We were playing an auditorium full with over a thousand young people in it. I was playing Peter Quince with a group of very funny and delightfully anarchic mechanicals. For months, they’d been delighting audiences around the country with their antics. It fell to me to rein them in, to keep the show from going off the rails. I mostly managed it until this teeming auditorium. This time, I couldn’t make myself heard over the roars of a thousand people. I couldn’t pull it back. We tried to proceed but the farther we’d get, the more antics emerged and the louder and more unmanageable the audience became. I wanted to cry. I might have. And I felt like such a killjoy but I had in mind the “necessary question of the play” and while no one heard me say the lines, I said them anyway. And eventually the play proceeded.

Most clowns I know don’t speak at all. But certainly the ones that do, they’ll talk whenever they like if you give them the opportunity. That is part of the pleasure of them; They are anarchic and unpredictable. I wrote a play in which I wanted that sort of energy. I tried to write it into the character but it doesn’t really translate into words. In order to give it that clown feeling, I had to specify that the actor was welcome to stray from the text when he felt like it.

It’s tricky though, giving clowns free rein. In another play, I gave an actor space to improvise in a couple of key moments. I found, though, that he made something up one night and then just said that same thing over and over again afterwards. I ended up writing him a thing because, while what he’d made up was mildly amusing the first night, it ceased to be amusing with repetition.

But then, too, clowns often thrive in adversarial relationships. Tell a clown he shouldn’t say more than is set down for him and I can almost guarantee you that he will be improvising his balls off, all over your script. Tell him not to swear, there will be a mountain of swears by the end of the night.

In reading Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier, I found his portrait of where we’re at with digital technology and where we’re headed chilling. It activated all my reforming impulses.

The fact that Lanier has a very clear sense of how a do-over is possible, of how it might not have to be this way makes it all the stronger. I get skeptical, of course, wonder how such a grand change in something that developed so all at once, so altogether, so piece by piece. It feels like trying to rebuild the foundation of a house without wrecking the house on top.

How could such a change happen, given how hard monumental change can be. But hope springs up and I want to join a chorus of voices, to say with lots of others, “O, reform it altogether!”

And I especially appreciate the “and heard others praise” bit. Because this happens to me ALL THE TIME. I go to see some performance that everyone is raving about and then start to feel crazy because, what?! What is that they’re doing?!

And on the flip side – I will see performances that blow me away in tiny theatres that no one’s coming to and never will.

This can take a lifetime to learn. Laughs can feel like a warm shower of approbation. They are seductive. To make an audience erupt into laughter can feel like the accomplishment of a lifetime. An actor can fall into a trap of doing anything to keep that feeling going.

And yet – there is (hopefully) a bigger picture – something with more meaning than a simple laugh. To sacrifice a laugh for the bigger picture can, indeed, feel like a sacrifice. It may feel like: “No, no, don’t give me all your love, no, it’s fine – I have this other thing to accomplish.” But it’s true – and sacrificing a dumb laugh can lead to deeper laugh, a laugh with shades of knowing, a laugh of understanding or of grief. Or it can lead to tears or any manner of surprising things.
Learning to make theatre for that one ideal audience member, that one judicious one, leads to deeper, richer work. And even the unskillful might gain from the experience.

It is remarkable that so many centuries later this sense of purpose still feels insightful. Theatre artists tend to squabble over things. There are great differences in style, in methodology, in aesthetics, in intention. Ask 10 theatremakers what their art is for and you’ll likely get 10 different answers. But this one seems to unite them all. And a mirror is a useful metaphor. There can be much variety in a mirror.
Some seem to distort an image – make it longer or wider. Some make what it is seem absurd. Some make reality more beautiful. Some mirrors make everything terrifying or menacing. Some seem to be reflecting truth, nature just as it is (but of course that is an illusion – at the very least it is nature reversed.)

But all of it is a reflection of some nugget of life, all of it reveals as much as it distorts, and sometimes reveals more through distortion.
I’ve never met a theatre person who wasn’t somehow moved by this line. We can forget sometimes that our work has value and that there IS a purpose and that it is one full of meaning, rich in importance. That playing has a purpose is something we can forget and we are moved when we are reminded.

Especially with a line so connected to the past, so interested in the future. The way the line lives in a long line of forever “both at the first and now, was and is” the line is like a line leading from the very first player until this moment now, allowing us to remember that there were players at the first and that they lead straight to now, to the very age and body of our time.

The simplest advice is often the best.
This line is the crux of it all, it seems to me.
So basic, on one level and
So essential on another that it feels like a no brainer.

What do you do?
Oh, just suit the action to the word and the word to the action. That’s it. Oh, and don’t go so far that you look like a maniac rather than a human being.

But it is quite remarkable how easy it is to stray from this simple bit of strategy.
You could spend years doing any manner of techniques that pull you in many directions, you could stomp, you could repeat, you could make funny noises and funny shapes, you could dredge up your childhood traumas, you could lie on the floor panting, you could imagine your arms radiating out like tree limbs, you could spend years in ballet. . . .but all of that is to simply bring you back to the basics of word and action, action and word.

Like I’ve said I like some discretion in my theatre. I know it’s not the fashion. But I like my theatre thoughtful. I like it discrete. And I especially like performers who can use their own discretion.

Reading Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking showed me something about my leadership. I lead best when I have followers who can do that, who are independent thinkers, who listen to their inner tutors, who honor their own discretion.

I do not do well with the opposite sort – the sort who need to be told what to do, who feel insecure unless they are following explicit instructions – the ones who’d rather let YOUR discretion be their tutors, having none of their own. I keep waiting for them to uncover their own wills, to grow, to discover their discretion for themselves while they spend a lot of time trying to convince me they have none.

When actors first begin to learn the ways of acting, most are deathly afraid of out-Heroding Herod, of o’erdoing it but most are in no danger of that. Most beginning actors suffer from this second issue – they are mostly too tame, usually out of fear of being the opposite. This continuum of o’erdoing it and tameness strikes me as very similar to the concept of Jung’s Shadows. The tyrant is afraid of his weak shadow and the weakling is afraid of his inner tyrant. Our timidity comes from fear that our inner tyrant will stalk out and start o’erdoing it. Our robustious tyranny is born from fear that everyone will see our weakness, our tame pussy cat within.

In watching young people learn acting, almost everyone starts on the timid side of the spectrum, afraid to stick out and be seen. And usually there’s just one or two that o’erdo it, that go too far, that when they play anger, go storming loudly round the room. But one or two of those is enough for the rest of the group to fear becoming that very thing.

Teaching, then, for a little while becomes about delicately handling the brave little tyrant, about encouraging everyone’s little tyrant out of themselves, letting them all go too far before teaching them how to reign the tyrant in.

The slippery slope of artistic despair – the moment you think, “I can not do it! I don’t want to! I’ll just have a sandwich instead.”
This is where a structure really helps. This is how you avoid the panic. This is how all the discipline you put into place actually keeps you going.

I came to this place to write. I carved out a big hunk of my schedule, took myself out of the loop and found myself with this solitude. And I can feel the fear slipping in, the panic. . . the “what if I came all the way out here and I came up with nothing? What if it’s all a big waste of time?”

But the years of just getting on with it are stronger and can hold back the waves, like a well built dam, it only lets the smallest trickles of that water through.