All the World as a Stage

The first thing I ever ‘wanted to be when I grew up’ was a mother. The second was an actor.

By the time I was 15, ‘actor’ had edged past ‘mother’ to the top of the list, and I arranged my teenage life so I could perform in seven plays in four years.

I experienced no greater aliveness as an actor than when we, at the end of the show, waited in that silent gap for the audience’s response. Had what I, what we had done here, had what I was, in this part, had it reached people? I could, it turned out, sense when the silence was going to swell into thunderous applause, and when it was going to be cut into with regular every day clapping.

My company and I brought the fifth play I was in to my first provincial festival where we were awarded Best Play and I, Best New Actress. The next year I was back in my seventh play and we swooped it again, this time I was awarded Best Actress.

I never graduated to ‘bigger’ stages, but the joy of having ever been “an award-winning actress” still warms me.

A magazine collage I made during these times comes to mind. One of the cutouts that featured prominently said, “all the world is a stage.”

The next stage of my life featured motherhood. I experienced ecstasy upon finding out I was to play this part. I was alone on a cutblock, planting trees, when I realized it. In that pause of silence I may have changed more than the total of thunderous audience applause ever changed me. (Which it did.)

Motherhood seemed a very small stage and a very big one at the same time. It was like Harry Potter’s suitcase, “just another bag” from the outside but a huge world on the inside. It was magical and mundane, and sometimes seemed life-threatening, as if the worst villain in the world was scheming to annihilate me and these glorious Beings who had arrived on Earth through me. Villains both on stage and off make for gripping drama.

I thrived in motherhood because I had a role, an important part to play. I experienced motherhood as something I was alive for, made for, and as something I was in the world to master. I sensed I was one day to move into (onto?) stages beyond.

Stage by Stage

When my boys were small I was invited to audition for a local dance show, and since dance had also been part of my training for the stage, I jumped at it. Leaped, really. We rehearsed in a hall but as the show’s opening approached, we went into the theatre and I stood again in the wings, and it all flooded back.

The chance to flow beauty and power, to co-create an orchestra of feelings and inspiration out there in the audience, to have them pause, rapt, as the upsurge happens, while I, on the edge, cannot be sure the upsurge is happening, it is like free falling.

It turned out that my award-winning acting skills also almost killed me as a mother.

For almost two decades I acted as if “everything was okay,” and insisted the “show go on.” Granted, I occasionally indulged in dramatic scenes wherein I was the tragic victim and someone (aka everyone) was a villainous perpetrator. My life and my children’s lives were at stake and the world was about to end.

Then, it kind of did.

I make light of it now, to soften the tragedy created for my four children. My sons, then 20 and 15, got a series of jerks and jolts that pushed them out of the nest and back and out again. My daughters, from the ages of 4 and 9, lived largely without a mother, after my marriage to their father collapsed.

That show ended. I was fired. Stripped of my role, I became an even more poor, starving artist.

I collapsed shortly afterward.

Intermission

I have used the last ten years to go through my ‘show notes;’ to rest, and to find out who I really am under the actor’s facade, beyond and behind the parts.

Experimentally stepping out into the world, during this time, I have more and more often gone off-script, improvising, straying out of the lines. I have broken through the fourth wall, again and again; the one separating the stage and actors from the audience.

I still sometimes hear the singsong lines I learned by heart come out my mouth, but the fear of the danger of using such old material, and the choice not to, are more available to me now. I know how that show goes. I notice and choose more readily to drop the mask, which makes it sound tidy. It is often messy.

I have graduated into a new way of being on stage.

From any direction may come direction, feedback about what’s happening. How is how I am being, how I am showing up, working? Am I sensing my cues? Catching my lines? Are they landing ‘over there’?

Who IS the ‘director’?!

There is a kind of spotlight that shines from up behind me.

The aperture of the spot through which this light shines operates as if it responds to my cues. If I open and allow a lot of light through, if I play my part inspired by the most resonant director’s notes, within and without, the ripple effects seem to reach wider.

When, for whatever reason, reactivity happens inside me, and I lose my place, miss a cue, skip a line or let an important part of the plot slide, the aperture of the spotlight closes and the light dims and the energy drops.

I am getting to know the places on the stage where my old roles never took me, and in the wings between which I am framed. More possibility comes as to how I might move, gesture, voice the lines of my emerging script, and handle any props to greatest effect.

There is less and less a gap between what occurs to me to say and do, and what I observe myself saying and doing.

I suppose when this metaphor plays out and my final act is done I may not hear whether, from the swell of the final silence, a thunderous applause occurs.

This will not end with a staged death but a real one.

Curtains

My stage ‘off stages’ in motherhood prepared me well for this particular post-intermission stage of my life.

As a mother I created and held space in which my children grew and rehearsed for life outside the home. I provided some direction, the purpose of which was to help them unfold as the Being inside their own golden-lit stage. I wished to create a necessity for as little masking or fakery as possible, and grieved when I found myself the one for whom they pretended, with parroting puppetry as if hoping to win roles or awards or easy applause.

We say “Break a Leg” for luck, and maybe in the Mothering Show we ought to say, “Break a Heart,” in order to be better prepared for the worst.

Nevertheless, now I know how the death scenes go. This emboldens me to bring fringe elements to this next stage. I want experimental theatre-as-life: edgy, transformational; the Death and Resurrection Show.

Something new happens when others join in on stages (in stages?) of their own. When we consciously connect our spaces and collaborate to create high drama, the light of each of our spotlights is brilliant. We play off one another, in an ever more conscious plot to empower each other to open the aperture, land and pick up cues, flow the powerful role of “star” to each of the company, as per the possibility and necessity present in these spaces and beyond.

I am in the part of the play of life on the other side of the intermission, not yet in my final act, though you never know when it comes to high drama. The Death and Resurrection Show plays over and over in new and fascinating ways. Hell yes, as practice for the final curtains, when the spotlight may go out.

In upcoming performances I will present material from my Motherhood days. It will be an edgy rendition of the theme. I have heard little of others playing it out as experimental high drama. It is risky in this pop culture full of political correctness that tows the company line: Mothers don’t graduate, they work (for free) til they die.

With a dreadful thrill, every next step takes me onto (into?) the darkest and scariest stage yet, and I am called to open to let the bright light through. I can see the shadows starkly. I step toward them, directed by a sense of purpose so thick it could get thunderous even before the curtain closes, and maybe not in a positive way.

I know I will die in this play, time and time again, as I have during the many experimental rehearsals.

My identiry as a Mother will, in part, die. My relationships with my children and ther fathers will transform. Tranformation means parts die. What else is possible?

As I scan the crowds who gather to bear witness, I wonder what rehearsals people have been playing out in (on?) the stages of their own lives. I scan for masks, for facades. I scan for people to play with, who might pick up cues, flow power, who want to co-create something magical; something that creates that alive and pregnant pause, within which a silent or audible thunderous surge arises, before the curtains close.

All the world is a stage.

This article is powered by the distinctions, tools, processes and Players of Possibility Management, to whom I raise thunderous applause.