Staying Kosher or Why I am Performing A New Show

LO
VE

a one woman show
written and performed
by TTRUBINSTEIN

This is the title of my new show and I am performing it this year, come hell or high water. Come financial ruin or panic attacks. Come global warming or weight gain. Come menopause...well, you get the idea.

I am a single mom. I teach solo performance, direct and produce an enormous number of solo performances every year. I train others to do what I do, run a business and produce a festival.

And, these are no longer compelling reasons for me not to be performing my own shows. My shows are what began all of this. My shows are what gave me my life, my calling and my purpose. My shows taught me what I needed to do to offer this form to others.

My shows changed my life more than any other thing that has ever happened to me with the exception of becoming a mother.

I am going to tell you the truth. The honest to God truth.

And it goes back to the aforementioned panic attacks. I got them. Unexpectedly and terrifyingly in the middle of my life. At the age of 38 to be exact.The first attack was right before I went onstage in one of my shows. I was sweating, felt nauseous and though I had been performing with ease since the age of 14, I almost didn't make it up onstage. I remember my director talking me off the ledge and once I got onstage, I was fine. But that turned out to be temporary. More severe panics came followed. My body was out of control and I would have these burning chest sensations that were terrifying and felt like heart attacks. I would become convinced that I was choking on food because it was so hard to breathe and swallow. For a few years they were quite debilitating. For about six weeks, I became agoraphobic and flying on planes became out of the question. And, so did performing my own show.


And, with the exception of a few times a year storytelling nights, I essentially just stopped. A few years ago, the writer, Natalie Goldberg said to me "Tanya, you have to begin again. It's what keeps you kosher" And, I know she is right. And yet, I have avoided it by saying that I am too busy with all my students, other writing projects, and parenting. But, I cannot avoid what my Soul knows. That I cannot become a teacher who doesn't perform. Because all I do for others is actually informed by my own art. And my art, like it or not is solo performance. As a performer.

My Soul also knew that I would need way more support that I have ever had before to get back on the proverbial horse. And so,what did it do but give that support to me.

My show is called LOVE. It is the show I have wanted to write my entire life. It is the show of my deepest longing, the impossibility of that longing and the longing denied and fulfilled. The show has been partially written for years. But I never had a satisfying ending. Now I am living it.


And so I am booking the theater for this fall. I ask you all to ask about it, and hold my feet to the fire. The way I hold yours.

And come to the show.....