So I submitted a play. Woo hoo. I sent in my play after a whirlwind writing session. Didn’t re-read. Just hit the page count required for a 10-minute play, print in PDF and uploaded it to the submission site. What the heck was I thinking?!?
Well, I was thinking. “woohoo, finished a complete thought!” I didn’t think I’d get chosen (which I don’t know if I have yet, but I seriously doubt it). I just wanted to present an alternate point of view from a rarely talked about group of people. They haven’t announced the chosen plays yet but after some discussion with another writer, I realized my error. I didn’t consider the group of actors who would be reading it. So now should I consider where I’m submitting it to and who will be reading it based on their acting company?
Should I consider this when I name my characters? Will that affect the reviewers who simply skim the piles of scripts they get? So if you have a character named Chris, how will your reader view them at first? Male or female? If you have 4 characters, one is named Nancy, the others Ned, George and Chris (sorry, I was watching a Nancy Drew marathon). So looking at that, how are the gender roles divided between the cast? If you had to make a split-second decision looking at just names you may say 3 male roles. But in reality, it isn’t. My script had 2 she/her roles, 1 he/him role and the last character was listed as they/them. Ugh. So where does this leave me?
I also love the idea of submitting for a theme. It gives me focus and the desire to write a new work instead of trying to adapt an existing script. OMG, and that’s another thing. How do you even do that? If I have a script and want to submit it to a particular event that has a given set of guidelines. How do I get this across and say “Yes, my play meets your theme”. If they can’t see it while reading my play, is it not all lost? The interpretation of my play is now dependent upon someone else’s understanding of the world and should I think of these things while I’m writing? or just write? I usually just write. But writing for a specific theme is so much more fun.
But ultimately. Ugh.
Ok. I’m off to finish crafting a short play to meet the guidelines of a Climate Change Festival. Wish me luck!
I’d love to hear how you label your characters. I’m still working on that.
I lost my dad on May 12, 2017, right before I graduated from undergrad which he was hella proud of. My mother transitioned January 1st, 2022, yeah, a few weeks ago. That shit was like being hit with two deaths at once since my mother was helping me grieve my father’s death. I don’t think I’ll ever have the words to explain how different my life is now or how sad I am. But before my parents passed away, they both got to see my plays. They were actually my biggest supporters. They’d drive from anywhere during any weather to see my work. My mom was always my muse. Like if you read all my plays, you’d see different versions of her that represent different stages of her life. I don’t often write about men, but when I do there is always a character that has strong Rickey Jackson traits. Normally a gentle man. My mom got to see the play I wrote about them in 2019. It was so special. She went up to a cast member and was like “You was playin’ me!” all happy and smiling from ear to ear. Eyes glossy from the tears she was holding back. I miss my mama. She was truly a remarkable woman. I’m so grateful I got to have her as my mother and my muse.
Here is a picture of her and my brother. Watching a play I wrote about her. Archived.
When Kimba Henderson was a young child, her mother required her to pick three articles from the newspaper every Sunday and write summaries of the events. This, in tandem with the criminal accounts she heard at home from her mother’s dictation as a court reporter, were the origins of Kimba’s love of storytelling. She first began writing and producing her own plays as a middle schooler, heavily influenced by the scintillating drama of Jackie Collins and Sidney Sheldon’s novels.
A Graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Dramatic Writing Program, Kimba is both a playwright and screenwriter. One of her first plays at NYU about an African American woman who grew up in an all-white town and decides to go to an HBCU, sparked an unexpected and lively debate in her class. Initially, Kimba slid down her seat nervously at this reaction until her professor gave her a quiet nod and wink, as if to say, this is exactly what theater is meant to do. As Kimba puts it, that’s when she realized the power of her words to “make people feel and discuss.”
When I ask Kimba what she’s drawn to write about, she talks about legacy and the reverberating consequences of the choices people make. Thematic to her creative explorations are questions of cause and effect: “How does it [legacy] live? How does it haunt you? How do you rise above it or escape it?” In her award-winning solo show, WOMEN ON THE VERGE, she examines a family of women, all with disparate tales, and how their choices ultimately affect the central character Vanessa and the woman that she becomes.
Her play THE RECKONING, produced by the Robey Theater Company at the Los Angeles Theater Center, is about a Black family running a crawfish farm on a former plantation in Louisiana. This is a family play that has gothic influences and features plantation ghosts who carry secrets and their own agendas for sticking around.
Kimba, an African American writer, who grew up living in an upper middleclass neighborhood of San Diego and going to private school, recognizes the tacit desire of the industry to demarcate the boundaries of identity for writers of color. We discussed at length the issues of representation and the question of who gets to write what story? Her take—and I agree–is that historically, white people have always been telling the stories of people of color and now it can often feel as though they desire diverse voices but still want to control the transmission. Meanwhile, the white power structure continues to write (and project) the stories of marginalized people. She says, “It’s another form of racism or othering” and as a writer “your brand goes beyond your ethnicity and culture.” Kimba is first and foremost a storyteller, and she doesn’t limit her content to her own lived experience. Instead, she does her due diligence in getting to know her characters and their environment through her research. It goes without saying that her lens as a Black woman informs her perspectives and renderings of character.
Kimba reflects on her writing life during the pandemic. Despite all the madness of COVID and amidst the murder of George Floyd, she used the forced quarantine to hunker down and generate. She says “Crazy doesn’t shut me down. Crazy makes me curious”. And Thank God for that, because her latest play reflects her skill for telling complex multi-character drama with humanity and humor to boot. RED HARLEM, developed with the Company of Angels’ professional playwriting group, highlights the true story of the Communist Party’s recruitment efforts in the 1930s by casting a propagandist film with Black performers from Harlem that was written by Langston Hughes and shot in the Soviet Union. The intersectionality of race, class, nationality, and politics are seamlessly woven into a fascinating tapestry that depicts a virtually unknown bit of history.
In addition to her playwriting, Kimba has written for True Crime and Origins docuseries. Her latest collaboration was writing the introduction to the upcoming book “Black Hollywood” which re-imagines classic films with Black actors through iconic photography. This book will be released in October.
MJ Kang’s life thus far is a treasure trove of material for great theater. A few highlights from the archive: Her father’s family owned a farm along the DMZ that was completely destroyed during the Korean War; When she was eight, her babysitter was brutally murdered, and her mother was insistent that MJ and her sisters watch all of the news coverage; Before she was a series regular playing a single mom on the Canadian soap opera Riverdale, she worked as a Christmas elf at the mall just to pay her bills; She took a trip to Korea where her aunt locked her in a room for six weeks at the behest of her mother; Her grandfather was a Korean astrologer and palmist who accurately predicted the city in which she’d meet her future husband.
Born in Seoul, Korea, MJ immigrated to Toronto with her parents and two elder sisters when she was only two. Like many immigrant families, her parents struggled to survive in a new country where their education and professional training were not respected. MJ grew up watching her parents work multiple jobs and run several businesses to provide for the family. MJ escaped the stress of her domestic life through theater. As a teen, she was hired to create devised theater pieces geared toward youth. At nineteen, she had her first professional production of Noran Bang: The Yellow Room, a piece she wrote and starred in about a Korean-Canadian family fractured from their historical past.
Shortly after this, she was awarded a grant to travel to Korea to research her next play. This is when her aforementioned captivity by her aunt occurred. MJ used the experience as the basis for her play Blessings, which debuted at the Tarragon Theater in Toronto, making her the youngest playwright to have a mainstage production in the prominent theater’s history.
We talked about her early success and the cultural differences between Canada and the U.S. “In Canada being a playwright is more respected [than in the States] as a vocation” she says. I asked her why she thought that was the case, and she pointed to the subsidization of the arts by the Canadian Government. Because the entertainment media is saturated by American stories, Canada is particularly invested in “holding on to what is different and special about being Canadian.”
MJ’s work centers on the Asian and Asian-Canadian experience. She is continually observing and interrogating “how Asian are seen in the world.” It is still a common experience for her, even in a place as diverse as Los Angeles, to encounter people who treat her differently because they believe she’s foreign and can’t speak English. She describes her writerly obsessions as the things that “keep me up at night.” Being the mother of a bi-racial daughter has further nuanced her perspectives on race, gender, and identity. These are themes reflected in her new play Foxy Ladies which examines race and cultural appropriation. When MJ sits down to write, she asks herself “What do I want to see on stage?” Later she answers her own question. “The world wants honesty. Or zombies.” She’s going for the former (but not against the latter).
After having a child, MJ took a long break from theater, but she’s been steadily making up for lost creative time. The pandemic has helped, giving her more time to focus and generate. Currently, she is a member of several professional playwriting groups including: the Company of Angels, the Vagrancy Theater, Playground LA, and Restorative Stories for The Barrow Group in NYC. She will also write and perform her show My Grandfather’s Story with Enrichment Works, an educational theater organization serving Los Angeles.
My daughter has epic temper tantrums. They are developmentally age appropriate, but they are very uncomfortable to sit through as a parent. I witness with a mix of emotions–awe, envy, and irritation as she rages on. I must clasp my hands together, as if in prayer, and remain across the room for fear that I will grab her or hold my hand to her mouth, or worse. Sometimes I see my child self, and then my adult self, in her unrestrained volcanic eruption, and I think of my own parents, how they may have been raised, how they were so ill-equipped to understand a child’s mind, which is empty of words but full of raw emotion, how they would not allow or make space for my feelings, how everything was personal. I wonder if those feelings are lodged somewhere deep in my psyche or muscle tissue because they were not given permission to exist. My daughter’s fits are pure, unfiltered by the demands of civility. Once, after she’d calmed down and was sitting in my embrace, she told me “It’s hard to stop [crying]” because I had wrongfully implored her after a full half hour of her wailing to “Stop! Just STOP!” I thanked her for sharing, for naming and processing the emotional experience so that I could understand just a little of what she was going through, and it was helpful and instructive; I got it. I was reminded that the tantrum is beyond her control; it needed to move through her in order to expel. Her self-awareness astounds and inspires me.
I’m thinking a lot about how we are not taught in school (or life) to name our feelings, to own our feelings, to make friends with our feelings, or to take responsibility for our feelings. Everything is so behavior oriented, but feelings are what prompt action. (Is it funny to think about a feeling? The writer’s brain must force feelings into justification, reason, transmutation.) I think about acts of violence and how the perpetrator was unlikely ever given permission to hold space for their own feelings, to sit with, to honor, and to forgive rage enough to let it dissipate. Yes, I am someone whose heart breaks for the school shooter as much as it does for his victims. I think of how social and economic forces are squeezing the citizenry to the point of self-destruction; their feelings, unprocessed, turn to darkness. We are not our feelings, I am told. Yet they are so seductive, so entrancing, so controlling…and they move us both negatively and positively depending on how we interpret them.
In his book “The Untethered Soul” Michael Singer writes:
When the energy can’t make it through the mind because of conflicts with other thoughts and mental concepts, it then tries to release through the heart. That is what creates all the emotional activity. When you resist even that release, the energy gets packed up and forced into deep storage within the heart. In the yogic tradition, the unfinished energy pattern is called a Samskara. This is a Sanskrit word meaning “impression,” and in the yogic teachings it is considered one of the most important influences affecting your life. A Samskara is a blockage, an impression from the past. It’s an unfinished energy pattern that ends up running your life.
It’s a fine balance, our brain’s relationship to the emotional experience within our bodies. One the one hand, we should acknowledge what we feel, but on the other hand we should not allow our feelings to define us, at least when they are negative. But isn’t our feeling world–particularly our pain and anger–what activates our creative expressions? And don’t our creative expressions elevate our sense of justice, ethics, and humanity?
My favorite poem by Amiri Baraka
Young Soul
First, feel, then feel, then read, or read, then feel, then fall, or stand, where you already are. Think of yourself, and the other selves…think of your mother and sisters, and your bentslick father, then feel, or fall where you already are if nothing else will move you then read and look deeply into all matters come close to you city boys–country men
Make some muscle in your head, but use the muscle in yr heart.
In one of my writing groups, we recently did a 15 minute freewriting exercise based on the prompt: 2 Characters, 1 Mask (a real mask). Halfway through, we were asked to shift from writing about the literal mask to the figurative one. This was a prompt provided by playwright and teacher Alice Tuan. It was a lot of fun, and I offer it to you. Here’s what I came up with:
A is waiting for B. B walks in wearing a dramatic mask that covers her/his/their entire face.
A: Interesting.
B: I’m hiding.
A: From what?
B: From you.
A: I see you.
B: Do you?
A: What’s underneath?
B: You don’t know.
A: I saw you last night.
B: And?
A: Did you hurt yourself?
B: No.
A: Did you use a chemical peel?
B: No.
A: Then what are you hiding?
B: Myself, from you.
A: Why do you need to hide from me?
B: I don’t.
A: Then?
B: I choose to.
A: I want to see your face.
B: I want to see your brain.
A: What?
B: Why should I show you my face?
A: Because this is weird and not normal.
B: Well, what is normal?
A: I can’t work like this.
B: I can’t work like this.
A: I refuse.
B: Now you get it.
A: Get what?
B: Do you ever lie?
A: Everybody lies.
B: To me?
A: No. (Pause.) White lies maybe.
B: What’s an example.
A: Can’t think of one off the top of my head.
B: Go inside of it then.
A: Okay, I told you I loved to cook.
B: That one got blown pretty quick.
A: Yes, I fessed up.
B: You had to.
A: I’m an open book.
B: Only in cuneiform.
A: What is that?
B: Ancient scroll.
A: So you’re wearing a mask to prove that I’m a liar.
There are many poems about love, and this one by Kahlil Gibran is among my favorites.
On Love by Kahlil Gibran
Then said Almitra, Speak to us of Love.
And he raised his head and looked upon the people, and there fell a stillness upon them. And with a great voice he said:
When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.
Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself
He threshes you to make your naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.
All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart.
But if in your heart you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.
When you love you should not say, “God is in my heart,” but rather, “I am in the heart of God.”
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.
After writing about hope I was meditating upon faith, hope and love. Again, among my favorites… with 4 to 7 often quoted at wedding ceremonies.
1 Corinthians 131If I speak in the tongues a of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
4Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
8Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
13And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
When I think of my impulse to write, the underlying combustion of the engine (my heart) is love. Love is the catalytic fire that transforms my being from sleep to wakefulness. Sometimes, I just want to be closed and sleep. But even in sleep, love breathes in and out. Life is love. I believe that I am still breathing because of love.
What is love?
It is beyond this romantic notion of sweet words, roses and chocolates, or anything we traditionally associate with Valentine’s Day. Those things are symbolic of the impulse of love. What if I couldn’t afford any of these things, and so I am left with words. I could say I love you. But if I couldn’t talk, then I could write I love you. But if I was illiterate then I could just offer my love with my presence.
Again, I lean upon some teachings from Thich Nhat Hahn. He speaks of love as being present for someone.
“The true declaration of love is ‘Dear one, I am here for you,’ because the most precious gift you can give to your loved one is your true presence, with body and mind united in solidity and freedom.”
It can be practiced as a mantra, “Dear one, I am here for you,” while thinking of the other person. A mantra can be practiced not only in speech but in your mind and your body.
I pause now. It’s visceral to recognize that just by being in love and expressing the mantra wholeheartedly in mind and body is enough. I am love. You are love. Again, the love I speak of here is not limited to the idyllic romantic love. I am talking of love that binds two hearts beyond the real and surreal; seen and unseen; waking and dreaming.
Here are the four mantras shared by Thich Nhat Hanh to cultivate true love.
Dear one, I am here for you.
Dear one, I know that you are here, alive, and that makes me very happy.
Dear one, I know that you are suffering. That’s why I am here for you.
Dear one, I am suffering. I need your help.
Now, after pondering upon those mantras, I turn to another definition of love from the book “The Road Less Travelled” by M. Scott Peck, a psychiatrist. In the second part of the book, he contrasts his views of the nature of love against common notions of romantic love, falling in love and dependency. He asserts that the nature of true love is an action, consciously undertaken to “extend one’s ego boundaries by including others or humanity” – a spiritual nurturing that can extend to oneself and to others.
Between Kahlil Gibran, Thich Nhat Hanh and M. Scott Peck, there is this common thread of giving of oneself to the other – a surrender that is beautiful like the symbolism and imagery of the Yin Yang. The yin surrenders without effort to the yang as the yang surrenders effortlessly to yin. So the sun rises and sets so we can observe the moon wax and wane for 29.5 days, then again the wheel rotates. What causes the motions and rotations of everything in the universe?
As a teacher of meditation, there is this surrender of the ego to enter into the realm of the pure awareness. Perhaps it is in the moments when the consciousness transcends the thinking mind and feeling body that we enter the bliss. This bliss could be love, where every boundaries are suspended and we see the one in the whole, and the whole in the one.
Did you know that you can buy Hope in a bottle? Go ahead, just Google it.
My search came up with a whole lot of unexpected results, including beauty products literally labeled “Renewed Hope in a Jar”.
Starbuck’s website has a page for “hopeinabottle”. I clicked on the link and the page is no longer available (https://www.starbucks.ph/responsibility/ngos/hope-in-a-bottle. The idea of the “Hope in a bottle” was to provide public schools in the Philippines from the sales of purified water. Another search on Facebook for “hopeinabottle” defaulted to a page in New Zealand selling beauty products (https://www.facebook.com/HopeinaBottle.co.nz/) – different from the “Renewed Hope in a Jar”.
So I’ve been pondering about hope, a lot lately, mostly prompted by the theme “Hoping for…”, the theme of LAFPI’s micro-reads this past Sunday. It was really fun. After we left the Zoom meeting room, I texted with a friend and he was grateful for hooking him up with the micro-reads. We were thinking of analogies for the micro-reads. He said, “kinda like coffee shop open mikes… a chance for artists to be vulnerable and lay bare their thoughts, ideas and emotions for an audience in an intimate setting.” I like it. I said, “It’s really like a chemistry lab.” (There’s a framework we work with, and we’re testing a hypotheses as writers, but the outcome is eventually in the hands of the directors and actors. It could explode into magnificent fireworks, or just fizzle out… no big deal. The writer can re-evaluate and re-do the tests, and same with the actors and directors. What worked? What didn’t work?)
So back to hope. I meander.
Meandering is good, especially with a good companion, someone who is adventurous, curious, able and willing (maybe not always able, but willing to try) to explore. On brighter days, “Hope” is a great companion. If you’re a hiker or any particular activity that requires some planning, a leap of faith and gumption, you’ve experienced that “hope”… like “I hope there’s a good view of the valley” on the other side of the ridge. Or on desperate moments like,“I hope there’s water beyond that ridge”, when you’re low on supply in your backpack and your legs. If you were alone, “Hope” is that companion that keeps you moving towards the ridge and to the other side.
Music is abundant of references to hope. I am aging myself when I refer to Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life”. She sings “You give me hope to carry on.” And the Bible, Torah, Bhagavad Gita is rich with references to hope.
In the “Oxford Handbook of Hope”, there’s a chapter on “Hope and Meaning of Life: Points of Contact Between Hope Theory and Existentialism”. Freidrich Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” This quote was often used by Victor Frankl, an existentialist psychiatrist, who was a Holocaust survivor. “The chapter makes both an empirical and a theoretical case that, linked by an emphasis on goals, hope and meaning in life are closely connected.” (Credit: https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199399314.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199399314)
The short piece I submitted for the micro-reads was “H”, and it was a less than cheery scenario of a woman driving around alone with her thoughts and feelings of despair. Her only tangible companionship was UB-40’s song “Red, Red Wine”, and a $20 bill. She has a spark of hope to buy herself some flowers and a bottle of red wine to keep her company, in simpatico, as she goes through the throes of a breakup.
I do hope that we never run out of stock!
HOPE is officially out of stock!!!
But I am leaving you with hope with a quote from Thích Nhất Hạnh:
“Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.”
I must also add that he was also quoted to say,
“When I think deeply about the nature of hope, I see something tragic. Since we cling to our hope in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment. We use hope to believe something better will happen in the future…Hope becomes a kind of obstacle.” – Thich Nhat Hanh.
“Western civilization places so much emphasis on the idea of hope that we sacrifice the present moment. Hope is for the future. It cannot help us discover joy, peace, or enlightenment in the present moment.”
Not to meander into Buddhist philosophy as I am not fluent in it, what I do recognize is the “The Middle Way”, a complimentary balance of keeping company with hope for a better tomorrow, but not to lose focus on the moment… to keep up the pace of moving one foot in front of the other to get to the other side.
I haven’t been inside a theatre for two years. And I’m not sure I’ll ever feel comfortable enough to return. Does this mean the death of live theatre? Does it mean the end of playwriting? At least for me.
It’s a question I’ve had to ask myself. Why spend my life writing something that no one will see?
Oh, sure. There are alternatives to a black box theatre experience. I myself have written a play that should be performed in a National Park. And I’ve written audio dramas for the Fina Mendoza Mysteries podcast series – plays that are performed inside your head. Others have created plays for Zoom and Instagram and YouTube.
Culture Clash turned its epic drama Chavez Ravine into a video project. Antaeus Theatre Company asked its playwrights to write audio plays about Los Angeles neighborhoods. They were turned into a podcast called The Zip Code Plays. Ellen Struve, a most creative playwright in Nebraska, wrote and produced what she calls Picture Window Puppet Theatre, a shadow play performed from her living room window for all of her Omaha neighbors.
The pandemic has indeed forced us to be creative. But it’s also challenged us to think about theatre itself. What’s the point? How important is it for us to gather together to share an experience? Is theatre just an elitist exercise?
I wanted to be an actor from my earliest days of watching television as a child. I spent most of high school backstage, either performing or running the sound board. I changed majors from Social Ecology to Theatre after one week of college, braving the censure of my mother who always wanted me to be a lawyer. (She surprised me by telling me to go for it!)
I spent my 20’s living on $40 a week plus board at a melodrama company near Pismo Beach, driving to commercial auditions where occasionally I’d get hired to extoll the virtues of peanut butter or play the rear end of a horse, performing plays and improv in tiny theatres where the performers usually outnumbered the patrons. I co-founded a theatre, Theatre of NOTE, where I served as Managing Director for more than half a decade. I rejoiced when I earned my Equity card and performed at South Coast Rep. I wrote dozens of plays, some published and performed around the world. One was even performed in the nude.
But that feels like another lifetime. I was another person.
A few years ago, Stanford political science professor Frank Fukuyama wrote that we had come to the end of history. Have we come to the end of theatre?
Of course, Fukuyama was wrong. A lot of history has happened since 1995. And since theatre has been around since human beings started telling stories around the fire, it’s unlikely the end of theatre.
But for me, for now, that shared experience of sitting together for an evening of theatre is over. And so is writing for that mythical place that filled so much of my life.
I’ll still write stories. Books and podcast dramas and who knows what next. But at least for now, and for the foreseeable future, my life in the theatre has come to an end.
There was a time when we ignored the cries, silenced the pain, and continued.
There was a time when the collective would gather together and mourn before they could continue.
There was a time when stillness answered stale questions and healed old wounds.
There was a time when birthing a child was an honor held in high favor by the entire community.
There was a time when mothers could lay their heads upon a pillow without fear. Instead…
They now pray for the spirits of their children as they lie in the dark fighting for the light.
There was a time when we didn’t learn to live with grief – a time when grief wasn’t a disorder but a vessel.
There was a time when we didn’t speak from grief. A time when we didn’t practice grief.
There was a time when grief wasn’t a gateway to joy.
There was a time when the house didn’t hold our sorrows. Instead… it overflowed with love, laughter, and dreams.
There was a time when we remembered we could fly.
As we enter this new season may we individually and collectively make room to heal our bodies, our spirits, our minds for the future depends on a healthy society that moves not in fear but with hope.
