My love affair with storytelling began in Boston in 1985. I ws twenty one years old and an acting major at Emerson College.......
Since I was fourteen years old, theater had been the major focus of my life. I had also stidied in Pittsburgh at Carnegie- Mellon and had a year with Bill Hickey (the Godfather in "Prizzi's Honor) at HB Studios. My immersion at all the places I had trained had been both tradional and contemporary theater. By the time I was nineteen, I had performerd in at least 50 plays and scenes including classics such as Macbeth and The Rivals. And contemporary classics by such playwrites as Tenessee Williams, Harold Pinter and my personal favorite, Edward Albee. I had done monologues by the Greeks and studied theater history in great depth.
In a way, I felt my focus in theater saved my life and gave me a much needed focus in my adolescence away from my suburban Maryland upbringing.
My first theater class had been the day my grandfather died. It was at an afterschool studio with the teacher being an old vaudvillian named Ralph Tabikin. When my mother came into my room to tell me that my grandfather had died (the second death in my family in a month) she added "I'll cancel your acting class." Something in me screamed out "No" in such an adament way that she drove me there later that afternoon despite my families shell shocked grief. I had been immersed in the horrors of illness and death for the past three months and lost the only two men in my family during that time. It wasn't a callowness in me that drove me toward that acting class. Indeed, I felt laden down with a depth of grief that I had no idea how to begin to work with. It was an intuition for self preservation.
I was handed a scripted monologue seemingly well beyond my 14 years. It was about a woman contemplating suicide (rather Hamlet-esqe, but less existential in her reasonsing). I stood up on stage and read the monologue, pouring all my own grief, confusion and sense of loss into the reading. The vaudvillian sat up; the class stood and applauded. That was less important to me than how I felt. I would not have had the word for it but now I may say that I stumbled on the process of alchemy. I was able to spin gold from straw. I did not know how I did it but I had stumbled on the experience of transforming at least a tiny piece of my overwhelming grief into something else through the process of expressing my authentic feelings through the thoughts and words of a character. I remember feeling lighter when I left the theater despite the family drama that I knew I had to go home and face. There was a spark that had been lit in me. A light. Perhaps.....hope?
I continued on the path that began that day for many years. I auditioned for every play I could through high school both in and out of school. I loved the feeling of taking on a new charachter or role. Accessing my own emotional landscape and channeling it into a role had a profounf effect on me. In a way, theater was the only place where my lifelong "intensity" not only wasn't a problem; it was welcomed and even rewarded with some of the juciest roles. I felt that my life would be, as a serious New York stage actress and that was the path I was pursuing until one February night in 1985.......
My acting professor at Emerson, Ron Jenkins invited my class to a special theater at a tiny theater in Cambridge called The Brattle Street Playhouse. He told us it would be a "one man show" by an alumni of Emerson and old friend of his. I imagined something like "Krapps Last Tape" by Pinter, the only one person show I had ever heard of. (It's about an old man alone, recording and playing back pieces about his life)
The name of the show was "Travels Through New England". No curtain came up. There were no clever stes or costumes or any of the artifice I had become accustomed to in the theater. Just one man coming onstage with a heavy looking manuscipt and sitting behind a desk. he was wearing a red flannel shirt and that evening, he would change the course of my life forever. His name was Spalding Grey.
No comments:
Post a Comment