The Birthing of a Playwright

After a long apprenticeship
with myself
And a long absence
from myself
I arrive
again
at the stage door
Only
This time
I pass through the fourth wall
Into the realm of imagination
In the darkness
Illumination
Deeper
Deeper
I push through
into words
into action
into story
a labor
where theatre
is born.

Visible in the World

Selves-goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

My blogging has taken a hiatus lately, bowing to the powers of the muse. All of my creative energies of late have been channeled into my playwriting. This past week, I spent hours in solitude as I descended into memory and surrendered to the all consuming story that has been my artistic companion for over fifteen years.

How many ways are there to tell a story? If the past two weeks are any indication, I have found no fewer than six.

Six attempts at an opening of a story I want to get right.

A story that has moved from scrawling, raw journal entries, to memoir, to the form I know best. Drama.

Why it has taken me so long to get here is either a question for my therapist - or an admission that, as the poet, David Whyte says, is rooted in a writer's most terrifying question "what if I am not equal to the job?"

What if I can't do it? Then who would I be for having spent fifteen years wrestling with the story that has come to define me? At least in my own mind. This interior world, the carving out of who I am, is so closely connected to the process of writing this story that I stand now on the precipice of my very being. David Whyte describes this as making ourselves visible in the world.

For anyone who knows me, the notion that I am only now making myself visible in the world might come as a surprise. But that is what this feels like. It is a process of getting to the essence of who I am.

That I lived the story I am forging into art is fact. Indisputable.
Why I have had the need to transform it into anything, is mystery.

Over the past few weeks, I've come to ask myself if I haven't in some way been hiding behind this story. That by never finishing it, I have been able to hold on to something certain. In some ways, my grieving has been something to cling to maybe as security, and maybe as shield against the terrifying unknown. Maybe.

Or it could be as simple as this.
David Whyte, says in his poem, Coleman's Bed

Stay in this place until the current of the story is strong enough to float you out.

I've been in this place for over fifteen years. An alchemy of ideas deep within the realm of my imagination -

I come again, my brother, to find you.
I seek again to know you
I rise to the task of telling you.
My brother
My muse
whose life was silenced in a purple haze
like a siren call
urging me on
pushing me forward
to sing you

Maybe now the current really is strong enough.
Or maybe, I am.
But I want to get it right.

Because, brother, I love you.

Starving Artist

A perfect day. Rain. A fire in the fireplace. Seventeen bean soup simmering on the stove. A new play in the works. Time to write it.

In my flannel nightgown.

Why have I denied myself this indulgence for so long? I love being holed up. Not having to go anywhere. Full absorption. Immersion into the creative process. Deeper. Deeper I go. Emerging only when absolutely necessary.

To stir the soup.

At fifty-one I am finally giving myself permission to be about my art. Not that I haven't been engaged in the creative process for all of my adult years. I have. But it has been about someone else's art. My job was to make my student's dreams come true. My job was to interpret and produce plays that someone else had written. My job was to critique other playwright's ideas on paper and give them voice on stage in developmental readings. At last, it's my turn. And I'm dead serious about it.

I don't remember ever being this hungry.

These last few years have been like an artistic fast. I've been bound to work other than my art. Devoid of creative fulfillment. I have been like fruit withering on a vine. Clinging too long to the branch. Over ripened. The season for picking seemingly long past.

It is only in my memoir workshop with some writers well into their eighties that I find genuine satisfaction. Not just because of the writing that comes out of it, but because I realize when I am with them, that withering is a choice. A choice they have not made. Ripened to perfection, they feed my creative soul and inspire me.

Hungry, I devour theatre like a starving refugee. I can't seem to get enough of it. But my focus now is on how the story of the play or musical is being told. I am putting myself through an intentional tutorial on dramatic story telling.

For so many years I've functioned as a director. Analyzing plays backwards and forwards. Striving for clarity. Moment to moment interpretation of the playwright's intent.

I am now thinking like a playwright. But all the years of directing and analyzing plays is working in me as I attempt to write my own. It feels like the most natural thing in the world.

I stand on fertile ground. There is a choice. The season for picking has come. No, I say, my pen, like sword warding off a dangerous dragon. No. I will not wither.

A Process Observed

I've been thinking a lot about my brother lately. What he loved. His relationships. His occupation. His hobby. His choices. Why he did and did not do certain things. What motivated him. What he might have thought about. His secrets. His regrets. His pain. His fears.

In other words, my brother has at last become a character to me.

This is a good thing.

I've been writing about my brother since 1994. First, in my journal as I recorded the unfolding real-life drama that resulted in his death-bed, our vigil, and the aftermath of grief turned depression that engulfed me for several years after.
The raw, emotional entries are contained in various styles of journals. Some with lines. Some without. Some with inspirational quotes on the cover, others plain black. Some bound. Some spiral. I was not consistent in my choice of journal like some people are. It has made for an uneven mishmash on my bookshelf.

Yes, on my bookshelf.

I've kept them all. I've not counted how many there are. And I've not burned them.

I have re-read some of them occasionally wincing along the way. They are a chronicle, a real-time record of my experience during a time of despair and descent into a health care system when AIDS was still relatively young.

In case of a fire, I would grab my journals before other precious keepsakes, they are that important to me.

As the years went on, my writing transformed itself into a collection of poems and essays. Some good. Some bad. What began in my wild scrawl in the journal as a synthesis of my experience ended up typed on a page with titles.

A first step in distancing myself. A first step toward transforming the pain into art. A first step toward clarity and meaning.

This went on for years. In workshops. On the beach. In my bed. At my desk. The typed pages tucked into a sunflower folder. Depending on my circumstances or emotional state, the folder would either sit on top of the desk - a priority. Or be stuck in a drawer for up to a year at a time. When we moved, the folder and journals lived in file boxes in the garage. I published a few individual pieces. My musician friend even wrote music for a few of the poems for a dramatic reading during Lent.

Over the past two years, I began to weave the individual pieces into a narrative - a memoir of sorts. I spent most of last summer on this project at my desk. I turned the memoir over to my writing teacher, Cecilia Woloch, who made comments on it and returned the manuscript to me

Fifteen years, and I was finally able to edit the most important story of my life. Phrases, lines, images, metaphors that I'd clung to were with one stroke of the key deleted.

Distance was serving my art.

My writing was no longer therapy. It had become craft. New questions began to emerge. What story am I telling? Whose story is it? How do I tell the story? What genre? Memoir? Opera? Oratorio?

Years have passed. The AIDS journey has changed. My story is now a period piece. A new distance.

I've spent my entire career in the theatre as an actress, director, and teacher. Two weeks ago, I sat down with my memoir and a stack of journals and I began writing it all over again.
This time as a play.

Only something incredible has happened. The characters have had the impulse to sing.

My brother is once again, my muse.

Only this time, our collaboration is on a musical.

C.S. Lewis published "A Grief Observed" a year after the death of his wife.

Mine has taken over fifteen years and I'm starting over.

Or am I?

Maybe these characters are singing because I have at last found my voice.