a journey through the present by way of Northern Ireland

So… here I am.  On the other side of what has been my most manic season for the past seven years.  It’s always that fantasized moment of peace to which I put off thinking about… doing other things.   Although, often those ambitions fade into the rest I award myself in the immediate thereafter and I lose track of what seemed so important, but not really that important that I didn’t do it immediately.

One thing I want to do, before the dust settles completely, is reflect on this play I just completed.  It was, as I’ve mentioned to co-workers and friends, one of those theater experiences that reminds me why I like theater.  Why I let myself forget the ugly parts and keep going back in search of more of what I just experienced.  Being amongst kindred spirits… even if we start off as strangers and walk away as strangers.  We live in that world of the play together for a few weeks as intimates, laughing over stupid things, finding the emotion and tear provocation of a line that has been repeated again and again throughout rehearsals and performances, suffering through exhaustion and forgetting lines and drunken audience members.  I wonder if anyone who doesn’t do theater knows this type of kinship.  I suspect there are other communities that offer it… but this is the place where I find it.  And found it this spring.

I came to this play a little later in the process, taking up a role when my overtaxed brain should have known better than commit time, energy, and my feeble amount of remaining memory capacity.  But, I did have the indulgence of a couple days after my big huge event… and it was a project that intrigued me on several levels.

 

My first day of rehearsal was the day Margaret Thatcher died.   The fact her anachronistic portrait was embedded in the set punctuated that detail for me.  The fact this was a play about Northern Ireland and the desire to rebel against the Brits during her rein… well there was an interesting symmetry to her life ending as I started my journey with this story.

Then a week later I showed up for rehearsal when my mind still hadn’t quite processed the bombing at the Boston Marathon.  It was a weird dance as we articulated lines about bombs and house raids all while deflecting the tears or shudders of what happened sixty miles from our rehearsal space.

I was still a little detached from my character at that point, but as I started to wrap my mind around a woman who is loyal to her abusive lover… a terrorist… Worcester declared its own part in the story of the Boston Marathon with the childish, xenophobic protests of a terrorist’s burial.  I struggled to understand how a woman could ask a man who risked her child's life back into her home... but found myself more aware of families hurting and reeling from our own present tragedies.  That there are victims on all sides.

I remember in the aftermath of 9-11, a few of my British colleagues referenced their memory of IRA bombs.  Indeed, I think there may have even been an incident… or the hysteria of a possible incident while I was there.  Nothing resulting in tragedy… but something to make me realize how normal it was… and how London just got on with it.  Including the Irish who lived there.

I don’t know that I actually have a thesis to these reflections.  They are just a bunch of thoughts I’ve collected as my life has bubbled with crazy busy and the world around it escalated its energy to a maddening fury.  The play was kind of like picking up a pair of spectacles and seeing one section in clearer focus… only when I take them off, I find my observation blurrier.

Theater… at its best… teaches empathy.  It lets us (actor, director, crew, audience) step into the mind and heart of a character… and maybe see something differently.  Even if just for a moment.