A Psychology for the New Theatre
Now, this issue of safety is a sticky one. This is important. If you skimmed the rest of is blog, don’t miss this: Sometimes, under the cover of safety, we will ask others not to express themselves because it may trigger, hurt our feelings, or offend us. It must be understood that you will be offended. Sometimes. You will be triggered. Guess what? That’s okay. Sit with this for a second. It’s okay for you to be offended sometimes. You’ll live. That’s what being human is. Use it! Take that energy and funnel it into your work. You may even learn something about yourself by being offended. It could even be an epiphone for you!
And don’t take it personally.
Everything is personal. But it’s never about you. Everyone is too busy judging themselves to care about judging you. If they do judge you, they’re actually judging themselves through you.
Judge yourself and let others do the same.
Get out of yourself for a second and try to learn their intent. Get curious about something outside yourself. Ask questions. Feel free to express yourself and tell the person in a calm manner that they triggered you. Tell them what they said made you feel unsafe. 99% of the time, they were not trying to make you feel unsafe or offend you. They were simply expressing themselves and you used their words to trigger yourself. That’s your responsibility. It’s nobody else’s responsibility to protect your mental health. That responsibility is yours and yours alone. That’s called being an adult in a world with other people. You’ve offended people in your life and you have hurt others. Did you intend to hurt them? No! You were simply expressing your point of view and someone used your point of view to offend themselves. You understood that then… understand it now.
You must allow yourself to go through the emotions of grappling with your triggers and your offenses. You must work through the traumas that you have acquired over your lifetime. This is the maturation process. You must learn to live with the things that have been done to you by others, and separate the actions of those who have hurt you in the past from the actions of those in your life today. More on this later.
Start doing things to yourself that move you in a healing direction. You must allow yourself the tough job of working through that discomfort so that you can grow the muscles of self-awareness and internal core strength, without which you will fail at accomplishing anything meaningful in your life, especially the building of a good theatrical production.
While the rehearsal room is a safe space for all, it is not the place to protect your ego or your delicacies. That is anathema to the practice of theatre.
A Word on Honesty...
A critical element of taking responsibility for yourself and your own mental health as a theatre maker is the practice of being brutally honest. True honesty is the most loving path anyone can take. It’s not that easy.
What is easy is to blame others for how you’re feeling. It’s easy to say that someone triggered you or made you feel badly. But have you ever considered who the center of those activities is? You Felt. You were Triggered. You’re angry. It’s all about you. It is you!
Think about that for a second. Did you ask any questions when you felt like someone offended you, or did you simply get offended and walk away? Did you yell a beautiful, improvised monologue in your car that made you feel vindicated and look silly to other drivers? Did you prod your insides to learn about your triggers, one of which was tripped when So and So said such and such? Or did you just get triggered and cancel lunch next week?
The theatre requires of its participants a brutal honesty that kills your dead puppies at the door (from a very talented director friend of mine, Ryan Parham). Your puppies died an hour before rehearsal and you brought them into the rehearsal room with you; you projected them onto your castmates and anyone who would listen. They were sympathetic at first but then, when you insisted on making them look at all your dead puppy pics on your phone, they were put off. And so you blamed them for being insensitive. You. You. You. It’s all about what’s going on in your head and heart. A brutally honest actor notices when she does this and uses athletic silence and his super-power listening abilities to recalibrate their psyche.
A regenerative theatre requires this brutal self-reflection that questions everything, including our triggers and trauma, and even our smug wokeness.
Honesty doesn’t just mean setting our boundaries or making sure people know where we stand on an issue that’s dear to our hearts. Honesty is actual, blunt awareness of what is vs. what you wish was. Being honest with yourself is the act of accepting what is the reality of a situation or the world or an issue, and releasing your attachment to how you think it should have gone. We’re always going to be disappointed and angry if we try to make the world around us conform to our own very esoteric, unique snowflake universal rule set. There are no universals. I am not the arbiter of good taste, nor the gatekeeper of some universal truth that everyone is just waiting with bated breath for me to tell them about.
The universe has no opinion. There is no judging sentience that requires us to conform to its will. Leave that to the religions. Without this realization, we will always be fighting with people, failing to make deep connections with co-workers, battling the circumstances of everyday life, and making shitty theatre. An honest and regenerative theatre requires the release of anything that is outside our purview, in order that we may find concert with the greater energy that we are inextricably a part of. It’s that simple and difficult at the same time. This is what a regenerative theatre demands of us. This is indeed what survival on this planet demands of us.
In the context of the rehearsal room and just as importantly performance, honesty takes the form of an open, gentle quietude that asks for input rather than demanding to express itself outwardly and loudly. An honest theatrical reaction can only come from listening, and it will never come through a pent-up response to past trauma. Honesty requires at its core the understanding that there is no subjective truth, but that as an individual, I must and have no choice but to take my own shape, of my own design, chosen entirely by me as I do it in the moment, in a dance with whomever is there with me now. Isn’t that beautiful? Let’s embrace that!
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