This week we finished the long marathon that was teching an outdoor, site specific staging of Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle in two languages during two week period of rain falling at some point almost very night, necessitating additional starts and stops to a start and stopping process on a show with a huge amount of tech to begin with due to the dozens of characters (and subsequently dozens of costumes) and did I mention it was being staged environmentally? In a park? And that we have a bath tub?
It was a very, very challenging week, culminating in a small panic attack yesterday afternoon while I was at work. It was sparked by a moment of confusion over my own age, but was the result of a building sense of anxiety over "what am I doing with my life!? This is crazy!"
It may also have had to do with the fact that after having opened in one language, my native language of English I was preparing to open the show all over again in a language I don't speak and had been struggling to memorize and pronounce correctly while maintaing some veneer of acting artistry for the past two months.
My Spanish text prior to last night's opening had been rocky to say the least. By the time of our first attempted tech run in Spanish, when we got to my big scene, all of my text was on point and for the first time I was totally off book and acting the hell out of my scene. Then I went away for a day or two as we worked English and fixed the very complicated mechanics of tracking all the props, costumes and set pieces as they traveled from act to act. By the time we ran again in Spanish, I thought "my lines were good last time, I got this" but they were not as good as they thought and then when my bathtub had disappeared due to the impending rain I was frankly thrown off balance, further complicating my juggling act of speaking another language and acting at the same time and my pronunciations went to shit.
So I was self conscious going into last night's run in Spanish. Our first attempt at opening had been Wednesday, but then that was rained out, and we finally opened the show in English on Saturday with no major technical glitches but definitely a cautious energy bordering on anxiety for when something would inevitably go wrong. But it didn't, and when we got to last night's Spanish performance, to an eager and excited audience that ultimately grew to something like 30 people a fire was lit underneath us, and we took off!
The crowd began immediately reacting and laughing at the funny bits (which the English audience the previous night did substantially less of, if this was us or them I'm not sure more on that in a paragraph or two) and we fed off that vibe. By the time my big scene came, at the juncture of my big entrance I felt myself go into a kind of comedic "bullet time" you know where stuff goes really slow and crazy in the Matrix movies? I get that way when I can feel my sense of comedic timing lining up perfectly, all of my lines and gestures landing at the perfect moment for maximum comedic effect, what had been a juggling act transformed into a wonderful dance.
And THAT is what I'm doing with my life is the answer to the question that precipitated my panic attack. And in this context, I'm doing it for an audience that gets very few stories at the level of a Bertolt Brecht much less brought to their park for free and in the language they speak.
I've been meaning to write for a while about how beautiful this story is, and how I imagine it must speak to the Latin American experience of the 20th century. At it's heart, it's a story about two young people in love, one of whom has to go off to war but before he does asks the girl to marry him. She promises to wait, but in the anarchy of a coup d'eta, is left with the abandoned child of the deposed aristocracy, sure to be killed if the usurping forces were to discover it. She flees with it, and due to forces of circumstance adopts it as her own. She marries a man she doesn't love to give it shelter, and in this moment her true love returns and condemns her as the forces of the previous regime, now back in power, take her to trial for kidnapping. The village eccentric, made judge by bizarre circumstances, follows his heart to do what is right and gives her the child, her beloved forgives her, they are reunited and with the child they are able to continue with their lives and live happily ever after.
There's something incredibly beautiful about this, and to me it's a story about the redemption of the human race and western civilization. There's a very old version of this story, perhaps in the mode of Greek tragedy, where the man goes to war and leaves his beloved behind, comes home to her and discovers a child and then kills both of them, or where the Judge has an opportunity to bring justice and restore order to the land and is perhaps destroyed in the process.
But Brecht turns those expectations on their head, and his story love wins the day. I speculate on this stories resonance for Latin America, because political upheaval defined the landscape of many Latin countries during the 20th century. No doubt, numerous men went off to fight the war, leaving women behind who were left to live their lives in fear and hope of their return while suffering at the hands of cruel fate. Many of them no doubt had children whether by their choice or not, and were left with no choice but to carry on with their lives as best as they could, as did the men who returned to them.
And in this parable they are able to forgive each other, and love wins the day, and I find that very moving. And the reward we get for all the hard work we've done, is bringing that story to the world at a time when the world needs stories about love more than ever before.
