptly on the second day of tech. You can’t be serious I thought, but bit my tongue. So I did, and the speeches fell over like blocks of granite. “So, add back in only the gestures which are the really good ones” she said later. Arg.

But I know she’s right. The speeches had become about my little comic inventions, and Thomas has to be plausibly human as well as a nearly retarded clown. He is also someone who is fond of “quoting the ancients”, so it’s important that we hear him deliver these speeches, deliver them badly, but intelligibly. So I employed some comic pruning late in the game and reminded myself of The Four Fold Way: be open to outcome, not attached to outcome. I am now wearing fake teeth which are a combination of the dentist’s and Griffen’s. I have glued Griffen’s on the piece the dentist made for me, so they read from the audience. They are appropriately ghastly, and don’t fall out of my mouth.

I have been reflecting on my own need to be included: in plays, in discussions, in meetings. I have seen that the drama of my life has influenced the drama of my art, and I believe this is true of all artists. Our lives and histories shape us, and the designs we make will always bear some hint of the original mold. Part of my essential shape is a deep fear of being forgotten, abandoned, left out, overlooked. This makes me drawn to inclusion, and to seek ways to make sure I am noticed.

What a love/hate relationship we have the audience. Lillian began a rehearsal recently by talking about “the kelp”.

“The what?” I said.

“You know – in the audience, “ and she made the seaweed waving under water gesture, both arms extended over head, swaying softly from side to side. And yet, all we are doing, we are doing for the kelp.

Griffen has again been the source of an important costume piece. First it was Inos’s hair, and now it is Thomas’s teeth. Thomas, the dolt Argan wants his daughter to marry, needs to have an instantly comic effect. It should be clear that this is a match made in hell for Angelique. So I have been experimenting with an over-bite (think of the Monty Python “Twit Of The Year” sketch). But Lillian pointed out that without anyone else screwing up their faces like that it make me look like an actor doing a gag. “If you can find some fake teeth, then fine” she said. So, after rummaging around in the toy bins downstairs, I came across some gag teeth Griff had received as a stocking stuffer a couple of Christmases ago. When I tried them in rehearsal, we could hardly get a line out, people were laughing so much. So now I’m going to my dentist to be fitted for a well-made set of ghastly teeth. But Griff’s are in use in rehearsal, stuck to my teeth with chewing gum.

Lillian understands the “mechanical” quality of rehearsing comedy, what Fava might call the “scientific” nature of it. The modern term is formulaic, and it is usually pejorative but it shouldn’t be. She drills us in the routines we invent that she likes. It feels like rehearsing a dance, or learning a football play. It can drive some actors crazy, but I enjoy it. I love digging into the precision of a moment, breaking it down into its component parts and really learning it. In the ethereal world of acting – so dominated by realism - it feels solid and concrete to me. It’s an aspect of my art I can hang onto.

And it helps that so far, what I’m doing has been met with laugher. After going through a series of voices, looking for Thomas, Lillian smiled at me and said, “You’re one of those fearless actors, aren’t you Benjamin?” How is a person supposed to respond to that? I mumbled something and stared at my feet. But it’s clear that – so far – she and I are on the same wave-length. To some extent, Lillian’s right. I have the most over the top roles to play, and the task with roles like these is to go as far out on a comic limb as you can and still be in the world of the play. There is huge courage in it, but I don’t feel it as such. It feels like joyful release to me, a wonderful emptying of my perverse humor, and my fear is greatly tempered by working in a room full of people who love me.

Lillian is all about what I call “robust collaboration”. “Don’t get fragile on me” she said during a trying note session. What she meant is, bring me your objections, your questions, your ideas, but don’t wilt, because it’s hard work what we’re up to. Comedy like this hangs us up because of our need to understand what we’re doing before we do it. But this is impossible. Comedy brings home the reality that we only make worthwhile discoveries in the playing of it, swinging further out on the limb and knowing that when it snaps (which it does frequently in rehearsal), we will drop on to something forgiving, at least we will in a rehearsal guided by a good director. This need to know before doing is related to the pernicious effects of judgment, in that this need is driven by our obsession with the “good” or “right” choice. But it is in our willingness to be “bad” and “wrong” that our comic genius lies. When we throw off the constraints of judgment, we begin to manifest the quality that Lillian calls “fearlessness”, and we open ourselves up to choices which may be transgressive, eccentric, impolite, obscene and very, very funny.

I was taught a pedagogical sequence some time ago that I have thought of rehearsing Invalid. It describes how we learn. We go from unconscious incompetence, to conscious incompetence, to conscious competence, to unconscious competence. In realism, we can hide our incompetence, since mostly what we are doing is behaving like ourselves. So our mistakes are camouflaged. But our incompetence is on full display in comedy, in which the distance between my choice and the laugh is sometimes huge when I start, but my task is to close it up in rehearsal. “Lear is not hard compared to this” says Lillian.

The formulaic aspect of comedy is intentional in commedia dell’Arte. Fava would say, the plots are all the same, the set-ups don’t change very much, everyone knows what’s coming. This is why it was so easy for Moliere to take commedia and adapt it. Once you’ve seen a few commedia plays, you get it. There is a critical culture which regards formulaic comedies as bad plays – but they’re not. They are plays which rely on other theatrical virtues besides great writing in order to succeed. They rely on the virtues of the fearless comic actor: boundless energy, physical and vocal expressiveness, comic ingenuity, skilful collaboration and great audience sensitivity. Fava regards the dominance of the written play as the end of the pre-eminence of the comic actor in the commedia tradition, who, he writes, would regard memorizing lines as akin to lip-synching pop songs.

And in keeping with the commedia tradition, we are playing fast and loose with the Invalid script. At the read-through, James told us not to be precious with his lines. So we have been changing them, adding new ones, cutting things, all based on the virtues of the comic actor. When the actor invents something funny while rehearsing, Lillian usually keeps it. “We may throw it out later, but let’s hold on to it now”.