21st Century Communion

A friend from college, V Kingsley, died on April 1st after a six-year, horrific and awe-inspiring battle against cancer.  Most people would have succumbed long before, but V was never one to go gentle into that good night, which will come as no surprise to anyone who met her for even five minutes.  The memorial service was yesterday up in Santa Cruz, and I couldn't attend--but the service was streamed live over the web, so I was able to participate in a little bit of the experience.  A few words about that in a minute--but first, a quick story about V.

We never particularly hung out--but as a frequent Tech Director on shows I was acting in, we worked together often.  And I quickly learned a respect for her that made her more memorable than a lot of the people I did hang out with.  We had a Sociology class together, and it should have been a great class because it's a great subject--but the teacher was bad.  Really remarkably bad.  Never taught anything that wasn't in the book, and his lectures always always always expounded on the obvious with a slowness so extreme it bordered on the surreal.  "Max Weber's... conflict theory... stated... that people... are... in... conflict."  (Truly, you cannot imagine how long it would take him to get those words out.)  It was so bad that the rest of us quietly gathered into groups of four so that only one at a time would have to actually attend the class and take notes.  And when we were there, we just sat and felt our brains dying.  But V, she was different.  She would stand up and say to this bad, bad teacher, "What the hell are you talking about?"

Which would invariably leave him confused--and me immensely grateful.  (His usual response, when thus challenged, was to repeat exactly what he had just said.  Slower.)  V eventually transferred out of the class to something that wouldn't waste her time, which was a very great sadness because now it was just us sheep and that very bad shepherd.

Graduation happened, we all went our various ways, and I never saw V again.  But with Facebook, I was able to reconnect with her a little, to say nice things to her that I'm now very glad I said.  She responded with typical warmth and grace.  I read a few of the entries in her excellent blog and my mind reeled.  Blindness.  Pain beyond imagining.  But she kept soldiering on through it all, with her sense of humor intact.  And then on April 1st she finally succumbed, leaving behind her partner Dani and her son Parker and a huge number of devoted friends and family.

The service, as I mentioned, was streamed live.  There were severe technical problems, but let me just say up front that even a poor experience beats the heck out of no experience at all.  I'm glad I was able to kinda sorta be there as people said goodbye to V.  But the online experience also led to some thinking about what community is becoming in These Times of Ours, and there are few things more likely to make me start setting words down.

The church (unitarian universalist, the most enlightened of the Christian churches) had set up a single camera hanging from the ceiling.  It was locked down, never moving, never zooming, the image was static and distant and distinctly low-res, particularly after being compressed for live streaming.  The sound was just as distant, with echo and reflection and distortion that made it very hard to hear anything that was being said--while the songs were almost robbed of anything resembling musicality.  I had the stream on for about an hour, and soon realized that the fact that I was up and making a sandwich during the service really didn't say much for the quality of the internet stream.

But was it purely a technical problem?  If the tech had been as good as it was for, say, the recent royal wedding, with high-def closeups and multiple expensive microphones capturing every nuance of sound, while commentators babbled on in the background with context and opinions, then maybe I'd have felt a greater sense of communion with the others assembled for the service.  But is there an essential limitation inherent in the nature of the service itself?  In other words: is it really possible to have a shared, communal experience without actually being there?

Bear in mind that without Facebook I'd have never been able to reconnect with V in the first place, so clearly the social media have their place.  But a memorial is a very particular kind of experience.  From my grandmother's service, I still have a vivid memory of when the bells began to peal, summoning people to a place where such services had been held since, in that case, the 11th century.  As soon as the sound of those bells began, I suddenly felt the presence of everyone who had gone before in that place: the people who had been baptised there, the people who had married there, the people memorialized, the people who rested in the cemetery just outside.  There is an argument to be made, even by those of us who aren't particularly religious, for the notion of a patch of land made sacred by its use for exactly these sorts of ceremonies over time--and obviously none of that can be transmitted over the internet.

And while there were certainly moments in V's service that resonated--such as her former partner talking about how she had not been strong enough to continue supporting V throughout her long illness, even though she never stopped loving her--there was never anything that could compare with the impact of sitting in a room together as lives intersected and resonated.  In a different (but comparable) direction, I remember going to see the movie Dead Man Walking, and at the moment when Sean Penn's character is revealed strapped to the execution table, someone in the audience, for just a moment before she choked it off, let out a single anguished sob.  Perhaps she had a loved one who had been executed; perhaps she had a loved one who had been murdered; I can never know.  But the story in the movie had just set off bells in her and for a moment, she could not help but resonate with them.  If I'd watched the movie at home, the movie would still have had power, but not that kind of power.

Communion--here in its broadest definition as "an act or instance of sharing" or, even better, "intimate fellowship or rapport"--requires community.  I am, as I said before, glad to have been able to share the experience at all, but technology is still no substitute for a gathering of souls in a place sanctified by prior gatherings of souls, be it a church or even a movie theater or a baseball field.  I have a long and somewhat odd history of writing and delivering very well-received eulogies at such services, but there was a moment yesterday when the experience of watching other people's eulogies over the internet came to feel so unnatural that I (momentarily) resolved to never deliver another one in my life--but the fault there was not with the thing itself, but with the manner in which it was received.  The next time I seek a gathering of souls, I shall deliver my own soul unto the appropriate place at the appropriate time, and be with everyone else.

It looks like it was a great service.  I wish I could've been there.

A Few Years With Falstaff

Just learned that one of my all-time favorite teachers died on May 29th, so here then are a few tales about what good teaching looks like.

Bill Sharp taught at Emerson College for only about fifteen years, after teaching at Stanford and then starting the theatre program at the University of California – Riverside. But those fifteen years happened to cover the entire period when I studied there, the more happy me. What Sharp excelled at was teaching acting styles, most particularly the classics. Now, acting is a particularly difficult thing to teach--it’s too easy to fall into the trap of saying to your students “You’ve got it or you don’t.” But he focused intensively on a few key things: understanding the text, trusting your instincts, and challenging your limitations.

He was wonderful with Shakespeare. In fact, the man was Falstaff. Squarely built, a bit of a belly, a good Falstaffian beard, a booming voice when he wanted it and a beguiling sweetness when he wanted it, plus a tendency to perhaps drink too much from time to time. If I were directing Merry Wives or the Henry IV plays, I’d have cast him in a cold second without bothering to audition anyone else. So he wasn’t one of those “If you can’t do, teach” sorts of teachers—he could do, indeed, and very well. Those of us in his class were always conniving to find ways to make him demonstrate a few lines of whatever we were working on, just for the fun of watching him handle the text.

And when we were working on a piece with some complex language, like Shakespeare, his first rule was always this: never say the line till you really understand it. He would sit with us and go line by line through a soliloquy and make sure we really thoroughly comprehended exactly what each line meant, why it was there, what it hoped to accomplish. By the time he was done, our speeches weren’t that awful generalized Shakespearean wash of sound but were concrete, and specific, and rich with meaning.

As for challenging an actor’s limitations—this is the guy who cast me as Othello in a long-form collection of scenes our class presented my Senior year. Bear in mind: I am just about the least likely Othello you could hope to imagine. Iago has always been more my speed, in fact I love that part and hugely regret that I never got to play it. (Though Sharp did spend ages working with me on an Iago speech that became part of my standard auditioning repertoire--the one that ends “’Tis here, but yet confus’d: Knavery’s plain face is never seen till used.”) But he wanted to push me, he wanted to see what would happen if I played a character way outside my normal range. It was essentially an in-class project with only a small audience from the other classes, so the point was not to create great art, it was to push the actors and see who could rise to the occasion. In the end I didn’t really do that great a job--but I appreciate hugely what he was trying to accomplish.

And here, finally, is a story about trusting your instincts. After I graduated, Sharp was nice enough to take on a bunch of us in his off-hours. His own personal time, something he didn’t have to do at all, but for about ten of us he decided what the hell, he’d continue working with us for a while. In that group were a couple of actors who weren’t really very good. Anyone else (me included) would say that these two just didn’t have it, whatever “it” may be, and that there wasn’t much point in spending too much time with them. Which may be exactly why Sharp included them in the group....

These two were doing the nunnery scene from Hamlet one night, and it wasn’t going terribly well. Stiff, and awkward, and dull. But at one point, Sharp noticed something, and he stopped the scene. He said to the guy playing Hamlet, “You had an impulse just then, didn’t you? You wanted to walk out of the room.” The guy nodded. “Then do it,” Sharp said. “Walk out of the room. It’s her job to keep you here, but if you have that impulse, you’ve got to honor it. Let’s try it again.” They started from the top, reached that point, there was a moment’s hesitation and then the guy really truly did walk out of the room. The girl playing Ophelia chased after him, and a moment later they returned, with Ophelia basically dragging Hamlet back onstage.

And after that, after that was one of the best versions of that scene I have ever witnessed. And for those two not-particularly-gifted actors, it was almost certainly the pinnacle of their acting lives, there in a dim room in the old Student Union at Emerson for an audience of about ten. Because Bill Sharp wanted to see every student accomplish as much as they possibly could.

I left Boston and have no idea whether he continued with the extracurricular classwork, but I know he retired in 1994, and despite the drinking he lived till the ripe old age of 84 down in Swampscott. I’m not much of a drinker myself, but I shall, this one particular time, most definitely raise a glass.

The Flubbing of Lines

Okay, fine. Chief Justice Roberts had 35 words to speak on Tuesday, and he got them wrong. It happens. Here's a story:

I was doing my first show as a college freshman, Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. I only had a small part, but it was a Mainstage show so I'd landed a big show right off the bat. Great joy to be there, and doing Shakespeare, and so forth. My character, the Pedant, was there for a bit of silliness about pretending to be Lucentio's father, etc., etc. Secondary-plotline stuff. And there was a moment when I had a long, blathering speech to deliver.

One night, I was in full blather. And the guy playing Baptista was in the moment so he did something slightly different from our other performances: he interjected a sound, just a little sound, as if the character was trying to interrupt but couldn't. That's all, not even a full word, just a little sound.

I stopped cold. Turned to him and said the decidedly unShakespearian "Huh?" Then realized what he'd done, turned back in order to resume my speech, and discovered in that moment that my brain had just lost the entire English language.

I made a succession of little strangling noises until the guy playing Baptista (hi, Jim Williams) stepped in with the next part of the scene and rescued me. Huge embarrassment yadda yadda, learning experience yadda yadda, ain't live theatre grand yadda, yadda and yadda.

This of course is exactly what happened to Mr. Roberts. Watch the tape linked above. Barack Obama thought the first phrase would simply be his name, so he started to speak, but Roberts wanted to add "do solemnly swear" to that first phrase. Obama's accidental interruption did to Mr. Roberts exactly what Jim William's interruption did to me, except that Roberts handled it better. He at least didn't forget an entire language, he just had a little wires-crossing, words-tangling adventure, right there with the entire damned world staring as his brain went blank during a moment of profound historical import.

All of which simply proves that history has a sense of humor. (Although you can see in Michelle Obama's face a strangled expression that says "This moment? You pick this moment to fuck up? This moment we've all waited for for centures? Aaaack!")

Naturally, the wombats on Fox News breathlessly asked "Is Barack Obama really president?!?!" Oh, shut up.

In Which I Do My Bit for the Alumni Association

Went to an alumni event for Emerson College the other night, one that targeted people from the years when I attended. (1820 to 1743.) So it was fun to see some folks I had sorta-kinda known back in the day, and extra-fun to see someone I really truly did know (and acted with). Emerson, though a Boston school, has a good alumni group out here, in fact the motion picture industry sometimes refers to an “Emerson mafia” of grads spread throughout the biz, networking through events just like this one. And hey, who wouldn’t want to work his way into a mafia that doesn’t involve actually, you know, killing people? Executives from a couple of the major studios, fellow graduates, were in the room, and happy to talk to other alumni. That’s a good room to be in.

I was of course reminded of my halcyon schooldays, there in the heart of Boston’s Back Bay, right across from the Public Gardens and the Common. I went to the school sight-unseen--a friend of a friend had recommended it, and the more I heard, the more I knew that this kind of school was exactly what I wanted. Emerson has always been a hands-on place, which makes it, unfortunately, a rare commodity in the higher-ed world. I auditioned, for example, at Boston University, and was told that I couldn’t possibly expect to get into a mainstage show until my junior year. At Emerson, I was cast in a mainstage show, doing Shakespeare, before orientation week was done. Which meant that I spent all four years working like crazy, in every space they had, doing classics and new pieces, and discovering, among other things, Samuel Beckett, who became one of my theatre gods. (A thousand thanks to Ron Jenkins, who handed me a copy of “Krapp’s Last Tape” and said “Here, you should do this.”)

For the last many years, Emerson has run something called The L.A. Center out here, in rented space in Toluca Lake. This is of course ground zero for the Emerson mafia, but last week they announced that they’ve bought property in Hollywood (near the Sunset Gower Studios) in order to build a permanent facility with much greater capacity. Which means the Emerson mafia should only grow, and it gives my company a great resource for new interns. We alumni have been encouraged to submit our ideas for how the new space should be constituted, and I think I’m going to do exactly that--something about the idea of finding ways to mix students from the various disciplines has a lot of appeal to me.

See, back when I was a student, the theatre department was in a building on Brimmer Street (just around the corner from the Bull and Finch, the outside of which was seen every week on Cheers). The film people were part of the mass communications department, which was in a different building, and there really wasn’t much mingling. (And none of us ever saw the communications disorders people.) I had a couple friends who managed to bridge the various departments, but I was so theatre-centric that I rarely left what we called “Brimmer World.” And as I wandered around the room at that alumni event, I saw people who graduated my year who I had really never known. Since I’m a big believer that artists should have interests that are as broad as possible, the fact that I essentially sequestered myself for four years means that I probably missed out on a lot of interesting possibilities. (I only acted in one student film that whole time, f’r instance.)

So I think I will make that suggestion. And I’m thinking that maybe I should volunteer to talk to prospective students from time to time--after all, it was a dinner held by a South Florida alum when I was just a prospect that made me realize, finally, that this was the school I wanted. That’s a favor I would really enjoy returning. And given that the school is still just as hands-on as it ever was, I can still recommend it just as heartily as ever. So if you're interested in a communications field and you believe that the best way to learn something is to get your hands dirty, here you go, here's the place for you.

There you go. Does this mean I don't have to contribute cash now when they call?