Takasago

It's really late, and I should go to bed, but I just read a Noh play for the first time. (Sad that I only just read one my senior year of college.)

I haven't had a whole lot of exposure to Asian theatre. I did a research paper on Kabuki for Advanced Writing my freshman year (had no idea what it was or what I was doing, but it was good to start thinking outside of the box and explore new kinds of theatre all at once--I was in Intro to Theatre at the same time).

So tonight I read Takasago by Zeami, generally considered the greatest Noh playwright. I mean, the man wrote 100 of the 240 plays in the active Noh repertory today.

Noh is one of Japan's forms of classical theatre. It was very much influenced by Zen Buddhism, as well as the strict feudal system that emerged in the late 12th century.

I liked especially the poetic nature of Takasago. A quote that one of the translators included:

The principal Japanese word for 'poem' is uta, which more generally means song. Thus we are told that "each sound of beings feeling and non-feeling, every last one, is a song."

Takasago is referred to as the best-loved god play, and I think I know why. Here's the story line--

Takasago by Zeami is a god or deity play about the paired pines of Takasago and Suminoe (or Sumiyoshi). Two travelers, Sideman and Sideman Second undertake a journey to Miyako, and hope to see sights along the way. They stop at Takasago, or “dune,” and see Doer and Second, an old couple. Second sweeps pine needles from under the pine with a broom while Doer (holding a rake) talks to Sideman and Sideman Second. Sideman asks about the Takasago pine and how its soul is supposedly paired with the Suminoe pine and asks how that can be since they are so far away (in different provinces). Doer and Second also happen to be from those exact same provinces, and we discover that they are actually the spirits of the two pines. Second explains that, “Though ten thousand leagues of hill and streams divide them, for lovers' hearts finely attuned, the way is never long.” They talk awhile longer about the pines, and then Sideman and Sideman Second call over a Fool to tell them more. He tells them they should go on a pilgrimage to the Suminoe pine, but they say they don’t have a way to get there. The Fool lets them borrow his boat, and they make the journey to the Suminoe pine, where they encounter the god of Sumiyoshi.

Like I said, I loved the poetry, and I really liked the romantic symbolism of the pines. I want to visit Japan and see some Noh plays.

Here's an excerpt from the beginning, when Sideman and Sideman Second are traveling:

Travel wear 
unfolding long
Miyako Way
cut out for us 
now waves touch shore 
and ship lanes lie
calm the spring breeze 
how many days 
stretch on, ahead
behind, all's vague 
white clouds trail away

And here are a couple of pictures. There's something about that image of the old couple, one with a broom and one with a rake, tending to the pine trees that is time- and culture-transcendent. Which is probably why they call it the "best-loved" one.

So, there you have it. My Theatre History homework. I should probably sleep now.

I Love My Senior Project: (in which I vent optimism and excitement)

I love working on My Name is Rachel Corrie. I love that this is my senior project.

Unfortunately, while I love working on it and talking about it, I don't want to talk about it all the time, nor do I feel like I can talk about it with everyone. Therefore I'll just vent all my excitement here. So. If you're reading this, yay for you. ILOVETHISPROJECT.

We did a full run-through on Thursday that ran an hour and twenty minutes (EXACTLY my target run-time!), shaving an entire twenty minutes off my previous run-time.

I mean, I'll take it.

In the run-through, I was present with the text--very much in the moment. My energy stayed up, and my director said she could feel it driving the run. I did call for line once, and there were a handful of times when I got stuck because of lines--I still can't get through the whole thing without getting stuck in a couple of places. My stage manager, Honey, and my media-tech designer, Daniel, both saw it for the first time, and perhaps MOST encouraging to me was that they both came out of it saying that I held their attention and kept them engaged the entire time. Which is more than I could have hoped for in an hour-twenty-minute performance of a one-woman show. Maybe there's hope yet.

I'm now in the middle of working on acquiring costume and some final props. Which, when you're budgetless, can be merciless to college student pockets. But I really love this project, and so I don't mind paying for things at all. It's just difficult.

I still need:
An ash try (note to self: check props closet)
Fake stage cigarettes
3 to 4 1990s fashion magazines
A package or two of black ballpoint pens

Khaki cargo pants
Black or charcoal rib-knit tank top
Hiking boots (I'm currently highest bidder for a pair on Ebay--guess we'll see. I've never bid for anything on Ebay before. I'm thinking of it as an adventure.)

I found some of these recently. These first two are from the very first staging of My Name is Rachel Corrie--directed by Alan Rickman and starring Megan Dodds--at the Playhouse Theatre in London, April 2005. I really liked them.

And the rest of these images are from other productions of the show.

Senior Jitters?

Remember that time the little missionary kid became a working professional actor?

Unfortunately, I haven't heard that story yet. I mean, maybe it's happened, but if it has I haven't heard about it yet. 

I'm not sure if it's because the first day of my senior year of college starts the day after tomorrow or if I'm just going nuts, but this weekend I suddenly got really scared. 

I don't know what comes next.

I don't know how to get work as a professional actor.

I don't know how to get that first gig--that first job where I would get paid to act--that I could put on my resume that would announce to the world, "Look! Someone actually thought I had enough talent and skill and chutzpah to hire me and pay me to do my favorite thing in the entire world!"

Scarier yet: at this moment in time I can't envision myself doing anything else right after I graduate. I think this is what I'm supposed to do.

I'm compiling a list of theatres and auditions to look into this year and trying to keep calm. And I know I still have a year of school to go and that plenty of people (not just theatre majors) don't have a job lined up right after they graduate. 

But so far that hasn't stopped me from shaking in my boots.

Music Musings

FREUD: You like music.
LEWIS: Very much so.
FREUD: Sacred music, no doubt?
LEWIS: Actually, I hate hymns.
FREUD: Really?
LEWIS: They're like dipping a chocolate bar in sugar. Unbearably cloying. Hymns drive me out of church early every Sunday. I leave after communion and head across the street for a pint. There, I'm happy to listen to any music playing... My objection to church music is that it trivializes emotions I already feel.

This fun little piece of dialogue between Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis is from a play by Mark St. Germain called Freud's Last Session. I haven't seen the play but, shoot, I want to. The play, according to Dramatists Play Service, "centers on legendary psychoanalyst Dr. Sigmund Freud who invites the young, rising Oxford Don C.S. Lewis to his home in London. On the day England enters World War Two, Freud and Lewis clash about love, sex, the existence of God, and the meaning of life, just weeks before Freud took his own life." 

I especially like this little piece of dialogue from the play because Lewis' words describe exactly the way I feel. Not entirely about hymns, necessarily, but certainly about contemporary Christian music. It's been a while since I could honestly say "I like 'Christian' music." I'm fully aware of the fact that it's probably just me being the reactive, rebellious twenty-something I am. But seriously. If I'm on a road trip and I'm losing the radio station I was on and I start scanning for new ones, most of the time in about three seconds I can tell you if it's a Christian station or not. I listen to some Christian songs and facepalm at the theology and messages in some of them. I sit and genuinely wonder why the blazes Christian artists feel some inner need to "Na Na Na" and "La La La" for half the song. The songs do sometimes seem to "trivialize emotions I already feel." I'm just really usually not a fan.

So you can laugh with me at the irony that, for the last couple of weeks, I've been filling in part time as a temporary DJ for my college radio station, 94.3 FM or The Fortress, home of all your latest, greatest Christian hits. 

I know, I know, I'm whining. So I'll quit and tell you about what happened on my road trip a few weeks ago. 

I was coming back from Virginia to Indiana after the conclusion of my summer internship at the American Shakespeare Center, and I hadn't been able to find my GPS before I left. (To an utterly directionally challenged individual, this is terrifying.) I was instead trying to use my BlackBerry's Google Maps App, which completely drained the battery before I'd completed three of what ended up being a twelve hour trip. Fortunately I managed to stop and write out some directions, but had no way of anticipating the intense storms and long (barely marked) detours all along my chosen route home. Long story short, I ended up badly lost several times, stressed, frazzled, and exhausted. So when I began losing the radio station I'd been listening to as I drove down some back country road that I only hoped was going to get me somewhere relatively close to home, I flipped the stations hurriedly and frustrated, and landed on something random. It was a somewhat upbeat sound--a mandolin or ukelele maybe. And then I heard the words.

I had no way of knowing
Just how hard this journey could be
Cause the valleys are deeper
And the mountains are steeper than I ever would have dreamed 

But I know we're gonna make it
And I know we're gonna get there soon
And I know sometimes it feels like we're going the wrong way
But it's just the long way home

I think I laughed out loud. Here I was, very lost, tired of sitting, with my contacts getting fuzzy, and some guy with a mandolin on the radio was serenading me with the story of my trip. But it was comforting. Mandolin man had taken the time to write a song for me about the long way home. Obviously he was a Christian artist (didn't take me long to figure that out) and was figuratively talking about life while I was thinking about my literally long way home, but that didn't end up mattering. He reminded me that life was going to go on even if it took me all night to finally figure out how to get back to my house, and that my problems (dagnabbit--I missed a turn... again) are not at all as big as they seem when I'm sitting in the middle of them.

It wasn't until the next week or two that I looked up the lyrics and found out that mandolin man was actually Steven Curtis Chapman--go figure. I used to listen to some of Chapman's songs all the time growing up. The Christian music fixture actually came to Quito, Ecuador (of all places) during my growing up days and held a concert for some of us overseas people down there, and I met him in person.

So, for all the complaining I've done about contemporary Christian music, I guess I really shouldn't. Because, I guess, what if--even just that one time--some song really does do some good for a poor lost, frazzled twenty-something or a hurting forty-something or a melancholy tween? Life is a lot bigger than my occasional facepalms.

Charlotte Brontë Speaking Truth

"Having thus acknowledged what I owe those who have aided and approved me, I turn to another class: a small one, so far as I know, but not, therefore, to be overlooked. I mean the timorous or carping few who doubt the tendency of such books as 'Jane Eyre': in whose eyes whatever is unusual is wrong; whose ears detect in each protest against bigotry - that parent of crime - an insult to piety, that regent of God on earth. I would suggest to such doubters certain obvious distinctions; I would remind them of certain simple truths.

"Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns. These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded; appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is - I repeat it - a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.

"The world may not like to see these ideas dissevered, for it has been accustomed to blend them; finding it convenient to make external show pass for sterling worth - to let white-washed walls vouch for clean shrines. It may hate who dares to scrutinize and expose, to raise the gilding and show base metal under it, to penetrate the sepulchre and reveal charnel relics; but hate as it will, it is indebted to him."

- Charlotte Brontë, Preface of Jane Eyre

In Which My Heart is Confused

Has someone under the age of 10 ever asked you a question that left you staring at the wall? I have a couple of those questions today.

What happens when two people feel utterly convicted in utterly opposite ways?

What happens when I feel that presenting My Name is Rachel Corrie is not wrong (and even that it is the right thing to do), while a local pastor feels that he has been convicted by the Holy Spirit that he should try to prevent me from presenting it?

What happens when I could not in good conscience eat at Chick-Fil-A yesterday while friends and family members could not in good conscience NOT eat at Chick-Fil-A yesterday?

Maybe it shouldn't be "what happens when...?" Maybe my question is "why?"

Why does this happen?

Why is life like this?

And why does it hurt?

And what do we do next?

Picking up the Pieces after Chick-Fil-A Day

I did not eat at Chick-Fil-A today. Don't stop reading yet. Let me tell you why.

I could have. Easily. We have a Chick-Fil-A in the Student Center at my university. I just returned to my on-campus library job on Monday, and walking through the Student Center last night, I noted a sign outside the entrance saying that they would open for lunch today, August 1.

I semi-followed the Chick-Fil-A drama and controversy after it erupted. I have Facebook friends and follow people on Twitter from both polar ends of the debate spectrum. I heard all the arguments. I saw all the bitingly sarcastic memes.

More than anything, I saw adult human beings blatantly refusing to take a moment to try to see things from someone else's point of view.

First of all, First Amendment rights are not really at stake, as much as people seem to think they are. This article from CNN, written by First Amendment attorney Marc J. Randazza, points out the fact that a boycott and negative media exposure in response to Mr. Cathy's statement are not a curtailment of his First Amendment rights. Those protesting and boycotting are also exercising their First Amendment rights. "The First Amendment protects you from government action suppressing your right to free speech. It does not protect you from private individuals' negative reaction to your speech."
Chick-Fil-A itself does not discriminate against customers or employees based on sexual orientation. The CEO of the company merely shared his personal views in the public arena. 
What some people have been reacting to, instead, are the threats of mayors and city leaders to do their best to use zoning and "adverse secondary effects" reasoning to deny permits to Chick-Fil-A to operate in the cities and areas under their jurisdiction. THIS, as the article points out, is where the First Amendment rights come into play. "A city can't deny permits because it disapproves of the owner's exercise of his First Amendment rights. Both Menino [Mayor of Boston] and Moreno [Mayor of Chicago] were dead wrong even to claim they would do so. That crosses the line between simply speaking out and abusing government power." The mayors are allowed to express their opinions about Cathy's opinion, but they cannot legally deny Chick-Fil-A operating permits in their cities based on their dislike of the CEO's stance on marriage equality. Legally and constitutionally, the chances are extremely slim that these mayors will be able to make good on their threats.

What is more disturbing to members of the LGBT community and their supporters is the fact that Chick-Fil-A supports the Family Research Council and the Family Foundation (which, I will point out, it did even before all the craziness erupted). Both foundations conduct and circulate research that opposes equal rights for same-sex couples. Chick-Fil-A financially supports both organizations at least partially with their profits, made when we purchase their delicious chicken nuggets and sandwiches.

And here is the divide--we've transitioned from a Chick-Fil-A debate to the equal rights debate underneath.

I'm not here today with a contribution to the equal rights debate. I'm becoming more and more clear on where I personally stand in that debate every day, but that's not for this post. It doesn't matter where I stand. It doesn't matter where you stand. It doesn't matter where anybody stands because love has nothing to do with where we stand on anything. For the love of all that's holy, can we just please pick up the pieces of this debacle and love each other?

In the words of Rachel Held Evans, "our allegiance is to Jesus Christ, not a restaurant." And in the words of Jen Hatmaker, "when we turn to politics and power to legislate our brand of morality, we take the opposite approach of Jesus whose power was activated in the margins with the outcasts...humbly...peripherally... With every hate Tweet and finger jab and Bible bludgeon, you are telling my gay friends they are indeed unwelcome, unloved, unvalued, and uninvited."

I support Dan Cathy's right to free speech, and I do support his right to hold to his views, regardless of who does and doesn't agree with him. Also, the vast majority of Chick-Fil-A supporters that I know are not homophobes. You are not mean, spiteful people, and I'm pretty sure most didn't choose to eat at Chick-Fil-A because you hate LGBT people. In fact, most of the time you say you're loving them (whether or not it comes across).

But I also love and support my LGBT friends, and I hurt for you in the aftermath of this charade.

I came to my individual conclusion today that there are more important things in life than making a stand on either side of this fast food frenzy. Like this, for example. That's why I didn't eat at Chick-Fil-A today. My fast food money went elsewhere.

Dear friends, is there a way we can come together after this? Can we bridge the gap made wider by insensitive comments and well-meaning people on both sides saying things that didn't help? Whether it's possible or not, can we please try anyway?

In closing, to my LGBT friends, I am so sorry about anything that may have been said or done today that made you feel like anything less than a human being with feelings and dignity. You are loved, you are valued, and you are precious.