It Touched My Theater

We are led into what seems to be a pretty small theater. This is it. The first in a series of plays that I will experience. Peers of mine will later comment how run down the theater was when they first walked in. I took no notice. Christopher leans over and tells me we are sitting on the stage and that behind the curtain is where the audience usually sits. The lights go dark and a projection comes up. This is it. The start. I am now a part of the experience called Das Spiel ist Aus. 

The projection lasts for about five minutes (ten minutes? twenty? I don't know. I lost all sense of time) and by the end of the projection my heart was literally pounding out of my chest and I absolutely could not catch my breath. Something was happening and I am getting a sensation all throughout my body. What is happening? I am spinning! Or the curtain is spinning? I couldn't figure it out. Wait, yes! I am spinning! The entire stage was rotating. We end up facing the audience again. We are witness to an absolutely beautiful theater orchestra that is possibly the most beautiful I have ever seen. In the lower center are two people that are before us. Both completely naked. Both with a gaze that tore through life. It seemed as though life started anew and before us were Adam and Eve...


...and it did start anew. Right there on that night in that place. It was possible. Theater was possible. It had happened. I experienced theater that was alive. I did not know a word of German, the only language spoken the entire night, and yet I was alive. We walked out and my body had been through something. I felt a feeling that I have only had a handful of times in my life. It is something only theater has ever done to me. It is when a little bit of that magic, a little bit of that life, is taken out with you. The lights are clearer, the night is clearer, and anything is possible. The world was ringing and singing sweetly. This moment was fleeting and the sad fact of truth slipped in. The banality of it  (I initially wrote "the omnipresent pettiness of human life" but i'm in Berlin and it is beautiful and I keep being touched by experiences in new ways here so I am afraid to write that phrase even though maybe in the day to day it rings true) slipped in. But that moment and that night made me take the blindfolds off that I had been wearing for so long. The folds that kept me thinking that theater is dead, ineffectual, never new. That it was not connected to the deepest passion that shakes through my bones .

I keep going back to this passage by John Patrick Shanley that he wrote as a preface to The Big Funk. The passage is absolutely beautiful and has been a part of my life for quite a long time. When I first read it I was still a kid who was not yet fully scathed by life. Back then every word made perfect sense to me and my soul. Now sometimes his words are things I grapple with. Though I am only a few years older than that kid who found the passage in perfect harmony with himself, I am now many times lost, confused and scared i.e. not in harmony with the spirit inside me that is able to dance with his words. I will leave his full passage at the bottom and will come back to this first experience in a later post (maybe to get at the "Why" of the impact of this night). But I leave this experience alive, changed, and touched. Touched with a million possibilities...that what we feel in the depths of our soul is possible. Possible in the theater.

John Patrick Shanley’s preface to his play “The Big Funk”

A man in our society is not left alone. Not in the cities. Not in the woods. We msut have commerce with our fellows, and that commerce is difficult and uneasy. I do not understand how to live in this society. I don’t get it. Each person has an enormous effect. Call it environmental impact if you like. Where my foot falls, I leave a mark, whether I want to or not. We are linked together, each to each. You can’t breathe without taking a breath from somebody else. You can’t smile without changing the landscape. And so I ask the question: Why is theatre so ineffectual, unnew, not exciting, fussy, not connected to the thrilling recognition possible in dreams?

It’s a question of spirit. My ungainly spirit thrashes around inside me making me feel lumpy and sick. My spirit is this moment dissatisfied with the outward life I inhabit. Why does my outward life not reflect the enormity of the miracle of existence? Why are my eyes blinded with always new scales, my ears stopped with thick chunks of fresh wax, why are my fingers calloused again?

I don’t ask these questions lightly. I beat on the stone door of my tomb. I want out! Some days I wake up in a tomb, some days on a grassy mound by a river. Today, I woke up in a tomb. Why does my spirit sometimes retreat into a deathly closet? Perhaps it is not my spirit leading the way at such times, but my body, longing to lie down in marble gloom, and rot away.

Theatre is a safe place to do the unsafe things that need to be done. When it’s not a safe place, it’s abusive to actors and audiences alike. When its safety is used to protect cowards masquerading as heroes, it’s a boring travesty. An actor who is truly heroic reveals the divine that passes through him, that aspect of himself that he does not own and cannot control. The control and the artistry of the heroic actor is in service to his soul.

We live in an era of enormous cynicism. Do not be fooled.

Don’t act for money. You’ll start to feel dead and bitter.

Don’t act for glory. You’ll start to feel dead, fat, and fearful.

We live in an era of enormous cynicism. Do not be fooled.

You can’t avoid all the pitfalls. There are lies you must tell. But experience the lie. See it as something dead and unconnected you clutch. And let it go.

Act from the depth of your feeling imagination. Act for celebration, for search, for grieving, for worship, to express that desolate sensation of wandering through the howling wilderness.

Don’t worry about Art.

Do these things, and it will be Art.