Ten years ago, recently out of theatre school, I went to an open call at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, also known as BTF.  I arrived extra early to “warm up and shake off some nerves”, a regular habit for me in those early days. BTF was mounting a production of Moon Children by Michael Weller.  I was sure I would be perfect for this production, I had played the lead (Bob Rettie) in my school’s production of the same play 3 years earlier. Filled with the confidence of youth and my previous experience with the play I was convinced I could secure a role in this production if I had a good audition.  

I was nervous.  All the classic symptoms – sweaty palms, slightly trembling hands, shallow breathing … little beads of sweat piling up on my forehead.  I wanted so badly to have a good audition.

Sitting in the waiting area, knees bouncing up and down, headshot and resume shaking in my hands, an older actor looked over and smiled warmly at me. Thats nice I thought to myself.  Then the monitor called the next name and he went into the audition room.  

Did he know he was next?  He seemed very relaxed for someone who was about to have an audition.  

After his audition, while he was collecting his things, I asked him “How did it go?.”  I was hoping it had been a good audition, he seemed like a nice guy.  Little did I know that I would never forget what he was about to say to me.  He looked me in the eyes, calm, smiling, and said “sometimes you have to let your soft animal out and let it love what it loves” … and then he wished me luck and walked away.

I stood there confused – almost alarmed at this response.

What the hell does that mean?  Soft animal? Did he understand my question? … Am I supposed to know what this soft animal reference means? … is this a professional actor thing that I am too inexperienced to understand? Was this soft animal a good thing or a bad thing? I am so confused.  

Was it what he said or the way he said it that struck such a chord with me?  I remembered those words and thought of them often over the years.  Rarely an audition passed that I didn’t think about … “let your soft animal out and let it love what it loves”

In the following years the auditioning process became a painful one for me.  Fear, confusion, shame, doubt and resentment were the hallmarks of my experience.  Often I would have a great audition for a role for which I was well suited and not get a callback.  Other times I would have a terrible audition and book the job. I felt like a crazy person. I didn’t even know what was good and what was bad work anymore.  How could I prepare for the next call or show up and perform with any confidence if I didn’t even know the difference between a good audition and a bad one? I auditioned less.  I doubted myself more. Then I got called in for a show that I was perfect for. I worked rigorously on the material and had a great audition. I was sure I had booked the job. All the signs were there.  Then, while out to dinner with some friends in the East Village, I recieved a call from an unknown number … This was a call about the show.  I got it!  I ran outside to take the call.  I was right, it was about the show but they were calling to say that they had gone with someone else. Any and all confidence I had in myself, my talents, my instincts … it was gone … or at least hiding deep under a mountain of shame and confusion.  I stopped auditioning altogether.

Years passed – I pursued other interests.  Teaching theater to children, travelling, gardening, painting, weightlifting and cycling.  All the energy I had once focused on a career in the theatre was now being dumped into these activities.  After a while the shame and confusion of the audition process was replaced with the shame of having quit, of not being tough enough to stick it out or smart enough to figure it out.  A sort of soul callus developed, I threw myself further and further into other endeavors, pretending I had never been an actor at all.

Then one day, almost 10 years after I had met that smiling man in the audition holding room, it came back to me.  Sitting on a new york city subway car in late May reading a book of Mary Oliver poems, given to me for my birthday by a friend, it found me –  “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves” …

I literally jumped out of my seat on the subway car and yelled “HOLY SHIT!”

This was it!  10 years of wondering and now I knew where it came from!  

The down side of this discovery was that it reminded me of my life as an actor.  All at once a slew of suppressed feelings and memories … hopes and dreams rushed in on me.  I was overwhelmed. I sat stunned, staring blankly at the page, watching the movie of my past life play out in my minds eye …. Eventually I came back to the train and so did my curiosity about this passage.  Maybe now I could figure out why that man had quoted this text to me.

Okay let’s read it from the beginning and see what we can find …

“WILD GEESE”

“You do not have to be good.”

I stopped.

Again.

“You do not have to be good.”

It all started coming together so quickly.  All I had ever wanted was to be “good”. I wanted so badly to be a good actor and do good work and have a good career and a good paycheck and I was always praying and working towards having a good audition.  I had been operating in a system of good and bad. Everything that happened or didn’t was either good or bad.

This was no way to live and it was certainly no way to pursue a career in the theatre. LOVE was the thing.  Love was what had started me on this journey so long ago and love was surely the only force strong enough to guide me through a career as uncertain and challenging as an actors.

“You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

   Love what it loves.”

Shortly after this discovery on the train I joined The Caymichael Patten Studio and began to train as an actor again.  In my two years at her studio I’ve rediscovered my love for the craft. I’m trying, day by day and class by class, to let go of the “good and bad” system that victimized my youth.  Instead I am trying to make an investment in my “soft animal” which I now see as a metaphor for my “most authentic self’ or what I think Cay might refer to as “The jumping off place”.  Reentry to the auditioning world has not been as challenging as I thought. A shift in attitude and perspective seems to have made all the difference. The only question I ask myself now is “Do you love what you’re doing?” and if the answer is “yes”, then I know it’s good.

Carol Reynolds gives her Body Dynamics’ students two homework assignments at their first class: (1) to take full-length photos of themselves from the front, sides, and back, and (2) to do a simple drawing, nothing fancy required, of how they view themselves, how they see their bodies. At the end of the three-month course, she assigns another round of photos and drawings and students then bring their Befores and Afters to the last class.

Rachel is hardcore. This is her fourth time doing the 12-week course and for the final class of this session, she’s brought in the photos and drawings she did over the four cycles.

Rachel’s photographs clearly chart her body’s physical changes over her 18 months of Body Dynamics work. Her shoulders no longer slump forward, her posture is notably different, and her entire person radiates a quiet strength.

But it’s Rachel’s drawings that show the true magnitude of her change.

Rachel sets her drawings, one by one on the floor, from earliest to most recent. As she places the last one down, the rest of us gasp. The evolution of her figures is almost as dramatic as Rudolph Zallinger’s classic “The Road to Homo Sapiens.”

Her first “self-portrait,” from October 2016, is of a sitting figure, viewed from the side, legs and arms crossed, back hunched, long hair dangling over a featureless face. It’s a desperately sad, curled-in and closed-up figure. Three months later, Rachel depicts herself standing straight, face forward (still featureless), palms flat against the thighs of her clothed body. The figure is contained, but present. The difference between her before and after is painfully, beautifully expressed.

Her next self-portrait is from late January 2017, at the start of her next three-month course. She is standing but turned slightly to the side, head tilted down, arms slightly akimbo. Her face and body are still featureless but the figure no longer appears to be hiding under clothes. By the end of March, for her final class, her figure is back in clothes but rendered with more shape and definition. Her hair is loose and wild, she’s facing forward, head straight, arms at her side with palms up and open to the world, inviting.

Rachel began her third round of Body Dynamics in April 2017. As always, her face is featureless but her hair is loose, her arms are held up and out at her sides, palms open, just like Michelangelo’s powerful Vitruvian Man. Rachel couldn’t locate her “after” drawing for this session ending in June 2017, but I’m guessing it was at least as compelling.

Body Dynamics’ students get a rigorous workout. Carol’s classes feature a lot of very specific, very targeted relaxation, stretching, and alignment work. Carol invited me to join in on this last night of class. It had been a couple of years since I’d taken Body Dynamics and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be up to the challenge of a final session. But I also remembered how revelatory the course was, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to jump in.

Carol is a keen diagnostician. Between her eagle-eye and acute touch, she misses nothing. During the ball work that releases muscular tension, stimulates energy flow, and reconnects the body to feeling and thought, Carol gently reminds someone (i.e. me) to “notice you’re clenching your jaw” and “notice that you’re not exhaling.” Carol is also funny. When “someone” gives her the fish-eye, she adds “I’m sorry to interrupt you while you’re holding your breath. But don’t hold your breath.” As we wrap up the ball work, Carol checks-in to see if any of us have something to report. “The subtlety of the ball work. . . it just really grounded me today,” Valerie, one of the other students, says.

We move on to partnered hands-on work. This was something that scared me when I started Body Dynamics lo’ those many years ago, but it became my favorite part. It’s learning to truly relax and trust a partner as you alternate physically assisting each other through stretching and manipulation. Articulating to my partner what type of touch or hold I need in a given moment, supporting what my partner needs, and understanding, as Carol puts it, that “we’re all codependent” – all of this was huge for me. It was discovery work that’s had a lasting impact on my acting.

And speaking of lasting impact . . . back to Rachel’s sequence of drawings.

Rachel began her fourth cycle of Body Dynamics this February with a fascinating, expressive self-portrait. Here, she faces forward. Her right arm is curled up and back, palm apparently resting behind her neck, and her head inclined against her upper arm and elbow. Her other hand rests on her upper chest. The only other feature is a slight indent at her right armpit. The image feels wistful.

In the final drawing, the one that drew the collective gasp when she set it at the end of her sequence, an entirely new Rachel emerges. She faces us, hands to her side. Her hair is loose, her head tilted slightly in contemplation. We know it’s contemplation because, for the first time, Rachel has eyes, a nose and a mouth. She has breasts and pubic hair and a seam of definition running between her ribs down to her belly button.

She looks like the Rachel standing next to us, except Real Rachel isn’t naked.
Either way, she’s beautiful.

When I ask her later about her experience of Body Dynamics, Rachel says “When I started, my body was a giant shell that kept a lot from coming in and also from going out. I’d learned to disassociate – I guess a lot of us do.” Carol would remind her that she no longer had to “defend” herself. Rachel tells me she keeps returning to the Body Dynamics work because “I want to experience life happening. . . flowing through me.” Working with Carol, “I’m retraining my body for the world.”

The sequence of Rachel’s drawings are up on Cay’s twitter feed @cpatstudio. If you aren’t yet following Cay’s tweets, now is the time to start.

And you don’t have to wait until September before getting a taste of Carol’s Body Dynamics goodness! Carol’s got a four-week Ball Class – a key aspect of BD work – starting in June:

Ball Work with Carol Reynolds:

The class will be open to all (subject to interview), rather than limited to students

who have previously completed the 12-week Body Dynamics course.

The fee will be $200 for four classes, and those four classes will be from

6 to 9 p.m. on Friday, June 15, Friday, June 22, Friday, June 29, and Friday, July 6.

It’s really hard to hear your own voice,
and every lie you tell
makes your voice harder to hear,
and a lot of what we do is lying.
Especially when what we want so badly
from other people
is for them to love us.
~ Nora, A Doll’s House, Part 2 by Lucas Hnath

Flashback: February, 2001

We had just finished our table read. I don’t remember the play, or which wonderful actor was sitting across from me in scene study class that afternoon. Cay was quiet for a long moment. “Vivienne, you’ve been studying with me for about a year now?” I nodded. She appeared to choose her next words carefully: “Not only have I not seen who you are as an actor . . . I can’t say I’ve seen who you are as a human being.”

Ouch.

When I approached Cay after class, unsure how to find this thing – this “me” I didn’t realize was missing – she said I didn’t need to search far. I was there, she said, but my “social mask” was obscuring me.

Cay’s words landed. I believed her. But I didn’t fully understand what she meant. I was too bound up in how I’d learned to represent myself. I’d come to believe this representation – what Cay called my social mask – was my truth.

I couldn’t hear – or maybe, recognize? – my own voice.
The revelation was scary as shit.

* * *

I’ve been wrestling with this post on the social mask for over a month. I’ve worked four different drafts of it, all crumpled at my feet — or would be, if I still wrote pen to paper. I’d get as far as that moment from 2001. After that, my writing would stall.

I started working on A Doll’s House, Part 2 for class and read the passage above. Nora is explaining to Torvald how, after she left him, she decided to live in total silence until she could free herself from all the voices she’d internalized, the ones telling her how to think, how to speak, how to be. The voices warning her against the inappropriate. After two years of silence she could finally hear her own voice. “I could think of things that I wanted that had nothing to do with what anyone else wanted.”

I realized I was resisting this post because my acting is still compromised by my social mask.

Since that afternoon in 2001, yeah, I’ve done a lot of work on myself and yeah, there’s been a huge improvement in my acting, thanks to Cay. But all these years later I can feel myself making nice when I fear getting moments wrong – because being “ugly” (in all senses of the word) means I won’t be loved. I slip behind my mask.

There’s a lot of shame in this. Worse, it short-circuits my self-awareness. A director or Cay might ask “What do you want?” My mind goes blank. I think: what do I want? What do I feel, in Cay’s words, “for real for real”? I get static – white noise – in reply.

This feels like a cop-out.
It may be a cop-out.
But there it is. As Nora says, “every lie you tell, makes your voice harder to hear.”

The social mask afflicts a lot of us. I think girls learn early on to fashion their thoughts and feelings in service to the ‘higher good’ of making others comfortable. This can muck us up for a lifetime. Many of the heartbreaking #MeToo stories I’ve read touch on an element of this dynamic and the self-doubt about what’s acceptable, what we allow ourselves to experience, what we allow ourselves to say. American men face their own oppressive set of expectations – be strong, be stoic, don’t lose.

If we’ve internalized these expectations, the social mask begins to wear us. As actors, as humans, it gets harder and harder to recognize our own remarkable voice.

(This post was running on and I’ve more to say on the ways the social mask can trip us up in our acting so, following the lead of A Doll’s House, Part 2, there’s a Mask Work, Part 2. Look for that in a week or so if you’re interested. Meanwhile, I’d be curious in any thoughts or stories you’ve got to share about the masks we wear.)

I’ve been watching for 10 minutes. And I’m wondering why Fred Waggoner leads drill class relaxation with his students seated in chairs. I’ve only done relaxation work splayed on a floor or slumped against a wall, so I’m curious how you find full relaxation while trying not to topple sideways off your chair.

“There’s a certain amount that has to keep us in the room,” Fred explains. “If you’re in an audition situation you need to find a way to relax.” This prompts Paul to ask how he should handle chatty fellow auditioners when his goal is to quiet himself and achieve a relaxed state before going into the casting room. “What if they think I’m rude?” he asks. “What someone else thinks of you is none of your business,” Fred says.

Direct and simple. Which pretty much sums up Fred’s no bullshit, insightful and compassionate approach to all the work happening on this particular Friday afternoon.

Once the initial relaxation exercises are done, the six students embark on their own specific sense-memory tasks. Arnold is creating a place – and he sits upstage, stretched out between two chairs, doing some imagined journal writing. Justin and Mae are each working on a private experience of pain, Paul is working on substitution in a particular place, Brian is exploring an animal, and Kaija is conjuring a cup of coffee. Fred reminds them to vocalize “to physically unstick yourself.” Moans and yelps begin to puncture the quiet of the room.

Mae is gingerly investigating a pain on the side of her torso. I wince as Justin breathes into and feels out what seems to be a busted nose and lip. During a lull in sound, Fred says, “When you’re working, sometimes you’ll wonder, ‘why am I stuck in this scene’? Well, it’s probably because you’re physically stuck. There’s a tension somewhere.”

Brian is now on his feet, moving his large cat (I’m guessing) up into his human body. His physicality has entirely changed but it’s grounded and true. A distinct character is emerging, one that’s Not Brian. Fred asks him to move his animal vocalization into some text. As Brian begins to speak, Fred calls up to Arnold – “I want you to find a song, start singing it.” At first, Arnold is discombobulated by the direction to sing while still keeping to his journal writing. But before long, he’s integrated the tasks and settled into the exercise, his legs rocking slightly to the rhythm of his low singing.

I look at Kaija, who’s holding her coffee a little above her head. Her absorption in each moment, considering the bottom of her imagined mug, gently testing its weight, is weirdly soothing to watch. Minutes later, I glance back at Arnold, and I’m struck by how relaxed and private his work has become. He’s completely given over to his tasks. And I feel a spark of guilty pleasure, like I’ve snuck up and caught him being utterly himself, for only himself.

A guttural longing courses through Brian’s next bit of dialogue, startling me. He spins out this skein of sound and dialogue a bit longer. Suddenly he stops. He sinks down on his haunches. Then he drops to the floor. Fred crouches next to him, checking in. Brian tells him that’s he’s feeling lightheaded. After a few minutes – and a few bites of chocolate (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYSBPo_mAD0) – Brian rejoins the fray. Later, as the individual exercises wrap up, Brian confirms he’s okay. “It was really, really good there, Brian,” Fred says, then adds with a smile: “til you almost passed out.” Brian nods. “I was vibrating.”

That experience of being physically overwhelmed during a sense-memory exercise can be scary. And like all the delicious, scary-safe stuff – vulnerability, great sex, roller coasters, great sex on roller coasters – it’s intoxicating. You crave more of it.

I was itching to clamber into a chair, not tip out sideways, and give over to letting my body and imagination guide me. What the students were doing individually and collectively was beautiful to witness. I wanted to be part of it.

At one point, Paul, Kaija and Justin, eyes closed, were simultaneously vocalizing and extending their left arms above their heads – an inadvertent synchronized expression. Their voices and arms hung in the air an achingly long moment. And though I was strictly an observer, something physically unlocked and released in me as they sighed out and lowered their arms in oblivious (intuitive?) unison.

Drill Class with Fred Waggoner meets on Fridays from 2pm to 3:45 pm. It’s a great steal – and a great gift to yourself – contact studio for pricing.

Back when presentational acting was still a thing – before Chekhov and Stanislavski and The Group and The Method – the actor’s work was performed from outside–>in. The physical expression was all: gesture gave form and form gave feeling. (That’s roughly the idea.) As a focus on the psychological and emotional life of the character gained traction (inside–>out), a nonsensical debate arose that acting technique is essentially binary. It’s either outside–>in or inside–>out. And never the twain shall meet.

When I was a young actor, I often heard this binary choice framed as the difference between British and American training. The Brits start with fake noses and the right pair of shoes; Yanks start with “remember the day your dog died.”

I thought about this false choice earlier this month when I read an interview with Christian Bale in The Guardian. The English actor spoke a little about his approach to characterization. He was out promoting Hostiles, in which he plays a bigoted US Army Captain working (terrorizing) the western frontier of the late 1800s. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jan/04/christian-bale-i-was-asked-to-do-a-romantic-comedy-i-thought-theyd-lost-their-minds

He arrived for The Guardian interview in a very different body than that of the soldier he portrays. Apparently, he was also unrecognizable as Christian Bale. The interviewer describes sitting down with an “imposter” with “a shaved head [and] heavy paunch.” The body belonged to former Vice President Dick Cheney. Sorta. It was the body Bale grew himself into to play Cheney in Backseat, the film he’s now shooting.

Bale is known for the physical transformations he undergoes in pursuit of character, starving himself to emaciation to play The Machinist, then muscling up to play Batman in the The Dark Knight:

The actor rivals Robert De Niro and Daniel Day-Lewis for diving deep – physically and psychologically. He doesn’t do it for fun. “There is a much easier way, but I can’t do it. I don’t know if it’s because I don’t have any training. I see actors who can just be themselves and then switch and give these really incredible performances, and then switch back to being themselves. I find I start laughing because I’m too aware that it’s still me. So I try to get as distant as possible. Otherwise, I can’t do it.’

People who cling to the binary would argue Bale’s approach is to create character from outside–>in. He manipulates his body in order to find the man. But as Bale talked, he revealed his process isn’t exclusive:

In playing Cheney, Bale sought “pathways to understanding” George W Bush’s vice-president. “What you discover when you start investigating any person is nobody is singularly bad or singularly good. He’s a wonderful family man, by all accounts. He didn’t hesitate for a second when his daughter Mary announced that she was a lesbian despite the fact that was complete anathema to his party at that time.’

Bale alters his physicality not so much to fool the audience as to fool himself. But to fully inhabit that new body, to give that body its soul, he has to understand his character’s emotional life. This suggests an interiority of process that draws on Bale’s own emotional life.

Outside–>in or inside–>out? The question informed how many of us thought about technique for too long. Most actors draw on elements of both, crafting their own idiosyncratic ways into character.

Different roles can require different tools, different ways of working. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to limit ourselves, thinking there’s only one way in.

At the beginning of April, Padraig and a new student, Bridgette, set to work on the one act play “Specter” by Don Nigro.

Not all scenes transition from the table quickly, but Bridgette and Padraig very quickly tapped into the event of the scene. Finding the event of the scene is necessary before any scene can be staged with a set.

Part of their early success is built into the circumstances of the play: A young woman seeks shelter from a rainstorm in the car of a man who has found himself stuck on a muddy bank. The chemistry of the scene is a useful hook for any actor.

The second part of their success comes from the work of the actors themselves. Bridgette brings to class with herself a sharp set of instincts and a preexisting way of working, what Cay sometimes likes to call the “tool bag”, and Padraig’s work in class recently has seemed to gain in depth with every new assignment.

The scene hit a road bump in week two. On stage they had built a basic set using chairs to create the interior of a car wrecked against a muddy bank during a rainstorm. But this time around the work, which the previous week had been alive feeling was for some reason now reading as flat.

“Alright guys I’m going to stop you,” said Cay early into the second read of their scene. “I feel like there’s a lot of sitting up there and talking and not a lot happening…what are you working for?”

“I’m working for not being too upset with him and just attempting to get comfortable,” Bridgette replied.

“Right. The problem is that both of those are performance notes. We’re missing some of the elements of the circumstance. For example, I don’t believe the car crash. I don’t believe the fight with the boyfriend. I don’t believe that you’re wet. In the past when people have worked on this scene I encourage them to spend one rehearsal wet…it’s a difference experience sitting next to someone who is wet. You don’t have to do that in class, but you get the point right? Pick one of the circumstances and work to make that true. Otherwise, if I’m a director watching this scene I’m feeling frustrated because I’m basically paying you to work on your lines. Can you guys start again?”

Bridgette and Padraig in Don Nigro’s one act play “Specter”

The partners each indicate that they do want to take another shot at the scene.

The second time around there was a freedom to the work, spontaneity and a sense of play granted by each of the scene partners allowing themselves to truly take in the person sitting next to them and respond truthfully. Jokes that a moment before had felt lifeless now were eliciting laughter from a classroom of people who had heard them already.

“Did you find anything?” asked Cay, and both of them nodded their heads in reply.

“I definitely think so,” said Bridgette “it’s a weird scene because there’s no physical life.”

“It’s true, there’s no movement,” Cay answered, turning her attention to Padraig “I feel like you were finding some things.”

“I think so. I felt more free…it was more fun.”

“Finding a place to come from within yourself is when you start to put your DNA in this. Bridgette, I see you hitting on it, but I’m not sure you even know how you are. I want you to start becoming aware of it so that you can feel it” at which point she snapped her fingers for emphasis.

“THAT was more truthful. THAT was more truthful!” Cay continued, snapping each time to lend emphasis to the word truthful and indicate the physical sensation of hooking into a personalization. “Does that make sense?”

“Sure,” Bridgette answered “and we talked about that being part of what I want to work on.”

“Exactly” replied Cay. “You need to slow down a little bit. Right now you’re working about a million miles a minute.”

Bridgette took a moment to think, and then nodded her head and offered up as an explanation, “I think part of the problem is that I don’t believe her when she says that she had a fight with her boyfriend.”

“And that’s where personalizing is going to be helpful. When you get that…”Cay snapped her fingers one more time to drive the point home “truth you need to explore that and ask, who makes me feel this way? Who stimulates me in this way? You need to make some decisions about that for yourself.”

Part of the joy of being an artist in Cay’s studio is finding that you are “deliciously relieved of perfection.” These are not my words. I appropriated them from Sheilagh during the advanced class last Monday night. They are fitting though in that they sum up the experience of being in class week after week, putting up work for peers who feel more like family in front of a teacher who is also a friend.

It is true that occasionally Cay will instruct you that you should be “feeling her foot placed firmly on your rear” pushing your work a little deeper, stretching your limits a little further. Perfection though is never the goal. The goal is good work; on fortunate occasions the result is great work.

There is a phrase that Fred often uses during Drill class on Friday’s. It goes something like, “always strive to achieve greatness, and if you can even come close then that is a success.” Cay’s studio is a place in which actors get to pursue greatness while enjoying the freedom to try something new, to not be afraid of making mistakes.

Sheliagh’s insight came after the first rehearsal of her scene last Monday. The comment set the stage appropriately for several incidents of “imperfection” throughout the night, including a nosebleed and an overturned water bottle onto a table with two laptops.

The laptops survived, and the nosebleed put Jack and Kieran’s staging of one of the final scene between what might be the American dramatic tradition’s most famous brothers from “Long Day’s Journey into Night” on pause only momentarily.

Kieran and Jack in “Long Day’s Journey into Night”

In her scene from Donald Margulies’ play “Time Stands Still”, Sheilagh is called upon to portray Sarah, a world-renowned photographer recovering in her home from a recent brush with death in the form of a roadside bomb. It picks up in the middle of a conversation with her ex’s new significantly younger lover, Mandy, played by Caroline.

“How did you feel?” asked Cay when their first run was finished.

They are sitting together on the couch, Caroline wearing a flowing, flattering dress and her partner sporting a head wrap and an arm in a sling, both allusions to her injuries, looking every bit the world traveler.

“I felt okay…a little bit stilted” replied Caroline, which Sheilagh followed up confirming that she also felt stiff.

“My feeling is that each of you is working a bit alone tonight,” said Cay “so that the event of the scene becomes about your memories rather than about what’s happening between you.”

She continues onto a discussion about the nature of their relationship and the effect that Sheilagh’s injuries have on her ability to move around in the scene. Cay makes the point that Sheilagh seems to be imbuing the movement with more difficulty than she might actually need to, especially since the circumstances of the scene dictated that the injuries had been sustained several weeks before.

“I guess I thought the physical and emotional damage was less healed than it actually might be,” said Sheilagh.

“When you are working on a role with a lot of damage, often it starts large and then you cut it back, Cay pointed out. “Also, the natural process of rehearsal ages it in a way.”

Cay leaves it to the scene partner to decided whether or not they think they would benefit from putting the scene up again or to take it home and sit with the notes until next week, and Sheilagh says that they would like to give it another shot.

“Since we are deliciously relieved of perfection in this room.”

Sheilagh and Caroline in “Time Stands Still”

During the second run the scene partners apply their notes with success. Caroline puts her attention on Sheilagh, who dials back her emotional and physical wounds, allowing the scene to take place between rather than around them. In the final moment of the piece, the Sarah tells the story of her fixer, the person who she shared her life with in a warzone who vanished after the explosion.

“He was an engineering student—before it all went to hell. Taught himself American English by reading A Farewell to Arms over and over again. Carried it with him wherever he went. That and the Koran. He had a wife. Who was killed. And two little girls. Also killed. About a year into the war. A mortar attack on their apartment building whle he was at school. He was a lovely, lovely man. Funny. And he loved America. Loved it. Everything about it. Television.”

“What was his name?” Caroline asks.

“His name was Tariq.” Sheilagh replies.

“Okay, give me that last beat one more time, but this time Sheilagh, offer the name to her as if it is a gift” Cay instructs without pausing the scene.

They take the scene back a moment, and then at Caroline’s cue Sheilagh repeats the line.

“His name,” she says with a pause, taking Cay’s direction and imbuing the next part of the line with the emotional weight of a long lost friend “was Tariq.”

“I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments. It’s not where you take things from, it’s where you take them too.”

Cate Blanchett, speaking to an attentive class of second graders, is saying these words. They are not her words, and this audience is not her true target. The words are a part of a manifesto written by Jean-Luc Godard on filmmaking. The audience is actually the fifty or so people gathered in canvas chairs, perched on wooden benches, or standing cross armed and listening attentively as Cate-made-teacher is projected onto a large screen delivering a Swiss director’s denouncement of narrative along side 12 other versions of herself in the Julian Rosefeldt show “Manifesto” at the Park Avenue Armory.

That quote came to me while sitting in class on Tuesday, listening to Cay discuss the danger of an incomplete use of “as if” during a preperation. Emily was onstage with Geraldine having just finished up their first run through for the day of a scene from “The Glass Menagerie”

“How do you know when you can’t use something?” Emily asks.

“My experience is that it’s a case by case call,” Cay replies. “Some people say seven years, but I think there are sometimes preparation’s that are fresh that you can use and something things that are ancient that you can’t go near.”

This territory seems both familiar and important for my own work. I remember my scene study class in Los Angeles when Chris Fields used to talk about the same subject. Attempting to prepare using an as if that was too fresh was a no go in his class. More than once I have found myself neck deep in a scene only to realize that whatever I had been working with was actually hindering rather than helping.

Sure, it doesn’t FEEL that way in the moment. It feels good, actually, to use a fresh experience over one that has been processed and integrated. The emotion in a fresh memory is so raw and visceral, so easy to access. But that’s the trap. A preparation that is being used by an actor must also be capable of growing and changing with the experience of the moment.

It seems to me that it’s about perspective more than anything. Distance from a memory allows a level of contextualizing to take place that isn’t possible when the memory is fresh. There is a clarity that comes once time has passed between the occurrence of an event that could be eventually become an as if for a preparation and the attempt to work it into something  usable.

If an actor uses an as if that is extracted from a fresh memory that they haven’t fully processed yet, then the actor risks allowing the preparation to overpower what is actually happening on stage.

“What you’re looking to do is to extract the essence.” Cay goes on to explain, “You don’t want to live in that preparation. You’re trying to turn it into something that can be extracted and plugged into the scene to give you a place to come from.”

The most recent example of this happening in my own work was during my last scene, also from the Glass Menagerie. When we began the process of working on the piece I felt as if I had tapped into something really powerful early. It came off of one of my scene partner’s lines—the line struck me in such a profound way, reminded me so deeply of a fight I had once had, that I felt there was no other memory that I could possibly use.

That feeling should have probably been a red flag. Instead of helping me to dig into the scene the memory that I was using actually set off a fight or flight response in my body which shut me down both from connecting to my partner, and ultimately, from my desire to continue working on the piece.

It did not feel good walking out of class that day. I felt that I had failed both my scene partner and myself.

Distance though, being the great provider of perspective that it is, has been helpful. I don’t think it was anyone’s fault really. I’ve learned this lesson before, but I had been out of class for so long that when my instinct led me astray, my training was slow to kick in and warn me “hey, something’s not working here.” There was a lesson to be learned, and if there is a safe place and time to learn a lesson, it is on Tuesday afternoon in a room full of friends and collaborators who have each also have plenty of learning moments in Cay’s class.

Actors go to class, actors go to class, actors go to class.

In the wake of the election earlier this month, I found myself asking the same question everyone seemed to be asking. What now? At my survival gig as a bartender I instituted a loose rule in the final few weeks leading up to Nov. 7th that his name was banned from conversation. This was an effort to escape the media storm, the endless barrage of news stories that choked up my news feeds, costing me hours of my time spent in anxiety inducing binge reading sessions.

That rule fell quickly in the week following the confirmation that our next four years in this country would be shaped by a man who has never held elected office. My regulars gathered at almost nightly that week, the need to be around others driving them from their homes and into the bar stools, and on everyone’s lips was that same question. What do we do now?

It all felt so very unlikely, so impossible to imagine a future in which our president would be him. If this were an eighteen hundred’s melodrama then in the 5th act a messenger would come riding in with a letter stating that a previously unknown wealthy relative had died and suddenly there would be enough money to save the family farm, happily ever after. But I hate melodramas, and he is our President elect. It seems unlikely that there is a last minute reprieve coming.

There isn’t much more about the situation I can say that hasn’t already been said by people smarter and more qualified than I am, so instead I’ll leave you with the words of my friend Steve Cannon, writer, poet, activist, and hell of a cool guy. Steve is 81 years old and has been without his eyesight since 1989. Once, I asked him what it was like to lose his vision so late in life. He replied that he was pretty bummed out…for about a month. But then he realized that he was hardly the first person to lose his vision, and that if everyone else managed to get by, then he certainly could.

Suffice to say, for an old blind guy Steve has seen some shit.

I called him the day after the election, and true to form, he was ready with these words of encouragement.

“Stay focused. This is not the time to roll over and die. Now we get to fight twice as hard.”

Back in class the following Tuesday we hardly talked about the events that had transpired. It didn’t seem worth it; all of the complaining in the world wasn’t going to change anything. The world might have felt like it ended, but here we were, all of us gathered in the same place, doing the same thing that we do every Tuesday afternoon. Geraldine and Migina wrapped up their run through of a scene from Annie Baker’s new play “John” and, when finished, Geraldine turned to Cay.

“This is the hardest damn thing I’ve ever done in this class,” she complained.

Cay laughed and replied, “That’s what you said about the Shaw. Why is this scene in the play?”

“We talked about that…” Migina answered. “We realized that this is the only scene without [my boyfriend] Elias. The scene for me is a breath of fresh air, and I think she’s realizing that she’s not boring, that someone is taking an interest in her.”

“And if this scene wasn’t in the play, what would happen?” Cay asked.

“Well, I wouldn’t break up with Elias.”

“Exactly. You give her strength that she didn’t expect. Even those who don’t appear to have it have strength. Which Elias doesn’t see, right?”

“Right” Migina agreed.

“He types them out. So if this scene wasn’t in the play, it would make it much harder to do what you need to do.”

Migina and Geraldine in Annie Baker’s “John”

I recently came to a similar realization in my own life. Two weeks ago my live in girlfriend and I called it quits, marking the end second major relationship in my adult life.  Currently I am in the peaks and valleys phase, that awful land of highs and lows and lows and highs. A few things are getting me through this phase. Friends, family, and of course, art. A trip to the Guggenheim for an Agnes Martin retrospective left me floating for a full day. The Kerry James Marshall exhibition “Mastery” provided me a sense of much needed perspective in a time of both personal and national strife. I recently found a study that said reading fiction makes you a more empathetic person. The next day I went out and bought “Best Short Stories of 2016” edited by Junot Diaz and devoured it over the course of a week or so.

Back in class, Cay asked Geraldine what she felt her character got from the scene.

“Companionship…someone taking an interest” Geraldine replied.

“Right,” said Cay before putting her focus on Migina again. “You know how there are some people who you only spend a short amount of time with, peripherally, who for whatever reason make you feel valued? You can drop the social mask and be yourself.”

“It’s a breath of fresh air.”

“Exactly. And often it’s the people who you suspect the least. You just get dropped off here, I don’t think it was a pleasant drop off. And you expect to go upstairs but instead you stay down here and you get curious. And that curiosity is such a powerfully human thing.”

Curiosity.

Artists come from all walks of life, but the common denominator seems to be that everyone who has ever taken up the cause is curious. If there is a through line that can be drawn from the Greeks to the Guggenheim, I think it would be done using a pen made of the stuff.

Annie Baker must have been curious when she wrote this play. Cay pointed out during this discussion that that what makes Baker is great playwright is that she frequently explores the characters that exist on the fringe of narrative. Geraldine’s character, an aging bed and breakfast owner operator living near Gettysburg, would in most plays be a peripheral character at best. In this scene though the character is integral to the plot, to the realization in Migina’s character that her relationship is over.

Maybe I am projecting my own experience onto the play, but it seems to me that Annie Baker is also interested in empathy as a theme. At a point in their talk Geraldine’s character tells a story about having run into an old coworker at the grocery store. The coworker was a doctor in a hospital where her character worked as an assistant during a low point in her life, mostly scrubbing out bedpans. The doctor had always been cold to her, but when she saw him in the grocery story he asked how she had been since leaving the job. Geraldine’s character gets to tell him that she is happily married and running a bed and breakfast with her husband.

“That,” she says “was a very nice moment in my life.”

Cay asked Geraldine why her character feels the need to tell that story.

“Well, it’s my way of saying my life got better, and yours will too” she replied.

Art has value, whether people want to acknowledge it or not. I felt that deeply during the last class, a class that I didn’t want to come to the day after moving my things out of another New York City apartment and trying to figure out how to pick up the pieces of my life yet again. But Steve’s advice echoed my head, and Agnes Martin building a career despite a life long battle with schizophrenia reminded me that people have gotten through more difficult experiences than the ones that I’m dealing with, and class has always been a way for me to get in touch with those two most human things, curiosity and empathy. So I got up and I got showered and I made my way over to the studio because like Steve says, now is not the time to roll over and die. Stay focused.

I have become a creature of the left brain.

My days are filled with emails, scheduling, phone meetings, and compulsively checking my inbox to see if we have gotten anymore contributions on the fundraising page.

I remember years ago sitting in a class on entrepreneurship being taught all of the ways to fundraise for your dream project. To my twenty year old brain the idea that anyone would trust me with their money seemed absurd. Now I watch the donations trickle in daily, in increments as low as ten dollars and as high as three hundred. People are sending ME money, to stage a play with MY friends, one that came out of MY head…don’t they know who I am? I have trouble getting to the subway in the morning without having to go back for my keys, my phone, or my wallet. Sometimes I make it all the way to the city before I realize the mistake.

It is happening though. All of my doubt and anxiety aside, we have a play. We have a venue. We have money in the bank. On a run a few weeks back, I expressed my fear around this first attempt at staging my own work to my running partner. “I think everyone who doesn’t suffer from a personality disorder or severe narcism deals with a certain amount of impostor syndrome,” he replied. With those words he hit the nail on the head.

What gives me the right to do this, I keep wondering?

Last Thursday I took the night off of emails to go watch two dear friends perform a mix of music and poetry in a local venue. I didn’t want to stay for long; I had come off of a long work day and was looking at a busy weekend. Somewhere in the evening though I lost track of that desire. The warmth of the space and of the people who filled it, of the creativity being showcased, worked its fingers into my core. All of the left brain worry around the production melted away, the stress of the survival job that I have to balance vanished with the sound of string instruments and applause. Oh yes, I thought. This is why we do it.

I stayed for over two hours.

This time a few weeks from now we will be finished with the play. People will have come to see it. Some people will like it, some will not. But if sitting in those seats watching something that has been built by a collaboration of myself and artists whom I love and respect causes someone to ask a question they have never asked before, or to leave behind some anxiety that has been eating away at their days, or inspires them to go out and create their own work in a world that needs art now more than ever, then (I think) it will all have been worth it.