Week 7/ 52 February 19, 2017

            I parked the car and stepped out into the damp, cool evening. The day had been spent in relative bliss, and I felt like dancing and singing, and being inside of myself, with no care for the world around me. This is a rare feeling. I better take advantage. And under the darkened drizzle, I walked with my light down jacket zipped up tightly. “If I close my eyes, this could be San Francisco and not Phoenix.” If I close my eyes and let the stillness hold me. The performance was transfixing, Rubén, Jorge’s friend, brought characters to life, through gestural suggestion, carefully crafted words, poetic punctuation. Light. Theater has always been a place where I felt safe, but tonight, I must admit, I was overwhelmed by the whiteness of the audience. I sat comfortably, easily enough, in my slightly inappropriate purple mini skirt and black tights, ankle boots, hair misted by the rain. But I felt somewhat oppressed by the polite tittering around me about vacations and shopping forays, where the woman who sat next to me asked me if this was, indeed, row k, and wasn’t it awfully close for row k. I replied, drily, that I wasn’t intimately familiar with what row k ought to feel like, being that I was not a frequent purchaser of orchestra seats, and therefore was totally useless as an informant for her inane validation-seeking. Of course I said none of that, just that I didn’t know what it was supposed to feel like. The rest I kept to myself. There was a well-intentioned young person who created a wall of speech to pre-interpret the play, Esquinita, USA, for an audience she assumed was not fully equipped to interpret black and brown characters from the ghetto, any ghetto, as the world crumbled around them. I tried to close my eyes, to ignore the yammering, to transport myself to other theaters, other times, when I used to walk to the CNA before it was the CENART and watch world-class acts, and student plays alike, for a nominal fee for students, and how I never feel lonely when I am held in suspense, in the suspension of disbelief, in the energetic field that emanates, pulsing and writhing, from the actors centers.

            I have always loved the theater (just not musical theater, sometimes). And Ruben was, simply sublime. But I am reminded too, of the magical sway that an actor can hold, how their embodied characters can touch us, and how, sometimes, we fall in love with the changing gels, illuminating nuance and power. I think about Brigadoon. I must have been in middle school, perhaps 7^th grade. We went to the high school, and settled into our seats, my mother next to me, my brother, perhaps too, though memory does not cast him as anything but an amorphous possibility. I fell in love. I remember it clearly, because it is a feeling that I have spent the greater part of my adult life chasing, that warm wash of emotion, the heightened touch, the gasping breathlessness, the hope. I’ll confess, it has been a while since I’ve felt that hope, but that is neither here nor there.

            For me the space and time of a play was as close to a religious transubstantiation as I was ever going to come, and I bit that metaphorical wafer hook, line and sinker. There is a calm that comes with this vicarious living, one that I later rediscovered in film, but there is something in the physical proximity, the sweating, breathing, smoking, bleeding humanity that makes live performances magical and often morally compelling. The Greeks, I suppose, had it right, and the longing for catharsis, the purging of excess emotional baggage, the orgasmic build up of tears that pull from your chest, behind your eyes, and then spill over in deep compassion for someone else’s plight, because, of course it is never your own. I am grateful for this certainty, that by making characters speak to one another, to watch the drama unfold in front of me, I will always have a way out of my own labyrinth, out of my own, chafing, binding disappointments. They melt away in the darkened theater, and then, as in a classroom, where the rest of the room falls away, and it is only me and the person who is telling me stories, they are speaking directly to ME, and I am held captive, breathless, and free.