The Art of Dramatic Living

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Okay. Some of my friends have been asking, “When are you going to let us read your play?” Well, I am not ready to share the full-length yet, but I have a 10-minute play that I hope you will enjoy.

This is called The Yellow Rose. It was an assignment in my playwriting class. We had to write a play in which a chair was featured as “not a chair”.

The Yellow Rose by Kirsten Olson

The Yellow Rose by Kirsten Olson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.theartofdramaticliving.com/contact-me/.

Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good. That honor, courage and virtue mean everything; that power and money…money and power mean nothing. That good always triumphs over evil. And I want you to remember this..that love…true love never dies. Remember that boy…remember that. Doesn’t matter if it is true or not, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in…got that?

Spoken by the character Hub McCann to his nephew, Walter, in the film Secondhand Lions written by Tim McCanlies.

This is one of my favorite quotes. I rediscovered it today while I was pulling papers and pictures off my bulletin board at work in an effort to create a more focused environment. I watched Secondhand Lions with my great aunt, my mom and my daughter about 4 years ago. After the film was over, I made them rewind the tape and rewind it again while I transcribed Hub’s monologue.

I love any film, book or song that gives me permission to believe in the things I want to be true even when I know that many times they aren’t true. My heart always seems to be engaged in a wrestling match with my head. I have vascillated between cynicism and faith, despair and hope, prayer and curse most of my life. I suspect this will continue.

But, today, right now – I am living as if the things I want to be true are true. It’s called acting. Also known as the “magic if” – acting as if these things are true. The key is that in daily life moment by moment we have a choice.

As actors and directors working to bring a character to life, we have a duty. When you walk on the stage with the script in your hand, you have a duty to act as if these things are true – no matter how improbable or uncomfortable. Some times the cirumstances we find ourselves living onstage are hysterical other times painful. But it is our duty to act as if these things are true with complete and utter faith.

This includes side trips to the dark side, opening your guts up to embrace sadness, and loving someone who, when offstage, you would rather kick in the shins. Ahh! The life of the actor.

I played a mother whose 4-year old son was hit by car and killed in front of her house while she was inside talking to her sister on the phone. This was a painful role to play. But acting as if, I relived that moment of her hearing the dreadful thump thump of her son’s body hitting the grill of the car then the curb every night for two months – and I cried a lot. And, when I was offstage, I thought about our fleeting mortality a lot. I also got married and went on a honeymoon and moved into a new house and my life was very very happy.

I played a vengeful social worker on a power trip bent on keeping her client in limbo: living in a seedy hotel. While I, as this God-fearing and uber-righteous social worker, dangled the promise of – maybe – if this client is a very good girl and learns to say please and thank you – then maybe – she might get her child back – it’s possible – but probably not. Oh! It was awesome to be that evil and so very righteous at the same time. And this one was a comedy!

Last night, I watched a former student of mine lose his lover to Aids in RENT. It was hard to watch and I cried and my daughter and my husband sat next to me and they cried too. But that actor did his duty. While he was on that stage, he beleived with all his heart that the love of his life was dying a painful death. He acted as if his lover was gone from this earth forever. Because he believed, I believed. That’s the way it works. When the show was over he was smiling and I gave him a great big hug.

I beleive there is a great healing power in empathy. Laughing or crying and everything in between. The theatre gives strangers and friends an opportunity to sit together and feel something – empathy. Live theatre offers us the rare opportunity to confront our humanity and, together, act as if these things are true…that people are basically good. That honor, courage and virtue mean everything; that power and money…money and power mean nothing. That good always triumphs over evil.

Many of my posts are spontaneous. I think of something I want to write about, I happen to have access to the tools I need and I write. I was planning on writing something else today about my disintegrated organization and priority system and the re-imagining of a new system, but that excitement will have to wait.

I’ve written about my body image issues before. Links to those posts are here:

Body Image, Eating and Creativity

Perfection is Death

This is another one of those, but different.

“You don’t have to prove anything to anybody” has now become one of my mantras for decision making. When an audition opportunity presents itself, I’ll ask, “Do you want to go for it? Remember, you don’t have to prove anything to anybody.” Because I am a chronic people-pleaser I’m hoping this routine will become second nature.

My goal is to take on projects that I want to do because they excite me and because they are coming along at the right time for me to do them. This will be different behavior from jumping on every opportunity that comes along because I’m afraid there will never be another opportunity ever again.

And the flip side … drum roll please … will be to pursue opportunities that I create for myself.

In Part I, I confessed to a lifelong struggle with my compulsion to make everyone “like” me. This is my curse. Before I get to the flipside of the curse, however, I would like to share with you the words of a very wise woman (to whom I am eternally grateful and will always love). These words were the wake-up call that shook me from the people-pleasing trance:

This is the “Rule of Thirds”
Whenever you walk into a room full of people,
1/3 will think you are fantastic no matter what you do,
1/3 will dislike you no matter what you do,
And the other third won’t even know you are there.

This is an article I wrote a couple of years ago. It fits very neatly into the December Theme: You Don’t Have to Prove Anything to Anybody so I thought I would republish it here.

People Pleasing Part I: The Curse

I’ll speak in the first person because I know this role so well. Being a chronic people pleaser often makes me feel as if everyone else is in charge of my behavior. It makes me feel that I have no control over my time. It makes me feel that I have very few choices.

I’ve been thinking a lot about purpose. My drive to prove myself to others and to please others – I couldn’t even identify who – so many – has lead to a constant pursuit of opportunity and a glut of activity that in some ways has lost meaning for me. I say “in some ways” because theatre has not lost all meaning to me – but I have lost my role in it. The question has become, “If I don’t have anything to prove to anybody, what role is there for me to play?” I’ve been pondering the meaning of my life. This is a time of uncertainty for me.

And this video – that I happened upon after searching for Matthew Fox and his Creation Spirituality movement – speaks to the value of uncertainty and to the larger definition of “role”. This is Joanna Macy speaking at the 2009 Bioneers Conference about Uncertainty.

Joanna Macy at Bioneers 2009 from Defend theCommons on Vimeo.

Registration is open for classes that will begin on January 30. More information about classes and contact information can be found here.

This session we will offer a Foundations Class and a Scene Study class. The Scene Study class is open to students who have completed the Foundations Class.

Both groups will run for a 12 week session meeting on Sunday mornings for two hours. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

“My passions were all gathered together like fingers that made a fist. Drive is considered aggression today; I knew it then as purpose.” ~Bette Davis

I love the words in this quote:

Passions:
Desires, longings, mission, loves.

Drive:
Momentum, action, movement, pulse, breath.

Purpose:
Reason, Being, Living.

Purpose without anything to prove. That sounds good. It feels like freedom. It’s more active than peaceful. I was reviewing goals today and one thing that kept popping up was, “To write something that matters.”  I’m wondering if my pursuit of fiction is the wrong pursuit. I’m wondering if there are other ways to clear the air. What matters? To whom does it matter.

Lately I seem to be full of desires and longings that cannot be met by my relentless pursuit of activity. It is time for me to tour a different landscape. I don’t want to spend a year staring at my belly button and I don’t want to wear myself out with repetitive activity – the mindless pursuit of opportunity. It is time to draw inwards and re-think the vision.

I am listening to the wind and waiting for the whisper.

For me the most obvious answer to this question is over-commitment. I don’t draw boundaries around my time when confronted with theatrical opportunities. I believe this tendency to over-commit is fear based. I am afraid that every opportunity to perform will be my last.

There is a common saying in the theatrical community, “You are only as good as your current job.” The fact is once a show is closed you join the ranks of the unemployed no matter how successful the production was. This is more true in professional theatre than it is in community or educational theatre, but it is a truth based mindset in any artistic community. If you aren’t visible, you don’t exist.