Stripping Away

Today I had a monologue coaching session with Andy Murray, an artistic associate at California Shakespeare Festival. We spent an hour and a half working on Banquo's "Thou hast it now..." solilioquy from Macbeth. The speech is only 12 lines long, very simple. I thought it would only take a half hour to work on and they we could look at another monologue. But I had developed a performance overlaid with emotional, vocal and gestural indications, that we spent the whole time stripping it down to just it's essence. It was a hard exercise, just to play the action of the thoughts. It worked my edge.

As a performer, I want to be seen. And I often feel I need to do something to be seen. But that's a barrier to being really seen. I need to trust that I am interesting enough if I just stand on stage and play the actions of my character. I don't need to "do" anything to make it interesting. There's a deep life lesson in this. I don't need to do anything to be a human being.

After the session, I was paralyzed. The stripping away of my false identifications as an actor brought up deep feelings of deficient emptiness. I had to sit with those feelings for a good hour. I didn't want to "do" anything but get away from the emptiness. I saw through how any action, in life or on stage, is often a defense agaist contacting that deficient emptiness, the core of all narcissism. As I sat with the emptiness, I relaxed back into myself. I was able to trust more deeply in my beingness.

My newly arisen desire to study acting more deeply is part of my spiritual practice as well. It is another way for me to strip away the layers of the false self and touch that which is uniquely me. Trusting in that is not something that I just want for my acting. It's how I want to live my life.