Easter Adventures

This Easter I agreed to lend my skills to an Easter service at St. Bartholomew's in Manhattan. The whole idea was to take the congregation's children on a walk through the Easter story. At several areas in and around the church there would be scenes that the children would encounter depicting the events surrounding the Resurrection.

Now, my own personal religious/ spiritual beliefs aside, I thought it would be a fun way to spend an Easter Sunday. It was fun. Which, in retrospect, makes me think I am probably a very sick person to have found this fun.

First off were the people I was working with. Some were old friends from my days at Circle in the Square and others were new faces. Such a nice group of people to work with! That definitely added to my enjoyment. Second was the sheer awesomeness of St. Bartholomew's itself. It is a sprawling and gorgeous piece of archetecture complete with tall columns, stained glass windows, mosaics, and weird nooks and crannies that satisfy the romantic little girl in me. The baptismal font itself is worth the trip. None of these things seem odd or out of the ordinary to enjoy. It is the third thing that makes me wonder.

I spent the entire day crying.

You see, I was to play Mary Magdelene (which I am quite certain that most of the parishoners confused me for the OTHER famous Mary) at the moment she discovered Jesus missing from the tomb. It was suggested to me that it would be powerful if Mary were really crying instead of indicating her loss. So, I went whole hog. I didn't go to the ugly cry place because that would have terrified the children, but I did sit and contemplate loss for an entire day. After all, at that moment the injustice of the whole situation must have been crippling for Mary. Not only has she lost her teacher and friend, but she has lost the means through which she could begin to cope with her grief. She has lost her hope for the future. The ritual of anointing the body would have been painful and yet would have helped her to move through her grief in a last gesture of love and caring. The loss of that moment, of that chance to say good bye must have been devastating to her.

We did three "shows" and each time I felt compelled to shake things up a bit and release some sadness and frustration of my own. I've heard many tales of dead dog personalizations and whatnot and I am certainly familiar with my own bag of tricks. However, I decided to focus on mass murders/ suicides and genocides to bring up the required sense of loss.

In a particularly morbid display I found myself thinking about Jonestown when the sound of a reluctant young parishoner reached my ears. He was chanting, "I don't WANT to go! I don't WANT to go!". This was somewhat serendipitous as, at that particular moment I was having difficulty connecting to my circumstances. But that child's protests added to my Jonestown scenario as I imagined a child who did not want to drink the Kool Aid struggling against his own mother. I needed no more for the rest of the day.

This is where my self loathing kicks in, because it feels so exploitative and wrong to attempt ot make art about real peoples' lives. And yet, what else have we got? What is more compelling that real life? What is more important than real life? But my ability and my need to bounce back from these emotional episodes and even share them and find them darkly funny disturbs me more than a little.

I know that I have developed a defense mechanism that helps me separate my acting reality from my actual reality and part of that mechanism requires me to look at my process this way. I need to be able to step back and analyze how I used this or that in order to survive the work I do and to understand my world. But sometimes I wonder if that is a good thing for my soul not just to use such things in my work, but to walk away having somewhat enjoyed the experience.

When I was pregnant my actor friends invariably said two things when they found out. Number one was congratulations. Number two was some variation of "Wow! Just think of everything you'll be able to USE from this experience!". This made me want to slap them because some things should be sacred, shouldn't they?

But as I creep up on that magic seven years after the birth of my son, I am begining to see how it would be useful and I shudder to think how it will creep into my work whether I like it or not. But then I think about how my work is sacred to me and it only makes sense that I would use that which is most holy to me in my creation. I wonder how the subjects of my silent homages would feel if they knew.

As for me, I'd be flattered. But then again, I'm a narcissist.