I’ve been thinking a lot about silence and sound lately after hearing Sunday morning’s episode of On Being on NPR. Krista Tibbett speaks with acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton about silence (“not an absence of sound, but an absence of noise”) and its effect on our brains, on our ability to be truly present, to take in the sound and the space of the place we’re in. They discuss the intimacy of really listening — actually being open to and taking in another person and their experience, instead of searching for what we want them to say. Or from an actor’s point of view, waiting for them to finish talking so we can speak (“Bullshit, bullshit, my line… bullshit, bullshit, my line” — Man on the Moon). It’s really worth a listen, and there are extra little sound meditations available on the site. The one I’ve included below is particularly cool: the variations in the sound of silence from three different locations around the world.

But I was primed for this discussion, because the night before we’d been to the Met to hear Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd. If you’re not familiar (I wasn’t), the opera is based on Herman Melville’s novella — a morality tale of sorts, depicting the murky waters of what (or whom) is good and what is evil; how do we know the difference; what happens when we have to make that judgment call? The production was wonderful: great singing, powerful staging and design, really affecting performances (this from the girl who prizes the storytelling before pristine singing every time).

And I was struck, as I often am at the Met, by the power of silence. There is no amplification in that enormous hall. It does not request that everyone be silent — it requires it. The final moments of the show are incredibly powerful — the orchestra slowly fading out as the tenor finishes his aria, until he stops, a cappella, at no ending at all (musically speaking) except that is the last note on the page. But life is like that, isn’t it? Murky, confusing, full of regrets, and lacking in tidy packages or neat bows. I could hardly inhale during the moments after he stopped singing, before the curtain came down. There wasn’t a noise in the hall. We were all listening to the silence, as much a part of the story as the hours of singing that preceded it.

So there’s a big difference between opera and Broadway, huh? Compare that to the rock concert, in-your-face spectacle of GHOST, for instance — in which the chorus sings lyrics like “more more more more more” and the words MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE are projected against the back wall, in case you missed it. Or weren’t listening. Obviously it’s an unfair argument, comparing apples to oranges. GHOST has some great singing of its own and really amazing special effects; rock concerts are just as valid entertainment as opera anyway, and I’m not going to get into a high/low art thing here. But it does remind me of hearing Damien Rice play at Radio City a few years ago. It was loud, too loud really to hear the music, and people milled around, getting drinks from the bar and talking with their friends, although Radio City is a theater and not a club. I sat and tried to listen, and when it was all over at the end of the show he came back out to play his encore. Acoustically. And everyone shut up, because they had to, and lo and behold that hall was actually built for music. I think he sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow;” I’m not really sure. I was listening more to the silence around the song.

This is why we tell the story…
life is why… pain is why… love is why… grief is why… hope is why… faith is why… you are why

–once on this island (flaherty/ahrens)

There are times I wonder what it’s all for – not always in a futile sense (though we all have our days) but curiously, inspecting the thing to see what it is. Why do we do these plays, tell these stories, over and over again? Why is Shakespeare still relevant these centuries later? Why do I write, talk about my own journey and process, when yours is inevitably your own?

“When the student is ready, the teacher appears,” we say. I think teachers can appear in all sorts of guises, be they books, quotes, people, blog posts – however the message can get to us, it will, just when we are ready and able to hear it.

When I reflect on the teachers in my own life, the shifts and passages and the inspirations that led me along, I can see how each thing led to the next. Or maybe we just like to look at it that way in hindsight, make a linear story out of a motley existence. But it seems at least at some point that it all makes a sort of divine sense – I couldn’t learn that lesson until l did. I wasn’t ready to move out East until the option of safety had been swept out from under me. It’s the old hitting rock bottom truism. Why we all let things get impossibly worse before they get better is beyond me, but it seems to be how we learn.

Some of it is choices. Some of it is just the erosion of time and goodwill on the hardened callouses of habit, until comes the moment when our shiny pink potential can see the sun. Even after we’ve been at that thing with the pumice stone til our eyes cross.

At the moment I’m re-reading Women Who Run with the Wolves by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, a Jungian psychoanalyst and cantadora (a singer of songs! a teller of tales) who uses the power of story to open gateways to the soul and spirit. She is a keeper of stories, an archaeologist of fairytale and myth, unearthing the bones of the old teaching stories from before they were whitewashed by Grimm and Disney. She talks of these tales as nourishment, as maps, so that no matter who we are or where we are in our lives, we can find ourselves in them and plot our way forward. “This being human,” as Rumi put it, is nothing new. There have been many before us, and thank the stars they told the story, and over again, for those days (like maybe yesterday) when we thought we were the first and only to ever feel like this.

The uncertainty is why we tell the story. To remember is why we tell the story. To express ourselves, to teach, to pave the way for whoever follows, to re-affirm those who have gone before. To process, to heal, to get through the day, to forgive, to laugh, to lighten up.

Why else, do you think? Leave a comment and let me know.

Inspiring me today:

“All of the arts, poetry, music, ritual, the visible arts, the theater, must singly and together create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society, and its masterpiece, free man.” –Bernard Berenson, American art critic

“Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater.” –William Inge, American playwright

“You’re always making a difference, every day & in every moment. For all the people you touch every day, you make an indelible difference in their world. With every door you hold open, car you allow to merge, smile you flash, encouragement you offer, you are making a deposit into someone’s life. The best part of this form of giving is that your ability to give is LIMITLESS! How many blessings did you dispense today?” –Darren Hardy, American “industrialist of human potential”

…off doing my part to improve life, create a humanized society, promote the human spirit – in the audition room and out of it, onstage and off…

It’s only January 9th, so chances are you’re still going strong on those New Years resolutions, hitting the treadmill after the straggler holiday parties, passing the candy dish at work without even glancing down. I mean, I know I am. Last night they even had to kick me out of the gym (ok, ok, I just didn’t know they closed early on Sundays).

Except that going to the gym wasn’t a New Years resolution but a habit I started on my last gig. And the drinking less, eating as many vegetables as I can cram into each meal (that tray of Christmas cookies was a special case) aren’t because I read them in a book but because… well… I feel better.

Sure, I made my resolutions, as people do, only this year they seem less like goals and more like choices; less a list of things to coerce and bribe and batter myself into doing (or not doing) and more just a handful of descriptives about the way I’d like life to be. There are still goals among them, to be sure (Broadway! I am coming for you) but at the same time an ease, a moment to remember the sun is shining, you know, I live two blocks from Broadway and it will be there tomorrow and it will be there next year and there are so many interesting stories to tell and waiting, eager audiences.

And I’ve been thinking about this very human desire to re-invent ourselves, to create the next new improved version, Katie 2012.0. We get a new hairstyle, trendier clothes, we change our name and move to a new town, we outrun and outfox and outdo our old selves and then we tell the stories of how fleeting is popularity, how transitory is success, how we can never escape our past until we turn and face it head-on.

And I’ve been there, too, which is why I’m taking paragraphs to say: this is different. This is new, in that taste-them-again-for-the-first-time kind of way. This year it’s less a re-invention, revision, fixer-upper self-help session and more… okay, I’ll leave it to the poets:

“A New Story of Your Life”
by Michael Blumenthal

Say you finally invented a new story
of your life. It is not the story of your defeat
or of your impotence and powerlessness
before the large forces of wind and accident.

It is not the sad story of your mother’s death
or of your abandoned childhood. It is not,
even, a story that will win you the deep
initial sympathies of the benevolent goddesses
or the care of the generous, but it is a story
that requires of you a large thrust
into the difficult life, a sense of plenitude
entirely your own. Whatever the story is,
it goes as it goes, and there are vicissitudes
in it, gardens that need to be planted,
skills sown, the long hard labors
of prose and enduring love. Deep down
in some long-encumbered self,
it is the story you have been writing
all of your life, where no Calypso holds you
against your own willfulness,
where you can rise
from the bleak island of your old story
and tread your way home.

So I’m doing this world premiere production at Delaware Theatre Co (closing weekend already! how did that happen?) — a (mostly) a cappella, modern retelling of the biblical gospel stories through a reality-show lens. It’s a fast, fun, funny commentary on our technology-driven lives: my Mary has a belt of cellphones around her waist and a growing Twitter following; the Magi follow a “star” with the aid of text messages and GPS. There’s a live camera feed projected onto two huge screens onstage (as seen in the photo above), and our a cappella/beat-boxed songs are juxtaposed with projections and pre-recorded snippets. It’s rather meta.

As we explored these themes throughout the process, the cameras and the personas and screen vs. stage, the discussion (probably inevitably) came around to the business model of the theater and how it is(n’t) keeping up with the times. How we could be live streaming these performances around the world, but we’re often prevented from doing that by our own artists’ unions. How virtually every other business works on residual income, getting the product out to greater and greater numbers of people, through the most efficient means possible… and the theater is restricted to however many butts there are seats for in any given house on any given evening. And then the show closes, and if you missed it, too bad! It’s over, unless it gets re-mounted or somebody finds the money and inspiration to take it to the next level — and even then, even if all the same artists come back to do it again, it won’t be the same.

But wait. Isn’t that kind of the whole point?

Don’t we go to the theater precisely in order to get away from the screen, to get in the same room with a few dozen or few hundred other people, to share that energy and see it, hear it, feel it firsthand? To have the collective experience — not just watch someone else go through something but actually go through it together? Because we can feel it, viscerally, the human voice and human experience — and when I’m in my room and you’re in yours it’s a nice proxy, maybe, but we do still know the difference between a screen and the real thing. We can live-stream stage shows all we want, but it’s a little like looking at your friends’ vacation Mobile Uploads on facebook. They may be showing you what that Hawaiian beach looks like *right now*, but there’s no sand between your toes (or Mai Tai in your hand, for that matter).

I’m reminded of the Buddhist monks and their sand mandalas, painstakingly crafted grain by grain into exquisite works of art… and then destroyed. Not saved for posterity or put into a museum for the benefit of the estate (and the public, of course), but swept away, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, a reminder of the impermanence of all things. A reminder that the only real thing is THIS moment, and now this one… and once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for residual income and I’ve got nothing against screens (I’ve been told I look great on camera). I’m going to shoot my music video early next year, and have the time of my life doing it. I’ll post it on YouTube and promote it on facebook and maybe someone will watch it on their smartphone someday while they’re hurtling through space on a high-speed train. I’m really interested to see how that song, that story, will live on the screen – how it will be differently informed by that medium. And I’ve gotten incredibly kind comments from fly woman genius listeners and those who have found my work online and been moved by my recordings.

But at heart I still feel that the real magic — at least, theater magic — happens in the room together, where the energy is palpable and the show changes every night because the audience does, because the actors are human and fallible and informed by the unique circumstances of that day and that moment. And if you want to know what happens at the show, you’ll just have to put your butt in a seat to find out.

On our day off Monday, wonderful Wyn Wilson (playing the Big/Little Edie role) and I took a jaunt downtown to the Dali museum to fill the well and see the town. As usual for me in an art museum, I started scribbling away in my journal halfway through the exhibit…

In retrospect (a retrospective) — how easy to put everything in order… create a through-line… as though life is actually linear, everything in perfect succession, lessons learned, packaged and tied up with strings before proceeding to The Next. But we in the middle, how can we see the forest for the trees? The artist may wrestle with those same demons, however many years later, just choosing this time a different color paint…

This morning the three of us Edies did a TV interview on Studio 10, and over the past week I’ve been all a-twitter with Opening! and family visiting! and flowers in the dressing room! Hearing that applause, catching the buzz, visiting and talking with patrons, oh my. Thank goodness for brush-up last night, to remind me there’s a show to be done.

Promoting the thing, talking about the thing, reading (gasp) reviews! of the thing – it’s all nothing, of course, without the thing itself. The telling of the story, the singing of the songs, the being the vessel for whatever comes through it.

Creating the actual thing.

Which is what, I suspect (and hope), most of us do it all for anyway. And while the perks are fun and the ego loves to be fed, just today I wonder what it would be like to create for creation’s sake. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If you do something brilliant and don’t post it on facebook, did it really happen?

Did Dali enjoy a more idyllic artistic existence, or just a more prolonged moment before the critics (and art teachers and Establishment folk) got to comment on his creative fruits? I suspect it’s the latter.

On the other hand, if people weren’t saying fabulous things about my performance, I would still be enjoying the heck out of giving it. I know this much to be true because I was enjoying the heck out of rehearsals and performances before people were saying fabulous things. But if art is holding (as ’twere) the mirror up to nature, there has to be somebody to look in it. None of us creates in a void, and the point of the theater is our shared experience. Anyway. Here I go with my cyclical arguments again.

Here’s Wyn tying a wish to the Dali Wish Tree. I can’t remember just what I wished for, but it was something about a life of wild abandon and self-expression.

Here’s to another weekend of storytelling and creating the thing…

That’s what I just said to my friend as I signed off of G-chat for the morning, and I won’t spend too much time here since I’ve got to, you know, actually learn the lines. But since those words haven’t passed my lips for awhile, I’m marking the milestone.

Getting ready to head up to Chenango River Theatre to start Almost, Maine rehearsals next week… you’ll be hearing more from me when I get there.

Feels good to be a working actor.

I was reminded last week, amidst the bustle of rehearsals for our I Am Jim Thompson reading as well as returning from a weekend away; day job work here in town; and all the other stuff of life, just how important it is to take time off. Not out connecting with friends… off. Not surfing facebook… OFF. How draining it can be to be an actor… to cram into a week the exploration of a character who doesn’t have the happiest of journeys… not to mention a journey for which I’ve got baggage packed and ready to go.

I’m not sure the body knows the difference between the emotions we experience onstage and those we do in real life (provided, I suppose, that those onstage are more than surface-level). Emotion is chemical, after all, which is one way to explain why we fall into life patterns and relationship patterns: we become addicted, or at least accustomed, to the chemicals we are used to receiving. But who is to explain to those chemicals that on Sunday night I would be having grievous fights with my significant other, but don’t worry, they’re not real?

It wasn’t until I couldn’t string a sentence together last Saturday morning that I realized I’d pushed it too far, and it wasn’t until that night after a three-hour nap and some QT staring at the wall that I started to come around. Why do we let ourselves get that far out of whack?

In The Artist’s Way, a wonderful book/process by Julia Cameron that I followed some years ago, she writes of the creative life and ways to work through the obstacles that keep us from being the creative geniuses we’re meant to be. When we create, however we do it, we draw on our inner reserves of energy and flow and genius or whatever you want to call it. We take what we need from what we’ve got stored up, like a well or a bank account, and spend it on what we’re making. But equally important to this process is making deposits back into the account; soaking up some soulful goodness; refilling the proverbial well.

So I’ve spent this week in recovery mode: getting a massage, working the puzzle, going yarn shopping. I had a few glasses of wine and listened to The Tobolowsky Files. I even let myself get bored.

Because I figured that if I had gotten so far out of balance the other way, I probably needed more refill time than I originally would have gauged. And I was right — it wasn’t til this morning that I was rarin’ to go, exercising, working on my script, writing this post. So for awhile I may need to let the pendulum swing, until I start to learn what the first warning signs are… all the ones that come before I’m dragging my comatose carcass around.

How about you: What are your warning signs? How do you refill the well?

Help. I seem to be having that age-old actor’s dilemma: how do you play a character you don’t like? Or perhaps more accurately: one you don’t want to be?

I’m in rehearsals this week for a workshop/reading of I Am Jim Thompson, a new musical based on the true story of an American spy-turned-businessman credited for revitalizing the Thai silk industry. I’ve done this show before, playing a different role — that of the good friend, the trusted confidante who wants to marry the man but knows she never will… but also knows she knows him better than anyone else on earth. The fabulously witty partner in crime, holding court at a party, who may live a life of unrequited love, but that’s probably some of her doing, too. She might have her walls up, but she’s his equal, and more than, and she knows it. And anyway, the audience loves her, and knows it too.

But now I’m playing the wife, the dutiful wife, the wife he cheats on, the wife he leaves, the wife who never really understands what else he might want in the world. The wife he eventually looks back on, and misses, but never goes back to. The wife the audience might sympathize with; the wife who does get those few fleeting moments of blissful love; but who can’t let go, and eventually, she’s the wife we mostly just feel sorry for.

She’s the woman I never want to be. The woman who can’t see what’s in front of her face, who only wants to believe in fairytale endings, who won’t loosen her death-grip on her relationship to let some fresh air in before it asphyxiates. Back when I was playing Ms. Fabulous, I completely understood why she was the woman he left.

But now I have to get into her skin, and I don’t want to, because the real issue is that she’s the woman I once was. I know what it’s like to be cheated on, to want the Perfect Ending so badly I was willing to put up with anything and everything if it meant we would stay together. I know what it’s like to ignore my intuition for months, years, to turn a blind eye to all the signs I didn’t want to see. Because we did have those few fleeting moments of love, didn’t we? But I’ve worked so hard to purge myself of that needy, frightened, Self-less girl that I don’t want to believe there’s anything left in me that knows how to play this role. I see this character in movies and scoff, identifying only with the boyfriend, the husband who wants out. Can’t she see she’s suffocating him? No. She can’t. Not til it’s too late.

But this is what we sign up for as actors, isn’t it? Not just to be the star of the show, the grand dame, the leading debonair gentleman; but to breathe pathos into the underdog, the misrepresented, the poor bastard stepchildren and overly needy wives, the Edmunds of the world. To put ourselves into shoes we wish didn’t fit us so well. To leave untouched just enough of all the things we don’t like about ourselves, because you never know when you might need them again.

h/t: The Exceptional Man