Glad

When I was performing Buen Camino in Edinburgh and Philadelphia I saw dozens of shows. Three of them affected me profoundly—how I thought about the world, how connected I felt to humanity, how I want to challenge myself as I make art.

Weathering

Weathering took place in a theater in the round on an inflatable platform. Ten actors run onto the platform and for the first fifteen minutes freeze in a state of motion, sweating as they try to hold their place, glasses falling from faces, backpacks slipping off shoulders, shoes sliding out of sneakers. At two or three minute intervals, the stage crew moves the platform a quarter turn.

Then, the actors slowly reach for the hand or arm of a person close to them and as they do so, they become more unstable, they become tangled, clothes come off, shoes tumble from the platform, someone eats an orange, someone else digs in her purse. The only sound is huffing and groaning and low growls as the actors begin to spin the platform themselves, faster and faster. The frenzy increases. Sitting in the front row, I feel anxious, afraid, helpless. Eventually, some of the actors stumble onto the laps of people in the audience. Two actors collapse at my feet and I can do nothing but put my arms around their naked bodies and ask them if they’re okay. Then for a good long while—five minutes? more?—the audience sits, taking in a trashed, empty platform littered with clothes and shoes and orange peels, aware of actors collapsed throughout the theater. At this point, every person in the theater is in that play. It isn’t possible to be a bystander. I’ve never had an experience equal to it. Finally, the actors rise and take their bows. And the audience continues to sit. I’m so thunderstruck it takes ten minutes before I find it in me to leave. This is what humans are capable of.

I saw that play seven weeks ago and have thought about it every single day since.

The Nature of Forgetting

The Nature of Forgetting similarly uses virtually no language to convey something deeply human. The play starts as we make our way to our seats from the lobby, walking into the theater in complete darkness, unable to see our hands in front of our faces, following arrows made with glow-in-the-dark tape and holding our arms out to find the wall. Racks and racks of clothing line the stage and a man sits in a single chair on the right side. Then a young woman comes out and says, “Father, your sister and brother are coming in fifteen minutes with a cake. I’ve put your gray jacket on the end of the rack with a red tie in the right hand pocket. Would you put it on?” The man goes to the rack. He’s bewildered about which jacket is his. He paws through clothing on hangars until he stumbles on something that jogs his memory. Immediately the stage crew whisks away the racks to reveal a raised platform arranged with school desks. Two musicians—a blazing percussionist and a musician who plays the violin and the keyboard—convey the mood. And immediately we are inside the mind of the man. He’s in grade school. A cute girl giggles at a desk behind him. Both are giddy with flirting, quickly returning to their books when the stern schoolmaster comes in. The entire show takes place with ten actors playing many roles. No dialogue interrupts the audience witnessing an addled man making his way through the dim corners of his life, finding both joy and sadness. We see his grade school shenanigans, his growing love for his girlfriend, his marriage, the birth of their children, the erosion of their love, the diagnosis of his disease—all through music, through expression, through frantic energy, and through knowing silence. At the end of the play, the man sits back in his chair, the stage crew wheels the clothes back in, and the daughter comes to her father and says, “Father, your sister and brother are here with a cake. I’ve put your gray jacket on the end of the rack with a red tie in the right hand pocket. Would you put it on?”

Pow!

The audience rose to its feet, clapping. I was weeping without shame for two reasons: This company of actors conveyed something profound and terrifying with generosity and pathos unlike anything I have ever seen. And I cried because I thought: Humans made this.

Without words, The Nature of Forgetting illuminated something every person in that dark theater dreads. Together we experienced that horror in a new way. As citizens of our country tear each other apart with vulgar indecency, there are humans who wrote this play, rehearsed this play, wrote original music for this play, and united a room full of strangers with a deeply shared, deeply personal experience.

Like Weathering, I have thought about The Nature of Forgetting every day. It gives me hope. As I think about my next show, I aspire to find a common story, to go as deep as I can to tell it, and to make it beautiful. This is what humans can do.

I See You Watching

The third play that stayed with me—I See You Watching—was very hard to sit through. I saw it four times. The show has two actors and exposes, without a shred of veneer, exactly what it looks like, sounds like, feels like to be objectified as a woman. They spare nothing. The play also shows what it looks like when a woman, finally, says no.

I See You Watching starts with a young woman auditioning for a part in Hollywood. She wears a red sequined dance dress and twirls to upbeat music in energetic circles across the stage, her face spilt with an eager, yearning smile. The casting director is a tall, fit man, handsome, and self-assured, wearing straight cut jeans, a blazer, and black oxford shoes. The first word he says to her is a beleaguered, “Stop.” And for the rest of the play he humiliates the woman, relentlessly asking her to be more of what she is not—prettier, younger, thinner—and, with his charm, gets audience members to participate. The play is both awful and true. The first time I saw it I left the theater so angry I knew that if I saw that male actor in one of the beer gardens at the Edinburgh Fringe it would be near impossible for me to stop myself from throwing my Deuchar’s IPA in his face. I bought tickets to the play three more times to find out if seeing it over and over again would inure me to what I knew was about to happen. It didn’t. However, the play did change depending on the audience. At one showing the audience was primarily millennial women and, when goaded to participate, every single one of them refused. Another time, a mixed audience of older people seemed not to understand the humiliation they were asked to participate in and laughed uproariously as the play proceeded. I was appalled and transfixed.

Weathering, The Nature of Forgetting, and I See You Watching went far beyond entertainment. They opened up new worlds inside of me and I left as a person more vulnerable, more amazed, more full of wonder. And it wasn’t just me. Those of us in each audience had a common, moving experience. We came in largely as strangers and left jointly changed or illuminated, sharing a bit of our humanity with one another.

There is something particularly human and vulnerable about theater. The actors are not at a remove, nor is the audience. When we’re in a theater, we can’t hit the stop button or pause the video. We can’t talk. We submit to the art and allow it to disturb us. It’s an experience of surrender for both actor and audience and we all have the chance to leave changed.

And maybe that transformative experience was made visible when, after Weathering, the audience just sat there. They didn’t get up and leave, chatting about where to have a drink. We sat together, silent and still, for quite a while, waiting for the air to settle, letting our hearts adjust to a new openness.

After each of these plays I thought: We can create this. We can astound. And it made me glad.

I choose that word carefully. Its etymology is from the Proto-Indo-European root ghel, which means “to shine,” the notion is of being radiant with joy. I was made glad because I felt more connected to humanity. Each play illuminated things deeply human—anxiety, fear, regret, yearning, remembered joy, humiliation, identity, love—that are common to us all and are often beyond words.

I also felt challenged. Could I make art that moves people like that? Could I peel away the hide of what protects our fear and expose it with few words? With no words? Just truth and beauty pared to the delicate bone?

I don’t know. But I know I can try. I’ve been sitting at my desk for weeks wandering down the dark alleys of my heart and brain and, as in a well-designed maze, have hit one wall after another and had to backtrack. It’s okay. I want to find that one hidden path that gets to something tender we all share and find a way to bring a room full of strangers to the same spot—to a place of being uncommonly glad. This is what we are capable of.