"THE TRANSCENDENT YEARS"

Kevin Leonard shepherds archives at NU, where I sent all my old notes and journals about Alvina Krause.  I was surprised when he let me know via email that I am named in Marshall S. Mason's latest book, "The Transcendent Years" which includes the years at NU at the end of the Fifties when were classmates.  Leonard said, "I just received my copy of Marshall Mason’s new book.  I’m only 20 pages into the story and there you are, working on Mary Stuart at Eagles Mere."  My own copy came this week and I put everything else down so I could read it.  I already had his earlier books about directing and acting which describe his use of the concept of "beats", which is a way of dividing any time-art into the near-musical concept of small arcs.

Besides being classmates at NU, Mason and I were both at Eagles Mere, which was the summer repertory company in the Poconos that Krause ran.  The first sentence of the book quotes Krause's key belief: "I am training you for a theatre that doesn't exist."  She meant the vision of a local repertory theatre like Eagles Mere:  cooperative, exemplary, excellence-based, beyond political to the point of what Mason calls "transcendent."  It is an idea not limited to theatre companies and has guided my life as well as Mason's, though we've taken very different paths.  

Claris Nelson's life-path often travels with Mason's.  She is a person I owe a great deal: there was a gap of several days between the university housing closing at NU and the opening of the Lodge at Eagles Mere where we all stayed.  Claris and her family not only allowed me to stay at their house, but also drove me with Claris and others across the miles to the little mountain resort.  The Nelson family house was one of many in Evanston built in a time of wealth and elegance.  I had never spent a night in such a fine place.  It was the first time I saw window shutters that were fine cabinet work that folded into niches next to the sashes.  Claris' father was an architect but it was years before I realized that the fabulous magazine he read was "Architectural Digest."  

The house was not furnished in a pretentious way and the family was vegetarian.  I had never known a household like this, idealistic but luxurious.  High-end glossy shelter mags have been a pleasure and refuge ever since, though I've always lived in shabby circumstances.  Claris herself was gifted and unique, a writer and actor of insight and power, though her taste for the whimsical might not be mainstream.  

The truth is that after we all graduated in 1961, we all went separate ways.  Oregon at the time was a backwater and in Montana, where I went for the next decade, I didn't pay attention to New York until Bob's sculpture was ready for the Manhattan galleries of Western art, like the Kennedy.  I didn't hear about Marshall S Mason until he was involved in"Angels in America."  By that time I was at the U of Chicago Div School (Eighties) and could make a pilgrimage back to Annie May Swift hall, the scene of so much.  And I was more than ready for both fantasy and grit, the gruesome real and the surprisingly salvific.  

Which is why I headed back to Montana in 1999 and discovered that Rollie Meinholtz, who directed both Marshall and I in "Queen of the Rebels," was now a prof at U of Montana.  Sometimes I feel like there are only a hundred people in the world and I know ten of them while all the rest know each other.  The thread of this book is double: plays and theatre people, in a setting of the political and world-wide news of the time.  I didn't remember how violent and extreme events were, but it explains why I was determined to stay in Browning, Montana, where things that terrifying had happened in the 19th century rather than the 20th.

I've never been central in any context and that had been true of Eagles Mere as well.  I didn't go as an actor but as a costumer, a one-summer career, and Mason claims to remember the stunning white brocade dress I made for Penny Fuller, with white fox cuffs on the oversleeves.  He mentions the black dress also made for the character but doesn't remember (mercifully) that the brocade from which I made the dress was dye-resistant.  No matter how many boxes of RIT I used, I could never get the dress darker than deep purple and then I ran short of time so that it had to be dried hanging above our only stove: an ancient and massive woodstove unbelievably called "Othello" -- a name embossed on the front.  IT was black.  The dress remained a little smoky.

The costume shop was in the old ice house but I doubt Marshall was there much.  It was full of trunks of the most glamorous clothes I've ever seen, beaded chiffon encrusted with beads and embroidery, hemmed in points or asymmetrically.  Absolutely un-useable in any plays we produced.  Remnants of former glory that probably ought to have a play written about them.

So many of the plays Mason mentions from those NU years are vivid in my mind's eye.  Mason, his close friend Rob Thirkield, and Bill Shaw  were roommates.  Bill was my biology partner at first and then my thought partner as we sat in the back of the auditorium through AK's classes, trying to understand and appreciate what was happening.  I have never seen staged productions with as much power and resonance as some of those uncostumed vignettes on an empty stage.  

For instance, Penny Fuller in a bit from "The Property Is Condemned" as the central character balanced along a bit of old railroad.  It was ironic that several of us, including me, were practically hypnotized by Tennessee Williams, considering that AK was essentially Edwardian.  But then, the undercurrent of fluid sexuality (often paradoxically faithful) ran through her and many of the rest of the actors.  It was an underground source of power that destroyed some and raised others into transcendence.

FANCY DANCERS

Somehow I seem to be producing a series of posts about gay men, partly because of friendships and partly because they can be a powerful metaphor, embodying nonconforming lives based on intimate relationships.  I’ve compared them to tribally enrolled men, who often have highly productive but sociologically ambiguous lives that raise religious questions.

“Tom Meeker is a handsome rookie priest stranded in a dying rural parish. Vidal Stump is a proud, gay half-breed with a criminal record and unlawful desires. Father Meeker must choose between his sacred vows and his secret attraction to this Fancy Dancer who lures him into forbidden love.

First published two decades ago, this provocative, hard-hitting novel was the first bestseller to portray a gay priest and to explore gay life in a small town.”  (http://www.anobii.com/books/The_Fancy_Dancer/9780452263208/019971144dca592e16)

Marshall W. Mason says in the Afterword of “The Circle Repertory Company: the First Fifteen Years” that at one point he was interested in making a film from another of Patricia Nell Warren’s books, “The Front Runner” but it didn’t work out, as most movie projects do not.  I would like to raise a vision of a film of “The Fancy Dancer” shot on video with all the special effects that Tim Barrus and Cinematheque have developed over the past decade.  

Full disclosure: I only wrote with Tim rather than making video, but I’ve seen most of them, often repeatedly.  One of the early vids juxtaposes two dancers: one Asian man dancing in a bare cement space and one white dancing in a standard mirrored studio.  The two overlap contrapuntally, seeming to dance as partners, then merging into one dancer, then separating and contrasting.  Another vid in the same mode melds skateboarding with surfing.  Physical movement is one of the hallmarks of Cinematheque and is key to the lives of boys.

In the years Marshall and I were in the community around Alvina Krause at NU and Eaglesmere (1957-1961), we were not close but both of us walked and thought in multiple levels, overlapping or informing each other, slowly unfolding as we came to grasp more and more about what it is to be human.  It was so intense that ever after I’ve had a little trouble finding a world as idealistic and piercing.  The rez in some aspects, the world of sculpture before it was seized by the cowboy commodifiers, sometimes ministry, and mostly writing have been far more to me than they seem to be for other people.  These things are full of bright shadows, in that paradoxical way informing the work of some artists.  My skill level only pursues them, but Tim, in the years he had strength and health, captured.  His poetry still does.

Marshall and some other NU people were fortunate — oh, fortune had nothing to do with it and not money either — because they created The Circle Repertory Company, which was as much workshop as theatre, in the same way that Cinematheque is a school, in the sense that a school is a place to grow, a kindergarten.  For me my school was seminary, a seedbed, a place of insemination.  But then I had to return to the land.  Like Sam Shepard, who was peripheral to Circle Rep, I am a Westerner.  (Actually, Marshall is, too, but I don’t think he identifies that way.)

Living in the world as an artist, particularly as a solitary, is not easy because the visions can come with overwhelming kaleidoscopic impact, but might also contract into darkness.  Unless one has built habit and discipline, there will be no container that can hold and shape the patterns.  If there are others who interfere with that, it dies.  If there are others who can be dance partners, it is elaborated.

Alvina Krause was not self-promoting, nor was she a star-maker, but she had learned in her own life how to be a effectively contained “dancer” and could pass that on to others.  We knew her in old age when even the tribal old warriors dance with slow steps, enormous dignity, wrapped in a blanket but wearing a headdress.  (In her case, a silver comb.)  Deceptively simple her life seemed, and yet it was layers and layers deep, non-conforming in private ways because she was always in danger of exploitation or exclusion.  Inside this small Edwardian-style woman was Marlon Brando on a motorcycle, a leather-lady. 

Paula Ragusa Prentiss and Rob Thirkield

Caesar and Cleopatra  at NU

Marshall is something like that as well and so was his collaborator, Rob Thirkield, who was finally “washed out to sea”.  That’s a metaphor for suicide.  The other suicide that deeply affected the company was that of Joe Cino, who danced his self-slashing death while Maria Callas sang “Norma” on the record player.  It’s much easier to understand Cino in a time when young people practice “cutting” to relieve psychic pain.  I think about Montgomery Clift and James Dean as twilight dwellers, while today’s youngsters go directly to werewolves and vampires, but always keep the intense bonding of pairs.

One of the powerful patterns today, coming from biology as well as philosophy, is that of the rhizome network: nodes connected by long filaments.  This is the pattern of the connectome in the brain, which plays the neurons as though they were the keys of a piano.  The visionary aspect of the artist, priest or dancer is not imaginary — it is the symphonic expression of an electrochemical instrument.  Not just in the brain.  Muscles and bodily fluids play their part as surely as brass and strings.  But the pattern is also expressed in lives of lovers and nomads — fusion and flight.

Still alive in my memory is sitting in the back of the auditorium of Annie May Swift Hall during acting classes watching moments when meaning came alive.  I’ve been more the observer than the performer all along, except for the years in ministry when I led services and preached.  I’ve avoided most intimate relationships for fear of being trapped and prevented, used by people who don’t have the vision.  

That may just be a rationalization, but even just sitting safely in this old house with kittens grappling my ankles, I can feel the danger in great effort and risk.  The world itself flames and gutters, not just with human life but also with the hurtling cosmic rays and ringing of the universe.  Gay men in the arts seem to understand.  So do Native Americans and the best priests.

MARSHALL W. MASON

The first play about AIDS, 1985

Directed by Marshall W. Mason

I subscribe to my “Alma Mater” publications in order to feel connected to my education though I’ve moved far away from anything they would recognize.  I just received the most recent issue of “Dialogue” (Summer 2016), which is about the Northwestern University's “Communication Studies” department.  Just the fact that they call themselves “studies” instead of “arts” is significant, signalling a kind of distancing, a cooling, a reliance on data.  In my day (1957-1961) it was all about passion and (hopefully) genius. 

Department of Communication Studies

"The Department of Communication Studies explores the social, political, and cultural functions of communication as it occurs in diverse settings ranging from interpersonal interaction to global media. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative methods, the department’s teaching and scholarship explore communication practices, media, institutions, and arts as they shape agreement and dissent, competition and cooperation.

"Our faculty are leaders in the study of new media, public culture, social networking, technology and social behavior, and other areas as well. They address both perennial problems and emergent phenomena in a context of interdisciplinary collaboration. Students have opportunities for direct involvement in state of the art scholarship. Additional programming ensures a rich academic environment for acquiring the understanding and skills that will be expected for leadership in the twenty-first century."

The illustration at the head of the above includes an Asian woman and a North African man.  They might actually be from the countries that are their genetic sources or they might be several generations' American.  When I was attending, there were no people who looked like this photo.  There were two groups that have been otherwise stigmatized over time but were quietly included: one was Jewish and the other was gay.  Both were well-represented in the Theatre Department, but I know of men who were arrested for being gay.  No one was arrested for being Jewish.  Several of both groups have been major successes in the arts.  There's a bit of overlap.

A subset of the theatre department students of the School of Speech (which is what we called it then) were devoted to Alvina Krause and her “Method”, signalled by being chosen to work in Eaglesmere, Pa, in the summer theatre.  A high percentage had family connections to Broadway and other acting/production venues.  We wondered whether we might be a community that history would note as a “hot spot” of creativity and brilliance.  By now, I think it has turned out that we were.  Not myself, because I returned to the West, where I am now, part of a different but echoing story.

Marshall W. Mason

In this issue of “Criterion” the Alumni Achievements include a thumbnail of Marshall W. Mason (C61).  Marshall, founder of New York’s Circle Repertory Company, is one of two recipients of the 2016 Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in Theatre.  The other recipient is famed Broadway lyricist Sheldon Harnick (BSM49).”  Marshall grew up in Amarillo, Texas.  He’s still comfortable south of the border but is not Mexican.  He was on the faculty of Arizona State University for a decade and remains emeritus professor there.

In an interview after receiving this award, a culmination of a career of awards, Marshall says that he is most proud of producing “As Is,” by William F. Hoffman at Circle Repertory.  Here’s the Samuel French description:

"Winner of the Obie and Drama Desk Awards

"The time is now, the place New York City. Rich, a young writer who is beginning to find success, is breaking up with his longtime lover, Saul, a professional photographer. The split is particularly difficult for Saul, who still loves Rich deeply, but the mood is one of bantering and ironic humor as they divide their belongings. However Rich's idyll with his new lover is short-lived when he learns that he has AIDS and returns to the goodhearted Saul for sanctuary as he awaits its slow and awful progress. Thereafter the action is comprised of a mosaic of brilliantly conceived short scenes, some profoundly moving, some brightly humorous, which capture the pathos of Rich's relationship with friends and family; the cold impersonality of the doctors and nurses who care for him; and the widely diverse aspects of New York's gay community—for which Rich's plight is a chilling reminder of their own peril. In the end the effect of the play is emotionally overwhelming—an honest and unsparing examination of a deeply felt human relationship shattered by a mindless, destructive force which cannot be tempered or turned aside.

"Winner of the Obie and Drama Desk Awards, this powerful, deeply affecting play was originally presented Off-Broadway by the Circle Repertory Company, and then transferred to Broadway where it was nominated for a Tony Award. Dealing with the AIDS crisis in the homosexual community, the play blends humor, poignance and brilliant theatricality as it details the bravery and compassion with which two young men face the shattering revelation that one of them is affected with the dreaded, and fatal, disease. "…the most impressive work presently being performed on or Off-Broadway…It is beautifully written and splendidly performed." —Variety. "AS IS is one of the few theatrical evenings in town that may, if anything, seem too brief." —NY Times. "A wonderful and frightening play…" —NY Post. "…this is the best new play of the season." —NY Magazine."

from the London Production of "As Is"

Peripherally in the AK group, I was fairly close to the gay men, but not the women.  I suppose I was a beard, but for what I’m not sure.  They tell me now that in those late Fifties they were aware that they were “different” but not what it meant.  They were “artistic”.  Or something.  When I talk to them now, they are surprised that I always knew they were “homosexual” which was a phobia in my childhood household, but of no concern or real interest as a college student.  My student teaching supervisor was gay.  He told the beautiful and gifted student actor she had no career ahead of her because she was black. 

Looking at the poster for “As Is”, the actors seem recognizably gay: plaid shirts with sleeves rolled up, Air Force mustaches, but no black leather jacket.  There were no markers like that at NU in the late Fifties, so I don’t know what I was picking up on.  Much less what they saw in me, except that we were all head-trippy in a — brace yourself — corticolimbic way.  That is, the WHOLE head plus bodies as a means of thinking and reacting, global sensory awareness as a source of identity, and never shutting down everything that wasn’t processed in the prefrontal cortex (the post-animal) which everyone else clung to and the school seems to have returned to. 

Blue tailed skink.

Tony Roberts  (no idea about his romantic preferences) did his class exercise assignment of embodying a living creature as a skink, a lizard that does nothing unless it’s in danger or hungry, so we all scoffed at him.  He was being humorous (he does that) but he also put up a pretty good defense about achieving a mind that’s only reflexes.  I can’t remember anyone doing a class scene directly about gays.  Not even Oscar Wilde.  But we were pretty invested in Tennessee Williams.  Maybe that was not so much euphemism as a kind of slant displacement.

We talked a lot about culture in terms of sensory styles (food, clothing, climate) and family dynamics, but I remember almost no discussion of drugs or politics.  Most people smoked, some drank too much.  The Peace Corps was just beginning, the birth control pill was approved in 1960, there had been no assassinations yet.  No one had any real idea what American Indians were like because they were all portrayed by Italians.  No one had any awareness of AIDS though in retrospect it can be identified as far back as the Twenties and maybe earlier.  

"Ghosts" by Ibsen, directed by Mason

Marshall Mason writes quite a bit about theatre.  I’m wondering whether he might trace out the larger evolution of his consciousness about HIV between the secret of one’s desires in 1960 to the frank confrontation of 1985 and what has happened since then, now that it's 2016.  It seems to me that the years at NU gave us such a broad, deep and intense understanding of human beings in all their permutations that maybe this new and ghastly spectre could be wrestled with honor, painful as it is.  

Today’s HIV/AIDS is a far different issue for a pre-adolescent boy entangled in sexwork, needle drugs, starvation, collateral trauma, and lack of shelter — bereft of family.  What seems to pull those boys back from suicide is the same thing that we at NU thought was the source of genius: a group, a community, a family.  But now they don’t write three-act plays.  They blog, they vid, they photo, they sing and dance, they skateboard (which is now an Olympic sport).  I’m not sure the present incarnation of NU’s elaborate Communication Studies has caught up to that.  They seem a little too cold and distant to me.  Not much like Timo.

THREE PLAYS: GATEWAYS TO THE PAST -- or future?

I don’t have the kind of analysis subscription in place that would tell me who in Chicago reads this blog, though I know there are some.  Perhaps they will be the most directly interested in this video, since they might attend Looking Glass Theatre productions.  I asked whether the whole productions might be on video some day, but they tell me for legal reasons it can’t happen.  Anyway, there’s nothing like live theatre, which is the whole point.

http://lookingglasstheatre.org/content/node/3560

I was struck that this season includes Marguerite Duras’ “The North China Lover,”  Antoine Saint-Exupery’s “The Little Prince,” and Sara Gmitter’s “In the Garden: A Darwinian Love Story.”  The video above is a teaser triptych by the three directors.  I’d love to see the productions.

But the subject of this post is that though this company is based on a group of Northwestern University students, post-Alvina Krause and in those terms “only” twenty-five years old as compared to my time there (1957-61).  They wished to explore experimental and original works.  Somehow they have come back to three subjects that I first learned about in the late Fifties, right there at NU in Evanston when repertory theatre was only a dream.

Duras

Duras

I came to Marguerite Duras’ work through “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” which is the same autobiographically based story that she returned to again and again.  But that version was entwined with the atomic bomb and the whole issue of peace.  I had never seen such a sexy movie -- the lovers shower together -- nor had I seen eros paired with death so explicitly.  It has never left me.  I watched it again not long ago and I’ve also re-watched “The Lover” several times, but I haven’t read much of her writing.  Maybe I should settle down to a formal study of her work but it would be more fun and possibly more rewarding to rework the Browning Sixties as though they were Saigon, using the holocaust massacre theme.  In my head in those years the images of “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” were very much alive -- it was only a year or so after sitting amazed in the Evanston art house film theatre.

The Little Prince

Saint Exupery

“The Little Prince” is bittersweet to think about.  I still have the book given to me by a dear classmate, not as a romantic gift, so much as a sign of sharing a world, a coded version of a friendship.  That friendship endured a long time, but maybe we’re out of sync now.  It's not ended, really.   Again, much of it echoed a few years later in Browning -- like the fox who comes to discuss what it is to be “tamed.”  Of course, Saint-Exupery  himself was never tamed.  I read his biography and the other books and saw that he was one of those men who needed women as a base port, not a co-pilot.

Charles Darwin

His wife and cousin.

The third story is also relevant since my basic biology education was at NU and my biology lab partner became a very close friend.  He died young but not before major achievements as a law professor and as father of a treasured family.  Still reflecting on bio issues, much of my thinking now is about the “omics”:  genomics, proteomics, epigenomics, culturomics and so on.  I still hear that lab partner’s voice.  The Darwin story is about the dynamics of understanding that have gripped us a long time, but the evolution of the actual animals has been displaced by the evolution of the code that makes them -- and our interventions in the code, accidentally and on purpose.  

Since I often drove the barrel of “our” microscope through the slide we were trying to look at (I’ve always had a problem with focusing) but Bill never did, and since I had the greater manual dexterity at that point (I drew praise from the professor for an angleworm dissection), we made a synergistic pair. We often sat together in the back of the auditorium at Annie May Swift to observe the acting classes of Alvina Krause.  At that point he was thinking of becoming a psychiatrist, so we were preoccupied with issues of identity, human heroism, and cultures that challenge and resist exceptional individuals.  He never shared my interest in religion.

From this vantage point in time, Duras, Saint-Exupery and Darwin seem to walk in light, but they were all three problematic characters who had to weather a lot of doubt, resistance, and affliction.  None of them were saints and none were religious in any conventional institutional sense.  They were people who took chances, met hardship, made love, and left legacies.  I’d like to be like that.

I never shared thoughts about these three individuals with Bob Scriver or anyone else in Browning.  Both my NU friends came to visit Browning with the high school sweethearts they married.  They were both sons of doctors -- what does that mean?  They didn’t know each other except to pass on campus.  Bob knew them only as my former classmates and they were very curious but baffled by him.  No discussions of the meaning of life.

Looking back, I’m a little surprised at how compartmented my life has been.  I suppose it’s an artifact of moving, not just from one place to another, but from one total context to another -- all of them unpredicted and with nothing obvious in common, and yet the themes and skills I learned from Duras, Saint-Exupery and Darwin have come with me -- the stolons stretching across the continent, connecting rhizomes that were communities of experience.

Maybe it’s a demonstration of how the arts and humanities become like spider silk, trailing along behind one, weaving a pattern.  Or to be more funky, one could speak of the slime trail left by a slug, a kind of excrement in the opinion of some.  When you look it up, slug slime is pretty complicated, implicated in everything from the ability to climb vertical surfaces to assisting sex.  It’s how you use it that counts.

But the “whole point” is the story, the live theatre of all this.  Consider that Ivan Doig was from here, is my age and attended NU at the same time, but in a journalism and history context.  I doubt that he attended that art house movie theatre or that it had any particular effect on him.  His writing is read in Montana, mine is read in Seattle.  His writing is conventional “books,”  mine is blogging.  Our audiences are probably about the same size, but the difference is he’s able to make a living writing and I am not.  But then our lifestyles are also different.  And our writing is nothing alike.  Yet we're both Scots -- maybe I'm more Irish.

If there is someone around here who watches Duras movies, reads Saint-Exupery books, or even thinks about Darwin, I don’t know who they are.  Mere proximity means very little these days.  But if one is “different” and spends the day writing, there are always friends a keystroke away.  There is a lot more to this story.

A PLAN OF ACTION

The idea was simply to type up my notes from the acting classes I took from Alvina Krause between 1957 to 1961.  It’s turning into Pilgrim’s Progress.  The sources I will name now are not morally invested like the symbols in that hoary old book, but they are representative of different points of view that both inform and frustrate attempts at biography or, more pointedly, attempts to describe and evaluate acting methods and the teaching of acting.  The big cyclorama “green-screen” constructed by the media, of course, is the Stanislavsky “Method”  that has seduced so many, promising them fame and fortune to say nothing of passion between the sheets, mumbling pillow talk.

This “blogging” is a way of working that wasn’t possible before the Internet and that will be disconcerting to some and fulfilling to others.  Those who think of this blog as a “Montana” or even Blackfeet source must be braced, but not because I’m going to shocking in terms of revelations and broken taboos. (I DID shut off the “safe search” feature but I’m not making people sign in after a warning that I might talk about sex, which seems to be the only “adult” subject matter.) This is not directly about cowboys and Indians.

I’m working in reference to the thesis by David Press, available like all Ph.D. theses through http://www.proquest.com which is a thesis archiving website.  $37   “A PH.D. THESIS FOR CARNEGIE MELLON ENTITLED "THE ACTING & TEACHING OF ALVINA KRAUSE: THEORY AND PRACTICE”  by David Robert Press.  In the past it has been brushed aside but it is carefully footnoted.  The trouble is that AK had a change of heart midstream.

I’m also working off the notes I took and my memories of the time period, as well as the notes generously posted by David Downs, who was AK’s designated heir as acting teacher in the NU Department of Theatre, defined as stage acting in repertory.   (DavidGoingOn.blogspot.com )  By comparison “Industrial” theatre (I’m thinking mainstream Broadway musicals or film and television) are different.  The kind of theatre now represented by groups like “Looking Glass Theatre” who create their own productions, often from local history mixed with classical mythology and including such things as juggling, puppets or trapeze work, develops out of and -- I would argue -- is a logical continuation of AK’s understanding of theatre as a community within a community. (Sample at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZq5W-hVKaE  Looking Glass has connections with NU, just as it did with Steppenwolf and Second City.)

The much broader and more philosophical department of “Performance Arts” at NU was separated not so long ago, maybe thirty years.  It would include my idea of a person as a performance (which I’m drawing from various psych contexts, including Internal Family Systems Therapy and Gestalt), “flash” performances that are possibly high culture (“The Messiah” at Christmas) and possibly social protest (pouring blood).  These ideas are open to ethnic and highly experimental means, often as technical methods become available -- projecting Mapplethorpe nudes on the sides of buildings in public squares or streaming sequences filmed by children on the tiny screens of smartphones.  

Performance Arts is open to “philosophy of performance” in the same way as  everything spiritual -- whether part of an institution or not -- is open to “philosophy of religion.”  Both are interested in the human creature and how it works.  We know we take in sensory information (some yearn after super-sensory mystical information), do something with it according to our internal structure, abilities and needs -- then act and interact.  Sometimes we are more interested in the individual and sometimes the greater community -- clear up to the most extreme and inclusive patterns that are the cosmos.

My informal (and involuntary) guides for this grandiose enterprise are Brian Rusted at the U of Calgary, who was at Northwestern in the early Eighties when the two disciplines separated, and Robert Benedetti, who was at NU when I was, except that he was mostly in the Department of Interpretation.  I’m bound to get things wrong.  Rusted has been reading my blog for a long time.  Benedetti always terrified me at NU, so I approach him gingerly but he HAS written well-respected books on acting as well as doing a bit of social action in the fine movies:  “Miss Evers’ Boys” and “A Lesson Before Dying,” powerful and much praised films in which he was both producer and actor.  He still teaches acting and is emailing me.

The person you can’t see but who is a strong contributer and provocateur for more, more, more thinking is my close friend, Tim Barrus, who has roots in the wildly exhilarating San Fran days that were crushed by AIDS.  I was a costumer for Eagles Mere.  He was costumer for fabulous, incredible, disruptive theatre.  (If you go researching, remember Wikipedia can be HIGHLY misleading, simply by omission.)  Since 2006 or so, one of my daily tasks has been to find ways to explain a cruel world to street boys by using what I learned as preparation for ministry to nice educated people, mostly prosperous and in families.  Remarkably, sometimes it worked, and NOT remarkably, sometimes they had to explain the world to me.

A big part of arts (and religion) is finding dimension, not getting deflected off into teeny-tiny issues of immediate personal interests.  If all the pain and struggle of learning one’s field and skills is to count for anything, it has to be aimed at the Ultimate.  Not just “love, sweet love,” but also justice, facing the abyss.  (AK would mention Antigone right about now.)

Usually I end these posts by circling around to the beginning, so I will.  AK’s life and work are remarkable because this small town woman (literally “small”) lived through two World Wars and the Great Depression (not to mention the Roaring Twenties) on a major urban university campus without losing her focus or her tenure.  Then in old age she found a way to survive the Aquarian dislocation of the Sixties and Seventies by returning to small town repertory theatre.  (My guide here is Jim Goode of the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble.  www,bte,com) Surely she still has much to teach us, whether or not we are actors.

And in the background -- oh, they are always sneaking up (It’s a performance art form.) -- are the Blackfeet who were always noted for dream narrative and oratory, ceremonial performances and trickster politics.  When a local female drama teacher (white) was fired for “romancing” her lead actor (enrolled), no one was much surprised.  Happens on university campuses all the time -- always has.  (Yes, even same sex schools. Even seminaries.)  The force for life, for creation, for survival, drives everything.  The difference is that we make plays about it.  Did you know AK wanted to cast Benedetti in a production of “Oedipus”?   I kinda wish it had happened.  The rehearsals might have been more exciting than the opening night.