Strife, Pain, Wonder - A Love Letter

Today was a day. One of those days where I felt on the precipice of tears all day long. I have this problem, see. All I’ve wanted to do was write on the Intern Showcase and how amazing it was. And it was amazing. But for me, in the aftershock, it’s also completely surreal. Did that really happen? Did we just do that?

I go through these lows after shows sometimes (just ask my mother). It’s a listlessness. Especially after something like what we just did. You pour your heart and soul into something, and your precious little time, and whatever energy you have left, and you do this amazing thing for one night. One night. It’s shows like that that have this effect on me the most. Kind of like you want to walk up to everyone you see and take them by the shirt collar and shout in their faces “Do you know what we just did!” and of course most of the people here do. They were there! (Thank you all so much for coming, I cannot tell you what it meant to us. I think a lot of us thought that there might just be, like, ten people there, or less.)And this is not a complaint. We were blessed with this night, with this opportunity to . . . display our beliefs on that stage.

And it’s a high. It’s a complete high. It’s a high to perform. It feels like flying, it’s like suddenly being able to breathe underwater. It’s something that shouldn’t make sense, but the minute people are in front of you for some reason it all makes sense. It’s as if a higher power is breathing through you. The world is perfect for a few moments. Perfect because for a few minutes a group of people are all in the same room, breathing together, being together, and we all take the same journey together. As a performer I get to help take us on the journey. It’s a high to hear my words performed, and to hear people react to them. To hear a group of people laugh at my words, or gasp at them, or cry at them, or be moved in anyway – it’s a small piece of the divine. It’s God’s hands stretching out and touching people and I had something to do with it. It’s a high to see the people I lead (I don’t know if you could call what I did directing. It was more like guiding. Really, I just let them play and suggested a few fun things along the way)hit a moment, get the laugh, feel something, be effected, react to the audience. It’s as if the universe is allowing me to gaze through its eyes. And for all of us to be together, to come together like that, to prove to ourselves that we could. For a brief time we got to create –which is what we all love to do most and some of us were unable to because of the internships we had- and we created together. It brought us together in a way that will mean we are forever a part of each other’s beings, each other’s thought processes.

But the next day you’re back. Back on earth. You touch godliness and the next day you’re back to being an intern – you have to do your job. There are images to be found, there are schedules to keep, there are things to copy, there are people to be driven around, there are people to please and politics to navigate, there’s an apprentice showcase to do, and there are teenagers to wrangle, take care of, be with. Friends come in from out of town, people you have just begun to love leave, move on to new things, and there is such a thing as burn out. Today I did not want to do the job. Today I wanted to shout at everyone “Do you know I checked out, like, two weeks ago?! I am done with this. I am sooo done with this. I have learned what I needed to learn by coming here, and I would be perfectly happy to go home now. To move on. To figure out the next thing. To figure out where I am going to be employed once the 29th comes!”

But it’s not true! I haven’t learned everything I needed to learn yet – today definitely showed me that. Negative energy was oozing from everywhere, from all of my beautiful apprentices (every single one of them) and it just broke my heart into a thousand tiny little pieces. They are tired and cranky and still not sure how to navigate each other, and all I want to do is take care of them and make them happy, make sure they enjoy the precious few moments they have left here, with each other – with me. And I didn’t know how. I don’t know how. I couldn’t fix it. And I don’t need to, I realize that. They are intelligent young adults (and also moody teenagers), they have to go through this, and they will come out on the other side. It’s just such a powerless feeling this feeling of ignorance, this knowledge that I am doing them a disservice because I am still learning how to be a good teacher, because I am on a learning curb. It’s not fair to them, and I’m sorry. All I could do was look them each in the eye and remind them of all the things that Mark and Andrea said to us at dinner yesterday. We are so lucky. We are so blessed. We are living the dream. People would kill to be where they are right now. To have the opportunity they have been given this summer. And I told them that there were moments running up to the intern showcase that I didn’t want to be in rehearsal, I was tired, I was in a bad mood, but you go in and you do the work, and by the end you’ve forgotten about the bad mood because you’ve remembered you love the work. And that I didn’t get my wildest fantasy to come true for the scene I directed in the intern showcase. I wanted to have that piece of paper flown in and I wanted those actors to spray paint tada across it. But I couldn’t. There was no space to fly it in, we didn’t have time or physical space to build something to put the paper on, and we were told flat out that we couldn’t use spray paint in the theatre. But we figured something out. It worked, it was wonderful. The obstacles in your way are the ones that are going to give you the best ideas. Great art comes from strife, comes from struggle.

I wanted to tell them that when I was told we were to have an intern showcase at the end of all of this I thought it was a HORRIBLE idea. I didn’t want to talk about it, I didn’t want to think about it, I hated it the way I hated group projects in college, no matter how much I loved the subject matter (probably more so the more you love it). There were so many strong personalities, so many directors, so many leaders, I thought it was going to be a royal mess or we were all going to end up killing each other or both. And sometimes it looked like it might end up that way. This was not all sunshine and lollipops, people. Exactly one week before the showcase I thought people were going to start spitting fire at one another, and I thought I might be one of them. There are times that it was not fun. There are times when this work is not fun. But you do it because you get to that moment when it feels like flying, you get to that moment when you realize there are people in the audience who are overwhelmed by the work you are doing.

I am going to see the showcase that these young people put on (or I hope I will, I might be back stage, but god I hope I get to sit and watch it) and someone is going to have to sit beside me and literally hold me together. They don’t know how beautiful they are. They do not know that they are sensational, that they deserve a medal for devoting all of this time to something that has been said several times this summer is a dieing art form. These apprentices are the people that will insure that that doesn’t happen. Even the ones who decide not to do theatre, they are the reason that theatre will continue to live. They hold the key in their hot hands and they are going to get up there on that stage and show us what it is and I won’t be able to hold it together.
I want to see it. I want to see the moment when they get up there under those lights and it all makes since. When this “process” that we’ve been dragging them through all lines up somehow, and in the midst of all this wonderfulness that is performance, the process was really the more important thing. I want to be there to see them have that moment of discovery when they realize the air is different on stage. The air is different on stage, did you know that? It’s different up there. It makes you breathe differently. It changes you.

Sam compared being an actor to Super Heroes. I can see that. It is mythological. I like my flying metaphor, because that’s what it always feels like to me. But it always makes me think of Peter Pan. Someone you can just look at and know that they have flown, that they have had the wind in their face, they’ve been kissed by it, and the effect lasts and lasts- on your face, it lives in your hair, your skin, your pours. That’s how I feel about performers. They’ve flown, they’ve ridden the wind, and the wind has touched them, and forever changed them, and the mark is on their bodies, and you can tell, you can just tell. I want to be there when they have that moment. When they experience that high.

I have to miss their last day. I will be flying away from them that last Friday night inconsolable. They have changed me. Emma has changed me, Peter has changed me, Rasheem has changed me, Whitney has changed me, Julia has changed me, Sarah Lee has changed me, Sam has changed me. I can only hope, only hope, only hope that I have had some small amount of that effect on them.

~ Laura (Roux)

p.s. It was after I had this talk with the apprentices that I realized “hey, miss i-am-going-to-walk-around-and-feel-sorry-for-myself-and-wallow-in-my-own-misery! Maybe you should take your own advice and remind yourself how lucky you are to be here. How incredibly lucky you are that you get to work at this place, with these people, with these interns, with these apprentices, with these actors (who once again, I must tell you, are soo incredible. And on top of that two of the most wonderful, genuine people I have ever met. COME SEE TRYST! IT IS SOO WORTH IT!). Shake it off already, will yah!