The House of Ash

"It does not interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.

"It does not interest me what planet is squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals, or have become shriveled and closed from fear and further pain.

"I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, fade it or fix it.

"I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with the wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, or to remember the limitations of being human.

"It does not interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself, if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.

"I want to know if you can be faithless and therefore be trustworthy.*

"I want to know if you can see beauty even when it is not pretty every day, and if you can source your life from God's presence.

"I want to know if you can live with failure, yours or mine, and still stand on the edge of a lake and shout to the silver of the moon, "Yes!"

"It does not interest me to know here you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done for the children.

"It does not interest me who you are, how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

"It does not interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

"I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the quiet moments.

- Oriah Mountain Dreamer

A Sign that I may need a Vacation in the Near Future:

Today someone jokingly asked me how my "kids" were doing. I thought they were referring to my theatre companies (and maybe they were) so I went into a 10 minute speech about my son (Co-Op Theatre East) and daughter (Project Girl Performance Collective).

This is an excerpt from a piece I did during a COTE "Home and Garden" rehearsal. The prompt was "Why Do You Go to the Theatre"?

A friend of mine, who’s a pretty well respected Manhattan therapist recently asked me, “Ashley – why are you in theatre?” and my response was “I imagine it’s the same reason you’re a psychotherapist.”

This threw her off guard.

“And that is?”

“I have a lot of unanswered questions about myself and the world that can only begin to be explored through art.”

“Oh?” Her eyes got big and invested like she had hit gold. I probably should have stopped there, but apparently since I like to “test boundaries” (something she often brings to my attention) I add, “Yeah. And I’m sick of being lied to…”

I have no idea where this even came from but I think that’s what she was looking for because she smirked. Not a big grin, but just enough that I could tell she’s onto something. She’s totally baiting me but I’ve been around too many therapists for far too long to fall for this so I make an allusion to “In Treatment”.

“Don’t Paul me..” I say.

“Paul?”

Paul is the psychoanalyst on HBO’s drama “In Treatment”, Gabriel Byrne’s character, the role he should have received the Emmy for… God, there’s nothing I like more than making obscure television references to make awkward situations slightly more… awkward.

Of course, she brings me back down to earth or back to the conversation at least.

“Who’s lying to you?” She asks it sweetly at first and I pretend not to hear which only makes her ask it again with more motivation, “Who’s lying to you?”

I shrug. Alright, I admit, that was the wrong can of worms to open. Now I would be forced to give an explanation. I should I give her something deep, something worth pondering. Something about my childhood. Therapists love that shit. It’s like on that episode of the X-Files where Mulder undergoes hypnotic regression that totally brings up severe childhood traumas stemming from when his sister was abducted by aliens … I digress.

“Well, you see, as a kid my only solace in my broken home was through becoming someone else. It was the only place I could find my true self, my many selves…” Insert “United States of Tara” reference right here.

I guess there’s no need to manipulate. Perhaps she really does want to know why I feel I have been so mislead by my family, my country, my government, the whole damn world that the only place I can be free is on stage – whether it be through the characters I develop as a playwright, breathe life into as an actor or the incredibly deep worlds I invent as a director, the worlds that most of the time I wish I could dive into and live in forever. The truth is, for a number of reasons, I don’t feel safe exploring the controversial and sensitive material that my work deals with outside of my “workspace”. Blame it on whatever you’d like, the twenty six death threats I received in my e-mail box after speaking on CNN World or the third “terrorist watch list” my name was added to after directing a show about Palestinians, and no not Hamas fighters, just the regular day to day happenings of life under military occupation.

“Have you heard the saying ‘Politicians use lies to cover the truth while artists use lies to tell it?’ It’s in the film V for Vendetta. I’ve seen too much truth and the only way to even begin to scratch the tip of the iceberg of rage I’m feeling is through theatre. I am one angry mother fucker. And if I didn’t have an outlet for it, I guarantee you I’d be painting a white padded cell with my own blood and shit… like Miguel Alvarez in Oz. Oh, don’t tell me you missed Oz… I’m not talking about Dorothy’s Oz either…

Okay.

Maybe I “go to” the theatre to avoid the hard stuff.

In recent months I’ve become so good at transforming my pain to paper that I’ve forgotten how to feel.

I don’t pretend to think this is a good thing.

Or a funny thing.

Or something I should be particularly proud of.

Well, it’s not entirely a bad thing either.

There’s no shame.

It just is.

It is.

It is perhaps the only way I have been able to get through the day.

It is a survival mechanism of sorts.

I once played this character who was incarcerated for arson. She would get mad and just light shit on fire in her cell. She was bad ass. Crazy, but bad ass.

I want to be bad ass.

Jolene Shatila, a character I penned, handled the illness of her beloved life partner a lot better than I have my mother.

I want that courage.

And assistant directing Ragtime made me almost forgot how abandoned I feel by my own father when the curtain falls.

I go to the theatre when I can’t go home.

At some point I learned that it’s easier to have the dialogue I want to have in real life through my characters. You know what dialogue I’m talking about, the one that most recently has been ending with me making references to obscure television shows…

I guess you didn’t expect to hear that, huh?

everything ███ █████ is█████ ████ ████ fine ████ ███ █ ██████ love. █████ ███████ ███ your █████ ████ government

I'm fascinated by "theatre people" that hate theatre. No really, I am.

What I mean... A friend of one of my creative partners was making his Broadway debut and we were hooked up with free tickets for one of his first previews. Generally these previews are packed with fellow "theatre people"... producers, directors, actors, playwrights, designers, marketing, etc... Often times, the discussions before and after the show with audience members are just as interesting as the play itself.

That night I got into a conversation with a typical 20-something director sitting near me that went something like this: "I heard great things about this playwright and show. I'm very excited..." I said and spoke a bit about the playwright, the development of the work and how exciting it was that it was his Broadway debut and how the play had evolved.

"Oh. I'll believe it when I see it..." He responded in a typical smug mid 20-something director way and went on to acknowledge how he has absolutely hated everything he has seen this season, hasn't been blown away by the theatre in years and can't fathom why half the shows in NY are a waste of time, the actors suck, the playwrights suck and the directors suck even more etc. etc. etc.

When he finished I stared at him for a moment. Of course, this is nothing out of the ordinary. I have several friends like this. There are many people like this in the theatre community (and even more in academia). In fact, with his big fro, hipster glasses and blue button down, he reminded me of a graduate student.

When conversations like these go down generally I smile, nod and go back to reading my program but this time I said "Wow. That's really sad."

"What do you mean?"

"It must be really sad to be an artist and so uninspired by other people's work."

"Uh...um..."

"I mean, how do you grapple with that? How do you stay inspired? "

The lights went down and he jetted after the show so I didn't have a chance to hear his response but it really brought this issue to light, yet again. There is a fine line between being an intelligent critic and an insecure asshole. Often when reading reviews you can tell who writes with a passion for theatre and who writes as a failed artist who takes their rage out on others who are putting themselves out there.

So, this is my ode (or perhaps just a public acknowledgement) to the "theatre people" that hate theatre. We all know these types. They are our friends, colleagues, teachers and former classmates. Mostly they are artists (or former artists) who at some point couldn't handle the rejection any longer (and who can blame them really?) They are the ones who go to shows wanting it to flop, perhaps to make themselves feel better about their own failures or because they genuinely get a thrill from watching others suffer.

I feel bad for these folks.

when i look around, i think this: this is good enough
and i try to laugh/at whatever life brings
cuz when i look down, i just miss all the good stuff
and when i look up, i just trip over things

“People who do not believe at all in a happy end impede changing the world almost as much as the sweet swindlers, the marriage-swindlers, the charlatans of apotheosis. Unconditional pessimism therefore promotes the business of reaction not much less than artificially conditioned optimism; the latter is nevertheless not so stupid that it does not believe in anything at all. It does not immortalize the trudging of the little life, does not give humanity the face of a chloroformed gravestone. It does not give the world the deathly sad background in front of which it is not worth doing anything at all. In contrast to pessimism which itself belongs to rottenness and may serve it, a tested optimism, when the scales fall from its eyes, does not deny the goal-belief in general; on the contrary, what matters now is to find the right one and to prove it. For this reason there is more possible pleasure in the idea of a converted Nazi than from all the cynics and nihilists. That is why the most dogged enemy of socialism is not only, as is understandable, great capital, but equally the load of indifference and hopelessness; otherwise great capital would stand alone.” – Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope

Check out more incredible political and social insight: http://www.walkingbutterfly.com/2010/12/22/albert-to-win-our-new-world/