Theater For The Future

I’m pumped for tonight.

This evening, New Leaf is embarking on something very different for us - we’re going to begin developing a play from scratch, using our lives, fears, and individual perspectives as source material.

The project originally began from a difficult point in New Leaf’s history, a night after a particularly difficult run through of The Permanent Way where we sat around a table at Ranalli’s and wrote our greatest fears as human beings down on the paper tablecloth in crayon. We’re kind of like kids when we get together, and crayon drawing is one of the most powerful ways we’re able to express ourselves.

Expressing our fears to each other gave them weight, and enabled us to gain insight into each other’s actions and the undertow of insecurity that led to those actions. It allowed us to become mentors for each other, and know when to push each other forward and provide encouragement or challenge. Expressing the fears also gave us some foothold against those fears, and plenty of raw material for our work. Knowing what was going on in each others’ inner lives allowed us to navigate each other more effectively and reduce the amount of confusion and unnecessary conflict in our company. It focused and sharpened the ensemble.

Personal lives often complicate a professional relationship, and that’s the reason creative tribes are difficult to put together. They only function on a foundation of profound trust and mutual respect. The way we are taught to operate is to hide our weaknesses, while the strong artistic choice often is to offer your throat to the world and dare the world to cut it. It’s surprising and exhilarating to display your identity and your perspective bare - the one you hide even from yourself - and it’s the core function of art. The tribe provides a collaborative environment that enables artists to do this and still maintain just enough safety net to keep pushing forward through the crushing insecurity that is generated by that level of honesty.

The support provided by a tribe is incredibly reassuring, because it has to be - it’s based on a family-type relationship that allows room for healthy and honest criticism based on years of shared experience. It also creates a people-centric co-prosperity that’s better than any pension plan you could ever hope for — Recessions come and go, but human beings, if they stay connected to each other, can maintain a stable existence of growth, pain, loss and happiness through harsh economic times. The tribe finds each other work and opportunities through lean times, and feeds resources, hopes, dreams and energy back to each other during those times when the manna rains from heaven. A tribe culture appreciates and understands your work from many perspectives, and they act as ambassadors of your work to find new clients and even new applications for your work. They find the doors that you haven’t been able to look for and they open them for you. It’s a culture that works for people more than the corporate model, because it places value on people rather than assets. It doesn’t have to convert human value into a monetary value first.

Scott over at Theatre Ideas has been plugging for a new model for a theater organization that will function more effectively to create exciting work than the regional theater model, and it’s a problem I’ve been trying to wrap my head around on the micro and the macro level. As excited as I am about the bottom-up approach of the tribe, there’s potential pitfalls for a tribalistic mindset in a globalistic environment. The potential price to pay is in the danger of groupthink and the difficulties involved in establishing a tribe of diverse backgrounds. It’s true that global environments like the American economic indicators like GDP haven’t been historically good at calculating the value of humanity because science and statistics haven’t really been able to develop solid objective calculation for subjective experiences like “happiness.” This flaw results in some pretty nasty side effects, like the artificial propping up of industries like Oil and Gas production or diamond mining which don’t accurately weigh in the costs of the human suffering involved in procuring them.

But a humanistic tribal mindset doesn’t completely solve the problem either: In 1972, Bhutan’s king decided to address the flaws of the GDP model by introducing his own Buddhist-influenced economic indicator: Gross National Happiness. For a country with few resources, a miniscule GDP, and no desire to modernize, this was kind of a no-brainer. GNH purported to measure and therefore encourage national wealth based on four indicators:

Promotion of equitable and sustainable socio-economic development, preservation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment, and establishment of good governance.

Sound familiar?

The problem with this model (and the tribal model) is that it doesn’t have an built-in incentive to include everybody. Wikipedia continues the story of a dark underbelly that can accompany these utopian visions of freedom:

Critics allege that because GNH depends on a series of subjective judgements about well-being, governments may be able to define GNH in a way that suits their interests. In the case of Bhutan, for instance, they say that the government expelled about one hundred thousand people and stripped them of their Bhutanese citizenship on the grounds that the deportees were ethnic Nepalese who had settled in the country illegally. While this would reduce Bhutan’s wealth by most traditional measures such as GDP, the Bhutan government claims it has not reduced Bhutan’s GNH.

On a personal level, I can see the potential for New Leaf to revel in its own ideas and backgrounds and not seek out those diverse opinions into the tribe because they don’t resonate in the “right” way. I’m happy that we have a pretty progressive male / female mix and a long history of producing plays by lesser-known female playwrights without making a big brou-ha-ha about it, but at the same time I’ve been ashamed that as an organization committed to renewal we deal very little with the issues of poverty, segregation and gentrification that face Chicago. Part of that is that the neighborhood we serve is right in the center of high-income and overwhelmingly-white Lincoln Park, but that of course has historically been how tribes have protected themselves - by not interacting with the people that do not fit the mold of the tribe.

I think there’s a middle ground here that I desperately want to find. The tribe brings with it an innovative energy and the old “many hands make light work” approach to problem solving. But the top-down, GDP-lovin’, LORT approach knows exactly how difficult and draining it is to really represent an entire community. They get the angry letters, they pay the salaries, and they see the trend of a drying-out subscriber base. I think their history and their heavy infrastructure makes it difficult to redirect the sinking ship, even if they desire to do so.

But word-of-mouth movements can have an impact on these top-heavy systems that don’t quite work. What I think is possible is a way to focus bottom-up grassroots energy and access with high-level thinking and coordination that promotes cross-pollination of ideas and culture and transparency all around. A way to unite the tribes into coordinated strategy and continue to value their independence. I’d like to see a double-decker strategy for change that gets it done with a minimum of burn out. If that thought makes you tired, you need to get yourself a tribe to help you keep moving through the fatigue.

The first step for me is tonight… To lose all my marbles and lay it all out on the table and see where our hearts are, where our brains vibrate, and to see what images, music and text we can layer and mold to tell this story with all our being. The framework is as ugly as a blog post that compares storefront theater to the economics of Bhutan, but the final product… The final product has got my heart beating faster.

Scott Walters has an interesting call-to-action post today which is an offshoot of one of the most promising sustainable and growth-ready models for a theater of the future: The Tribe.

The basic ideas at work here are similar to that of the ensemble, but with an added commitment to interpersonal development.

Traditionally, this is where the work gets subsidized by the members through their day jobs: they contribute their labor to the theatre gratis, and they pay their rent and put food in their stomach by selling their services in the marketplace. I think it is helpful to think of this as subsidy: the theatre’s members are subsidizing the theatre by not taking anything from the coffers…

… I am suggesting that the tribe create some sort of business that is staffed by the tribe members. Ideally, this would utilize the specific talents, theatrical or otherwise, of the group…

… But wait a minute. Do I really want to contribute to Corporate America? Hell yes I do. I consider the money I make to be the redistribution of income that our paltry income tax system doesn’t take care of. I consider this a contribution being made to the theatre, but instead of having to go hat in hand, we have them come to us wanting our product. What a great reversal!”

Here’s what my friends feel about working in corporate America: it’s empty. Another place to go where you try to avoid the people next to you. I think there’s a growing consensus not only in the arts or in the progressive movement that the corporate model is really only good at generating more income, it does very little else to raise the quality of life. To some individuals, the choice to join corporate america is to skewer one’s raw creativity and risk and exchange them for security. This is a choice that we are expected to make by our society, by our families, for our own good, and to become a professional artist isn’t necessarily frowned upon - it’s just odd behavior, like going off the grid. Just as damaging is the knee-jerk and insecure response from eternal bohemians - that joining that rat race equates to selling out.

I think Scott is opening a door here that leads to a third possibility, a possibility of building relationships that reaffirm the artists value to society. For the record, this is a value system held by Barack Obama and other presidential hopefuls. When corporations run artistic organizations, the result has typically been homogenization and nationalization of product. Broadway is only a small reflection of that… take a look at the dregs on TV after the WGA strike to see what a mess the profit model has done to that industry. Or music sales. The incentive is to create the next big thing for the whole country, and the models to create work that is successful in those terms, certainly

The fact is, Corporate America needs artists to help them feel/seem/be human again, and the country is ready to believe that message. The time has come for us to empower ourselves and become artistic consultants. It’s not selling out when you call the shots.

One such artistic entrepreneur is Sandy Marshall of the highly successful comedy troupe Schadenfreude. Sandy has really effectively retooled his comedy writing skills to an equally challenging purpose: tongue-in-cheek brand identity, copywriting, and web design. And I’m happy to disclose, I’m working with Sandy on some of his projects for some of the best pay I’ve ever experienced (more on that - and why I’m doing it - later. But all these relationship disclosures are becoming increasingly comical in a community so teensy that one can’t trip over a flying monkey without first disclosing a professional relationship).

To get a sense of Sandy’s approach to his corporate work, check out his video spot for camera-shy mortgage broker Dean Vlamis:

No one in corporate america would think to sell themselves like this without artistic input. And yet, I think we can agree - it’s probably the most effective spot for a mortgage broker that you’ll ever see. That’s what we can sell to them - the strange and unintuitive ways that one can work an audience to build honesty and trust. We can sell them subtext. And we can also be proud of that profitable work, and bring the skills we learn in that endeavor back to our primary artistic endeavors… the ones that challenge us as artists. While we’re there, I’m sure we can pick up a couple donors and some young eager temps to boot. Go to the people, and bring the theater to them.

It’s important to mention here that Sandy continues to have a primary commitment to his work and his name whether he’s working on Schadenfreude or with a corporate client. If a corporate client begins to sway him from his mission as an artist or as a consultant (or as a human being), he lets them go, or more likely doesn’t take them on in the first place. Did you know you can do that? You can Fire a Client. Money doesn’t have to dictate everything, your priorities do. Selling out is a choice that we make for ourselves - and it’s a choice we can take back.

As far as my own involvement with Sandy’s company as a freelance web programmer, that role developed out of a set of skills that I had accrued and developed slowly and naturally in my regular theater work. I started out as a young and eager-to-please sound programmer, which gave me a rudimentary knowledge of how to tell a computer what to do. When New Leaf launched a website for the first time five years ago, I learned Cascading Style Sheets to help maintain the site. When The Side Project needed a website capable of lighting-fast and often weekly updates, I needed a simple system to do this in order to save time, so I learned dynamic web programming using PHP and mySQL, which pulls data from a central database to display on multiple pages. When I found out that my co-worker Patrick ran the website that had gotten me dozens of jobs across the country off of an archaic and glorified word processor document (hint: rhymes with “BluntPage”) that caused him about 10 hours of stress a week, I learned a lot more about PHP in order to pay him back for the opportunities and automate the job listing process.

All this is to demonstrate: We have a lot more skills than we give ourselves credit for. In my theater company, we have a history of people with day jobs in the branding, marketing, positioning fields, and so for a theater of our age, we’re (surprise!) pretty sophisticated branding thinkers. We got there by literally bringing home the books from the office. If you’re bored at work, use that time to use your work to benefit the life you actually care about. Or identify skills you wish you had and hit the library. Challenge yourself in manageable steps and mini-projects to build your power moves. If you’re capable of producing a show, you’re capable of working wonders for a corporate client who will pay you handsomely for that effort and fund your next project. If we accrue and develop skills that we need in theater (or in the corporate world), they’re not just valuable for theater… they’re valuable everywhere, and we can use that value to get what we want: a society that understands that art makes our lives better. Or fame and fortune, if that’s your bag.

Oh, and don’t forget: If you’re a non-profit, you’re still a non-profit. Start a personal LLC and become a donor to your company.

Doing corporate work can mean doing corporate work on your own terms. That’s how we keep ourselves from losing ourselves. It’s a new world out there, and it needs leaders who understand the human value that the arts generate, and they ain’t gonna come from the old leadership pools.

I was told that I needed to see Atonement (which will be one of like, three films I see in the theaters in a typical year). The sound design / composition was, as promised, exquisite (I think Marsha and Jess, who told me this had to be one of the three, saw a kind of combination of the musical concepts from The Dining Room and Girl in the Goldfish Bowl).

But what struck me was the same feeling I had felt after seeing Saving Private Ryan: this sense of guilt for everything, for being alive in a time of surplus, this deep regret that my grandparents’ generation had to fight for these basic necessities and barely escaped with their lives. It made me want to call them again, to talk with with all of them and relive their memories with them, and be thankful for their surviving: my grandfather Phil, a pilot in the CBI theater of WWII, who I was lucky enough to see a few months ago, and the grandfathers I can’t speak to anymore, Charles Keenan who also served, and my Japanese homestay “grandfather” Masami Ueno, who grew up on the other side of the war. There are fights that our forefathers fought then and since then so that we wouldn’t have to. They are fights of violence against aggression and injustice, and they are also fights of rebuilding that constructed the infrastructure of our lives. It is very difficult not to take the fabric of your life for granted.

The baby boomers also contributed a kind of violent and righteously indignant intellectual shift - a second major reaction that formed our world to day. The 60s developed this kind of revolutionary approach to everything, a new dogma that held that old infrastructure must necessarily be rebuilt from scratch in order to be truly new and truly equal and truly free. This kind of intellectual violence, like WWII, was absolutely necessary but also had side effects - it bred equally violent reactions that served to perpetuate some of the same attitudes they were trying to squelch. See also: Fundamentalists of all stripes.

I don’t believe that our future can be won with violent reactions on the geo-political front or on the socio-intellectual front anymore. What I do believe in is a taoist kind of sustainable and constant change and adjustment - short bursts of energy and readjustments that use the momentum of past actions, but that don’t get stuck and mired in blind conservatism, habit, dogma or laziness. A change that is cooperative and flexble, like a river wearing down rock. It will take enhanced awareness and diligence on our part in our daily lives and in our relationships, and an open-eyed acknowledgment of our collective past. It will take a willingness to engage in small acts of creation to counteract the destruction of the past and the constant decay and death that is a part of living. It will take stories of life and growth to encourage the life and growth itself. It will take…

(wait for it)

Atonement.

(groan)

So back to our corner of the world. A few weeks ago Artistic Director extraordinaire Jess Hutchinson forwarded me this white paper from a study on what the young leadership of non-profit organizations are up against.

It might be a bit dry, but I find it to be quite palate-cleansing after a week of blogosphere mud wrestling and theater URL cataloging, all mixed in with an ugly guilt over the sacrifices of the past. Given all this, reading the paper felt like downing a bottle of shaved ginger.

I’m going under for a few days while we tech How I Learned to Drive at Backstage Theatre Company, and then it’s back to developing a few more of these collaborative projects that we’ve been working on in the last few days. Sorry if I’m at all leaving you hanging, Dan, but I’ll pick up as soon as I can. So for now, I’ll leave you with some of the study’s general findings that are resonating with me like a Model-T with two bad spark plugs and a hangover:

Once young leaders gain entry and standing in their organizations, they are confronted with the realities of structure, power, accountability and culture that define organizational life.

Decision-making in non-profit social change organizations often lacks clarity and transparency.

Young leaders grapple with developing good models for exercising leadership, power and accountability.

Power and structure: who is accountable – and to whom – is part of the responsible exercise of power and leadership.

Young leaders are often disenchanted when there is a gap between an organization’s external values and its internal culture.

Balance between work and personal life remains a daunting challenge for young leaders in a culture still steeped in sacrificing all one’s time to the work.

Good mentors are hard to come by – and urgently needed – as we look toward the future of movement building.

There are specific complications in mentoring and support when leadership is being transferred from one generation to the next in organizations that include family members [e.g. some unions].

The lack of adequate mentorship and broader intergenerational dialogue means that important lessons of history and experience are inadequately transmitted, or are lost to a new generation.

[Young] leaders seem particularly eager to be good mentors to the next generation coming up after them.

Young leaders feel that the Baby Boom generation has cultivated relationships with funders that are not being passed on – and that they need assistance in making those connections.

In some regions of the country, funders were perceived as biased toward certain models of work to the detriment of new models, especially those conceived in communities of color.

There is no infrastructure to support the transition of older leaders, and no roles into which they can readily move.

The culture of transition should be supportive and affirming, not blaming and punitive. Smooth transitions can be helped by personal and organizational planning.

As they evaluate the lives and legacies of the Baby Boomers, and consider what their own lives and legacies might look like to subsequent generations, younger leaders are offering some new insights based on their own aspirations and experiences.

Young leaders are looking for balance and reconciliation with older generations.

“In the ‘40s and ‘50s, despite the oppression, there were things in place to rejuvenate the community that don’t exist now…we’re scrambling to create those mechanisms.”

“Our issues are always incredibly difficult to win. You have to be in it for the long haul if you ever want to see
a victory. I was just updating our victories and it stopped at 1999. And I was calling all my colleagues saying, ‘Didn’t we win anything in the last four years?’”

“Are people seeing results from their work? I mean, I know you see it to a certain extent but when you look at, kind of the societal issues and the kind of fight that’s out there, it’s kind of very disenchanting. And it’s like well, is this making a difference?”

“Everybody in nonprofits is talking about how this is the most difficult time they’ve ever seen. It’s a lot of pressure on us – and I have to talk to a lot of people to remind myself it’s not me – it’s not my fault.”

It wasn’t their fault either. That doesn’t mean it’s not our responsibility.

A big thanks to TOC, Kris Vire and Chris Piatt for the shoutout in today’s Time Out Chicago. For those of you checking out this blog because of the article, welcome, and I hope you enjoy the discussion.

I’m writing from the tech table at the Goodman’s kickoff production for the Horton Foote Festival, Talking Pictures, with sound designer extraordinaire Richard Woodbury, sound guru Dave Naunton, and intern Dan Schrek, so I thought that it’d be appropriate given the bump to acknowledge the people that help me through my wack-ass schedule with their own work, input, and support –

My teachers and students.

In theater, everyone’s a jack of all trades. You’ve got to be in order to survive. There’s so very little money in theater that you sort of develop a habit of carrying lots of buckets (or spinning plates) to capture as much value as you can from each experience.

And then you give away those nuggets of wisdom like trading cards.

But it’s not always a happy garden of cooperative flower-bunnies. I recently had my young & angry side brought right out front and center by another blog post discussing a theater company in town particularly infamous to industry folks that is currently throwing my good friend into massive personal debt by refusing to reimburse him for expenses. I tiraded against this and related incidents, publicly, and I wasn’t the only one.

Now I know the consequences of tirades in an industry this small. I have been told once by someone in power, an artistic director of a LORT theater, actually, (no, not in Chicago) “If you do this, you’ll never work again.” And the type of person who would say that doesn’t deserve their power in that moment. There are just those folks out there that I think don’t get it, who end up scared and entrenched in a system they think will protect them, who tear down something because they don’t yet understand its potential value. And as far as my lapse goes, sometimes we tear something down because we feel powerless - we attack it to serve the almost crocodilian need to feel dominant again. When the young & angry side in me gets thinking about reconfiguring the world to serve social justice, I know it’s over - my brain has shut down and I’m in it for the kill. So after getting it out of my system, I’ve come to realize that in the case of theater, it’s pointless to simply tirade against the injustice that exists in the industry. Now I believe in justice, but I also know the value of practicality, and we’re talking about a tiny industry here. It’s pretty easy to single out a delinquent party and throw out some blame in their direction, but I don’t think that those kind of tirades ends up solving the problem for the next guy or gal. What could solve the problem is a sea change that flips the industry on its cute little bunny ear. Why would that work? Because both the delinquents and the bellicose are dinosaurs - they’re fighting each other to come out on top of an old system. Nothing we can do will save them, because the ecosystem that supported them is crumbling. But there are new ecosystems at work now. It’s the tiny bunnies that will survive the next evolutionary crisis. We are agile, responsive, and we reproduce early and often.

Teaching is what stopped this cycle of envy and despair in me. In my first class, I felt a new fear - the fear that if I indulged my own adolescent railings and beliefs in class, I would shut out my students’ ability to explore material for themselves. It forced me to do nothing but open doors. And that’s when I realized that helping other people open their doors generated a ton of creative energy in myself.

And here, back at the tech table, is when Dave whips out his iPhone to show us the latest features in 1.1.3, including the new (ooooooh / ahhhhh) geo-positioning feature. Richard and I are in a debate over the relative merits of two MIDI sequencers, Apple’s Logic and MOTU’s Digital Performer. Richard shows me that DP can transpose the transition music into any key (he likes the sound of the Phrygian mode). I try to do this with Logic and discover about 17 new features I hadn’t dreamed of before today (but alas, no Phrygian transposition). I show this to Dan, and in the process of even telling him what I’m doing and what we’re doing, I learn and clarify four new bits of knowledge myself. And it turns out Dan knows Ableton Live, which I’m going to need to learn from him at some point. The student has become the teacher.

And it’s not just us hypergeeks in sound land. We swear that we can hear the actors while they hold, static on stage while the director and the lighting designer craft a look, and they are discussing podcasts and the relative merits of various popular sound technologies. More importantly, the constant feedback and sharing of knowledge and insight in the room is creating a new understanding of what’s actually happening in the room. This is the first Owen show performed entirely in the round, and the actors and director and designers and production team are all learning and sharing information about how that’s working. What’s remarkable about this room is that the feedback and information is flowing in almost completely positive and constructive ways. In telling each other what we see, we both redirect and continue the momentum we’ve built up. We learn the world better ourselves without shutting other possibilities down.

Talking Pictures has some oddly resonant themes that I can see leaking into (and from) our thoughts and conversations in the room - the public craves an advance in technology, entertainment delivers that advance in technology, and the advance in technology seems to both destroy lives and offer dangerously exciting opportunities. I think we’re seeing this combination of fear and opportunity a lot in a lot of fields today because of the leveling force of internet technologies. There’s a great deal of paradigm shift and fear in the air… Will the argument over new media kill television and film, are ipods making us all deaf, will digital downloads kill the music industry, is there a need for news in a world populated by bloggers, does user-driven content disable a common public dialogue and exacerbate philosophical divides between us, and will all of this shift lead to a big cataclysmic recession? These are all related questions, and the answers will prove that the questions didn’t even matter.

And yet, we can continue to teach and learn from each other. We can look out for each others’ flow and keep our mutual momentum going. This isn’t just frilly feel-good work, this is about opening connections. This process of checking in, of bouncing ideas off each other, of collaboration - that’s the process that the internet was built on, and the process that will yield the most rewards in the future. I couldn’t have completed my sound design for Bilal Dardai’s Contraption without the assistance and input of Stephanie Farina. As she learned my style of programming, it taught me to refine my style of programming and use her set of ears with mine to make something more compelling. Without that teaching process, it just wouldn’t be the same design. I wouldn’t have developed any sort of fearlessness in my work without a simple lesson from Smith College playwriting prof and Taoist master Len Berkman: “Always start with a bad idea. Then you won’t be afraid of that your ideas are bad. You’ll know they are.”

We need each others’ help to get big change in motion, and that means passing torches and being able to trust others to teach us and help us redirect our own adolescent prejudice. I wouldn’t know about half the things I know about how sound works in theater if my students hadn’t asked those questions that started with “How do you do….” I wouldn’t have become a confident artist capable of making strong choices if my teachers hadn’t turned to me and said, “Okay, what would you do here?” Do this for others, and you’ll see - feedback comes quicker, stronger, and more effectively.

Building a better community, a community that works better, begins with a very simple step:

“Hey, check this out! Look what I can do with this…”

So, What did you learn today?

I visited Bev a few days ago, for the first time since right after the accident.

Bev Longo had been our stage manager at New Leaf for our production of Accelerando two seasons ago. Bev is an accomplished MFA director who had worked as an assistant with Lookingglass, taught for years, but was having difficulty getting reconnected with the theater scene in Chicago and at that point was really interested in doing anything. I know her because she’s also the aunt of Lilly West, my counterpart sound operator for the Albert stage at the Goodman, who helped arrange the whole collaboration. Bev was quietly focused and almost religiously respectful of the theatrical process, and we desperately needed a capable stage manager, someone who would shepherd the project and help it grow. She sort of ended up as a mother figure for the show - running sound and projections in addition to the myriad props presets and stage sweepings and note taking that goes with stage management. She certainly was the central culture rock for the cast, and remains good friends with several folks, including New Leaf regular Tiffany Joy Ross. We hoped that she’d be interested in continuing our relationship with us at New Leaf by directing one of our upcoming shows, and indeed Bev was involved in the casting process for last season.

For a couple reasons, that never ended up happening, and it took me a while to understand why she ended up leaving the directing project suddenly, and with little explanation. Eventually, through much discussing with Lilly, I learned that Bev had a dream of starting a theater of her own, a dream that compelled her to focus her energies on her own work and not the often compromised collaborations with teams she couldn’t always trust. At the time, I didn’t understand and to be perfectly honest, didn’t trust that “go it alone” impulse, but now it’s something I’m beginning to feel a bit more myself. That need for complete trust and focus is strong when you really believe in your own work - when you decide to put all your eggs in that basket - and I think with where New Leaf was at the time, we couldn’t offer her that kind of complete support of vision that she could trust to the ends of the earth, which meant the time had come for her to forge her own path.

Bev was arranging space for her first Chicago production, I believe, when she was hit by a CTA bus at the corner of Belmont & Clark, on August 31st. She landed on her head and spend the next three days in a medically-induced coma. Life has a way of wiping away the petty drama when you least expect it.

Correction from Lilly: Bev was only medically comatose for about three days, which is when I saw her the first time, and the remainder of the three weeks was simply her stillness in recovery and from morphine and other pain killers. For those of you who have experienced a friend or relative with a head injury, this is a big difference - the longer a patient is comatose, the smaller their chances of recovery.

I don’t know why I stayed away so long. Maybe it was seeing her in the ICU, asleep and bandaged. Even though I knew whatever bad blood or disappointment may have existed between us didn’t matter to Bev anymore, I somehow still carried that idea around. I thought that if she had bad feelings about her time with New Leaf, I didn’t want to reawaken those memories with my presence. I tried to help Lilly with just being a sounding board, I suppose, as the family dealt with the massive change to their lives and the innumerable crazy things that happen when families need to come together again to cope with a big change. I didn’t even know what I could do for Amanda, Bev’s daughter, who I didn’t know as well but who had been suddenly thrust into the completely overwhelming situation of being the caregiver of her mother, and therefore needed all the help we could give. Bev eventually woke up from the coma, and like most head trauma cases has to go through a very long recovery process, which so far has involved three four very capable and dedicated care institutions (from Lilly: Illinois Masonic, RIC, St. Joseph’s, and now the Imperial. I wanted to include them before but didn’t have the details in front of me) Slowly movement returned, then some speech, then some sentences with mixed up but somehow still evocative words (When she was asked where she got hurt, instead of “I was hurt in my head” she jumbled up the words and said “I got hurt in my soul.”) Then, some memories came back, and the ability to read and write soon returned as well. In the last four and a half months, Bev has retrained her neural pathways from almost scratch, while retaining many of the long-term memories of her adult life.

This is truly one of the greatest battles we can face as human beings, as creatures - a journey back through our mind, finding our way to our body and our words after the old well-worn path has been lost. In that journey, you have a memory of your old mind and yet you cannot find it… the whole house of cards has fallen. The cards are still there, of course, but Bev has to put them together again, one by one.

I knew I was being childish about the whole visiting thing, so while we were working on Shining City - which is a play that really resonates with those that have suffered a similar loss in their family, let me tell you - I finally said to Lilly, let’s go. During tech, whatever, I wanted to see how Bev is doing. And I finally did.

As we walked into the room, I didn’t expect the constant laughter. From Bev, from me, from Lilly. Bev has changed, of course - her scars, her mind, but her heart is the same - wide open and excited to be alive. I say her mind, but I should be more specific - details are mixed up, like memories and vocabulary, but her cleverness and even wit are still there. Bev thrives on company, but Bev is the first person in her boat that I have ever heard of that still knows how to work her audience. When she can’t remember a word, she uses tricks to try to improv her way through. She’ll read voraciously to jog her memory… when she can’t remember the word for potato she’ll sneak out her printed menu from dinner and say “Oh, we had 1 starch for dinner.” And then she realizes that she’s goofed, and laughs with you. It’s hard, yes, but I also see it as downright inspiring. She is living, and engaged fully with her life, and she has a second chance.

She sat us down first thing and told us something, which coming from Bev is a very promising sign:

“Did you know… I was talking with Amanda, and… I didn’t realize before, but I almost died!” She walked us through her scars, with excited and eager eyes, and told us of the injuries and the surgeries that caused them, as pieces of the puzzle that she’s been putting together since she woke up. For the first time, her short term memory has improved to the point where she is now retaining her recent past, and discussions from a few days ago. And she tells her new stories with all of herself - hope and joy and wonder and self-deprecation.

Bev began writing in a journal the other day to help herself remember. Her written words are that tool she can rely on. It’s a tool that her sharp human mind can use to repair itself, survive and thrive. In her bedside table she reads and rereads her MFA dissertation, amazed at her own work and remembering bits and pieces of emotional detail, especially the signatures on the front from her advisors - “These are the people who liked me so much, they wrote it here.” Her dream from the last year of starting her own theater and directing again has resurfaced with a vengeance. She wants to write a play about what she’s been through, what she’s going through, what she will go through. She is writing with the purpose of remembering who she is, and her writing already reveals that she has a rich inner understanding that she cannot express yet through her damaged speech centers.

“I wanted to live, but I couldn’t.”

We’ve been talking at New Leaf about what it takes to write with your whole soul… Writing and creating with all the language that we possess, not just our words - our music, our dancing, our faces, our hearts. We’re trying to open up a new possibility of engaging with our work - going after the work and the themes that resonate with us from a multi-disciplinary approach. Intellect, Empathy, Touch, Music, Shape, Color… all our languages. Bev has always understood this kind of trust and completeness that you need to have in your own work. And she still has that trust that the work will help her through today.

I learned a lesson yesterday. I guess i knew it before, from my own experiences with teaching and stories of Theater eureka moments like Parabasis’, but I have never seen it and felt a calling to it as strongly as I did when Bev read me her journal two days ago. Theater, and the tactics of engagement that we use in the theater, can save your life. That’s why theater is valuable and worth fighting for. Theater and the crafting of theater can give us all purpose, and hope, and a reason to keep plugging away through overwhelming adversity. It can codify our stories and help us remember the things that matter. But you don’t get to compartmentalize the experience, and you don’t get to do it halfway - clapping politely, and forgetting the experience on the way to the parking garage. It’s an experience that changes you. It’s the hardest work you can do - opening up new neural pathways. And that means it’s not just the words on the page, it’s in the eye contact and the touch - in the connection. It’s acknowledging that we have an impossibly long journey ahead of us, and choosing to take that journey anyway, because we take it together.

God bless Bev Longo. She is one strong woman.