Quaker-Theatre

Recently, I found myself standing in front of a group of Quakers in Colorado going "Moooo!". I was there to lead a workshop on vocal ministry - what we Quakers call it when someone speaks during meeting for worship. No, I wasn't instructing them to imitate cattle, though they were all going "Mooo!" along with me. I was playing a theatre game with them. And we were having a blast. Quakers are not known for having blasts, but there we were sending zings of energy to each other, going "Mooo!" when we messed up and laughing and laughing. That's when I had that thought again - creativity heals.

This occurred to me recently as I tried to help my four year old daughter though a toilet training trauma. It wouldn't be polite to share the details, suffice to say that it had been going on for almost a year and my wife and I couldn't talk about it without flaying each other, such was the stress little Ella's situation caused. We all dealt with the stress in different ways. Ella drew. Before the situation came to a head - so to speak - Ella drew these complex abstract drawings in bright colors of intricately connected shapes. They were clear, orderly and beautiful, like stained glass windows. But in the midst of the potty transition, when things were really tense at home, I would pick her up from day care and she would present me with very different drawings of tangled knots of color. I could feel her fierce energy in the slashing collisions the markers made. She was detonating her frustration on paper. Now, as things are normalizing again, she makes amazingly detailed human shapes - stick arms and legs on giant heads with identifying features. "That's you, daddy" she says, pointing to the one with only five little stalks of hair on his head. Many of these figures have lines on their faces indicating tears coming from their eyes. Tears of relief, I think to myself.

My wife heals herself creatively too. Her father is dying and it has triggered a kind of avalanche of feeling in her, feeling so overpowering she is in constant motion at home. The only time she is relatively still is when she is asleep or at work at one of her quilts. They are gorgeous, but I'm biased, but really - they're lovely. She usually makes about two a year, at a leisurely pace. But this past fall, as her Dad went from bad to worse, she made three quilts in as many months. She usually works in soft colors, but the one she made for Ella was neon orange and green, with mermaids. The one she made for the mother of a friend was autumnal: deep moody browns and maroons and dense, intricate patterns. The third escapes me now. But it didn't escape her. She escaped into it and it relieved her of her suffering.

Creativity allows us to escape for a bit. Actors are particularly prone to use their art to salve their wounds. As an acting teacher, I watch again and again as my students use the shield of character to leave themselves, selves that are frequently encrusted with late adolescent anguish or lingering childhood trauma. Acting is a safe way for them to express their own pain. It's okay for a while, but then we have to take our problems out of the rehearsal room and into the therapist's office. And yet I don't disparage my students' use of performance as means to heal. I did it too. In fact, I don't think a person can be anything but healed when they make something, be it a drawing, a quilt or a character from Chekhov. In making things we re-make parts of ourselves, we bring order to chaos, or we blow the order to smithereens because doing so in real-life would be unacceptable.

What I said to my Friends in Colorado was this: that when we create we are closest to divinity, because in creating we imitate the original divine act, an idea I adopted from the Christian mystic Matthew Fox. We are not alone when we make art. God is working with us.

So the next time someone tells you art is a luxury, or that we shouldn't be paying taxes so that kids can do plays, I encourage you to politely tell them that art heals children, nourishes communities and saves lives. Or you could just look him square in the eye and say "Mooooo!"

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.

About Revival: Meetings for Theatre, an exploration of Quaker spiritual practice and actor creativity:

We are left with the question of application. How, then, can we offer this work to theatre artists, or to artists of other disciplines, who have not self-selected as receptive to this investigation? How might our work morph into a new kind of performance medium? How can this work apply to the contemporary rehearsal structure, bound as it is by the constraints of time and money? How can this work influence what we offer our students in the classroom?

I think meetings for theatre, as we have facilitated them, will remain a forum only for those drawn to them. I can see no way we can offer a meeting for theatre to group of people with no expressed interest in the link between spirituality and creativity. What meetings for theater can be, however, are places of affirmation for those so inclined. We who are stimulated by this investigation may come to meetings for theatre for spiritual sustenance, exactly as we come to any other form of worship. The “clearness committee” idea I proposed to Abbey in September never materialized. But, as I noticed in my work in Jason, we may bring the energy and insight gained in meetings for theatre into our more conventional work, where we may have a soft and steady “ripple effect”, being undercover ministers as it were, shedding a new and gentle light on the harsh life of the professional theatre. We may feel less embarrassed to discuss the spiritual-creative link with those we work with, thus engendering conversations which may lead to others’ openings. Those of us who direct may be more inclined to value stillness and quiet in the rehearsal structures they create. Those of us who act, may be more trusting of the Divine nudge, and more willing to wait for the energy to flow through us, rather than trying to squeeze it out.

The challenges in academia are more thorny. Revival has caused me to reflect on the state of actor training in this country, where it has come from, and where it might be going. There was an explosion of theatre training institutions in the 1960s. This coincided with the emergence of “method” acting as pedagogical model which could be articulated and taught, a burgeoning fascination with the human psyche and increased government funding for the arts. It is my opinion that there was another element that contributed to this sudden surge of acting classes, and that was the great cultural release of that decade, when young people sought to escape the emotional repression characterized by middle class social norms of the previous decade. In other words, there was suddenly a great market for acting classes, as a wave of young people arrived at universities excited by the work of Freud and Jung and eager to explore themselves through creative means. At it’s core, this is what Method acting is: a creative means to explore oneself. Leaving aside for a moment the mangled history of that term, it nevertheless provided a way universities could cater to this new population of young people.

The problem is that, from a career point of view, it’s a giant pyramid scheme. There aren’t and never were enough jobs in the fields of acting and directing to employ this new population of young theatre artists, fresh from their training programs and wearing their shiny new degrees. And yet these proved to be very popular programs and lucrative for the universities, who had no incentive to downsize successful programs (successful because they were making money) simply because their graduates were entering a marketplace with regular 85% unemployment. To this day, most graduate acting programs, the ones we call “conservatories” offering M.F.A.s in acting, will have between six and ten applicants for each space they can offer. Clearly the lust for acting among our youth has not diminished, even though most young people have a fair idea what they’re up against professionally. As I describe in The Actor’s Way, I believe that many of the young people compelled to make acting the center of their lives are potential “wounded actors”, using the art not as a means of ministry in the world, but rather in a self-perpetuating failed attempt to resolve issues from their childhoods. A cynic might submit that these training programs use these troubled young people by perpetuating a lie, the lie being that if you train with us you will have a successful professional acting career. The lie is needed to continue bringing in fresh students and tuition each year. The whole thing is a nation-wide “hollow form”, with institutions teaching skills that promise professional rewards, but do not, in fact, have a prayer of delivering them; institutions which exist mainly to feed the bottom line.

These training institutions perpetuate themselves in another way. They have provided an alternate career track for their own graduates in the field of teaching. But here too there are way more candidates than places – I speak from experience, friends. And once inside these institutions, there is tremendous pressure to conform to the points of view espoused by them, such as the “value” of what that institution is offering its students. In the pursuit of tenure, theatre educators in higher education are not rewarded for truth-telling, for creativity or innovation. They are rewarded for perpetuating the status quo. I am not aware of any theatre training program dealing honestly with it’s own acting and directing students about the realities of what they’re facing upon graduating. I worry that many of the people in these teaching positions perpetuate the lie I described above in order to ensure their own job security. My sense is that most of these places behave the way my conservatory, the Yale School of Drama, did. They virtually ignore the realities of life for the young actor and teach only the craft itself. There is certainly a kind of pedagogical purity in this, and in my case the training was excellent as far as it went. But it didn’t go far enough, and looking back, I think there was deceit in it. What else can you call it when the people in charge know the truth but don’t do anything about it? Many young actors are utterly unprepared for what they’re up against in the real world, and, like me, enter their careers with a vague yet fervent hope that the dream will somehow come true. An honest training program for actors would reserve at least one third of its class time for the teaching of skills designed to help the student survive when they’re not acting. Revival put me in the midst of many citizen-actors (and citizen-directors) who are living in their lives as they are, full of compromise and yet abundant in creativity. There must be a way we can teach this citizen-actor model.

Revival also perpetuates some other designs and archetypes that make the academy nervous, I think. The first is a celebration of the non-hierarchical creative structure. Revival is about as ensemble-based as you can get, with no leader, no director and no script. This certainly has its challenges, but many in the meetings expressed a delight in the collective energy explored, unguided by human hands. The academy perpetuates the conventional, hierarchical model, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is the model at work in the professional rehearsal room. But there is a chicken and egg question here. If we weren’t so attached to hierarchical structure in our institutions teaching theatre, would they be so prevalent in the professional theatre?

Our meetings for theatre were populated mostly by artists who would self-identify as actors. The discussions we had about the nature of our exploration and the implications it had for the way we live our art were deep and as intellectually stimulating as any classroom dialog I’ve ever had. One of the debilitating aspects of the hierarchical model is that is that it perpetuates “stupid” actors. Since the hierarchical model is inevitably a power relationship, in which decision-making authority is invested in one person, there is a tendency to avoid collective discussions about the, well, the direction of the thing being made. As my experience with Shannon (and with many other wonderful directors) demonstrates, this is not always the case, and the best directors are the ones who most successfully perform the balancing act between authority and power-sharing. Still, it is undeniable that in the conventional theatre, the ultimate responsibility for the vision of the production lies with the director. The harm this does to actors is that it conditions some of us to make obedience more important than free thinking. Revival allowed the thinking actors among us a venue in which to not only envision a creative event, but to enact it spontaneously.

It is interesting to note that there is a tradition of the thinking actor in England that seems not to have taken hold in the States. British actors like Simon Callow, Anthony Sher and Vanessa Redgrave have each written important, thoughtful and entertaining books on their craft and their lives as actors. In America, obsessed as we are with exhibitionism and voyeurism, our actors tend towards tell-all autobiographies (my God – am I following in this tradition too?!?)

Lastly, the hierarchical model has a symbiotic relationship with judgment, which is a big reason it will not be de-emphasized in the academy any time soon. We are steeped in a culture which loves winners and loves reviling losers. This is partly because of the capitalist need to vanquish the competition, and partly because we are so in love with sports (and I speak as an avid sports fan). Sports has affected the way we evaluate art, and partially explains our enjoyment events like the Academy Awards, in which one person wins over four “losers”. Any artist worth their salt will tell you the whole idea of winners and losers in art is absurd. These award shows are nothing more than elaborate popularity contests, and we are fixated on them because of the small orgasm we experience after the phrase “and the winner is . . . “ than because we appreciate any value they claim to celebrate.

Revival essentially removed judgment form the equation. As my blog posting called “Doubt and the Full Professor” articulates, I have a bone to pick with judgment, and the whole concept of “good” and “bad” as it applies to theatre. Revival was empirical research: we reported on what we witnessed and felt. Judgment is theoretical: it holds an experience against an invented system of values in order to name that experience as “good” or “bad”. Judgment is deceitful in the area of art, because it masquerades as objective and thoughtful, when it is only ever subjective and opinionated. This is why I hate so much artistic criticism. Most of it is entirely invested in judgment, and never acknowledges its own subjectivity.

Quakerism has something useful too say about all this, based as it is not in Biblical interpretation but rather in personal experience. The ideas that guide us in the religious Society of Friends are called “testimonies”. That word testimony is important, because it implies an idea that is born out of personal experience. So we live by the lives that have come before us, and the Holy Witness of those lives has been informally collected into testimonies: about peace, equality, integrity, stewardship of the earth, community and – if my Yearly Meeting is moved as we in Revival have been – creativity, the newest testimony. So for a Quaker, what you experience is far more important than what someone else has written about it. The Quaker actor (the Quactor?) might de-emphasize script-analysis, and focus more on what is experienced up on one’s feet. This is what makes us such renegades, stubbornly insisting that what we feel in our hearts is good and true when the rest of the world seems to be headed in another direction. And this is what made Revival such a good fit for the thinking actor. It freed us to give testimony based on experience. We needed no permission other than that granted by the Spirit itself.

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.

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.