Topics: Forgiveness/Spring/Change*

 

Note: *I cut the financial considerations out of this essay for a reading in the Simpson House writing group.

 

As spring gallops forward with green bursting forth full tilt, I note again the change this winter wrought in my life, and ask myself for forgiveness, gratitude, and joy.

Moving into Simpson House this winter was a good choice, (but a choice that brought with it a great deal of change.)  The first change has to do with money.  I used to donate to a variety of causes, but now I have to divert my earnings to pay the monthly fee.  The second, and in many ways larger, change is how I spend my time.  Moving itself was essential as my house needed multiple repairs, and my tenant gave notice that she was moving to LA on March 4^th.   I am not a landlord.  Trying to find a single new tenant who was both a reliable friend and a cat sitter seemed daunting to me.  My body could no longer take the challenges of a second floor and taking out the garbage and caring for the yard.   I didn’t have the money to move to the first floor, and renovate the second so it could take a new tenant—even if I wanted to search for a new tenant.

And so I moved.  I had been exploring the choices for retirement communities for two years, but still, I knew I could get a modern apartment for half the cost--$1800 a month.  I could save over $1000 a month and be ready for a move, say, in ten years’ time.  That would have been a savings of $120,000.  But what would be the cost of retirement housing in 10 years, I asked myself?  And the effort to shop for food and cook meals weighed on me.  I have a book to write, I told myself.  What if my care for housing and for myself was minimized?  

I thought I could bring everything I do to Simpson House: I could remain a hermit in an apartment of my own, work on my unfinished book undisturbed, and venture out to socialize at dinner time.  The last time I made progress on my book, in 2016, I had room and board as Artist in Residence at Pendle Hill Quaker Retreat and Study Center.   I have yet to make closure on the promise of those days.  I thought taking up residence in a retirement community would help me with that.  And maybe someday it will.  But right now what has been happening instead is that I have read the books of the Reading Group, attended and written to the prompts of the Writing Group, joined the card making and neighbors group, attended art classes of Zen tangle for fun and of acrylic painting to try to capture the strength of the two trees I loved from the backyard I have left behind.   Also, I’m playing scrabble on Saturday mornings, and checking out music and documentaries in early evening.  All of this is in addition to continuing physical therapy, on-going engagement with my Quaker meeting, and participating in my previous book group in Yeadon, PA.  I've been enjoying the activities, but mostly the people of Simpson House.

I think: This is the curse of my horoscope.  I’m a cancer, and find it hard to focus on my own work when other activities are going on.  I am reminded of moving to a college campus back in 1969, when I discovered theatre and anti-war work, and earned 2 incompletes every semester.

I need to release myself from the guilt I feel for spending almost all my earnings on myself, and for playing almost full time! I am spending my income on myself and planning for my own future instead of continuing to fund anti-war slash humanitarian work.  I am not participating in reparations.  Yes, I feel guilty for cutting back on my donations to causes I believe in.  That’s the money part.  I often feel full of light and blessing instead of struggle these days.  This seems a luxury.  Have I done enough in life to have earned such lightness of spirit and lengths of time that I forget what is going on in the world?  That I forget the work I've been led to do?  My cause has always been about children’s lives, education, and release from trauma.  My writing is fiction about aging, creativity, and feminist theatre, a lost history of the 1980s and a semi-autobiography.  Is this truly time to cut back on that?

Maybe it is.  I am finding it easier and easier to feel joy, and when I stop paying attention to war news, forgiveness does not even come up as a question.  This writing itself is doing a lot to acknowledge loss and to relieve guilt.  I, too, have a traumatized child inside who wants attention.  How many people in the world rue their good fortune when a burden has been lifted?  I think only those of us who have tried to convince others that they have a part to play in making this a world where children can have both a present and a future.

As a partial solution, I have lately turned the guilt I carry into meditation and prayer, mostly centered on gratitude.  Gratitude for the challenges I’ve faced in my own life that have made me strong, aware, creative, and friendly.  Gratitude for the lessons I still learn.  Gratitude for the time to write and the blessing of groups to share writing with.  Gratitude for family and friends.  Gratitude that I have gifted this time to myself, time when stress slides away and creativity, as a result, soars.

Gratitude outweighs the guilt.  The practice of forgiveness—the practice of loving and supporting myself—is healing.  I can’t believe I wrote that sentence.  Healing.  I am grateful that it is true.  Imagine that!  As spring continues to awaken the world around me, I surround myself with it.  I am emerging from a long winter in my life, and if, at this point, aging feels like spring instead of winter, I am blessed.  To forgiveness and joy and gratitude, I say yes. 

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Please respect my copyright.

© 2024 Susan L. Chast

In my new home at Simpson House

 

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In my new home at Simpson House by Susan Chast

The apartment floor holds reds and browns right by the entrance,
which then blend with blue and tan in the carpet, and lead back
to hues of brown, navy, and turquoise in bedroom and bathroom.
The walls hold landscapes and still lifes in living space,
trees and flowers in bedroom, and waves in bathroom.

It's quiet, relaxing.
 I wake with wildlife, then float up to the coffee maker and cat food.
Panther kitty greets me with purrs and headbutts. She tilts her head
questioning me, “What’s taking so long?” and then weaves between my legs.
I cannot move without hurting her, and so push back at her with the pressure
of a headbutt while opening a can of wet food, a language she speaks.

I am happy.  But
In a space that represents down-sizing, my home is stuffed to the ceiling
with books, knickknacks, plants, art supplies, dishes and pot holders.
I rarely open the stuffed files or China or kitchen cabinets,
and hardly know what’s in them.  The objects I kept illustrate neither
rhyme nor reason—just love and the thought “I may need this someday.”

I rest in the air of too much, then
 I imagine leaving it all, leaving home, a reality in Haiti, Ukraine, Gaza,
Afghanistan, etc., and a reality at closed borders everywhere.  Could I downsize 
to the clothes on my back?  Downsize with an escape sack by the door,
light enough to carry.  Downsize keeping only what I touched this year.
Then let go of electronics, art, and mementos. All are possible.

 Yet, let me add instead of subtracting.  What objects would make anywhere home?  the space would have a bed and blanket, books, a phone, writing supplies, bread, a knife, apples, 
and hunks of sharp cheddar cheese.  Walls and roof for shelter.
Home objects would build warmth, wisdom, writing, outreach, and food.
Add a few glasses and chairs for guests and fresh water.  I would be content, rested.

I am content and rested, surrounded by a good life.
 So what about the excess stuff in my new home?  I'll use the things, if possible,
in the way of found objects and improvisation, welcoming a life of collage
and surprise—until I can recycle them, every last piece.  My new home
provides space for conversation, comradery, and transformation—a haven 
for me in my journey toward wholeness, 'til death do us part.

I am content.

Please respect my copyright.

© 2024 Susan L. Chast

And a word from Mary Oliver:

Storage

When I moved from

one house to another,

there were many things

I had no room for.

What does one do?

I rented a storage space

and filled it.

Years passed.

Occasionally,

I went there

and looked in,

but nothing happened,

not a single twinge

of the heart.

As I grew older

the things I cared about

grew fewer but were

more important,

so one day I undid the lock

and called the trash man.

He took everything.

I felt like the little donkey

when his burden is finally

lifted.

Things! Burn them, burn them!

Make a beautiful fire!

More room in your heart

for Love, for the trees.

For the birds who own

nothing;

the reason they

can fly.

Women who move me in the field of theatre, 2024 version

    One of the spunky women I like to perform is Helen of Troy, Helene of Sparta, the Helene who Euripides wrote about, the one who when cornered by circumstance and by men who wanted to use her, literally rose above them.  She didn't bow down, and never let her supposed beauty be an excuse for war. In performance, I may exaggerate her defiance, but I see it in her.  She never went to Troy with Paris.  The gods lifted her up to a place in the clouds where she lived out the war.  From up above, Helene watched an image of herself interacting in Troy.  While her husband tried to return home to Sparta after 10 years of war, she went to Egypt to make new friends and a new life.  The public image of Helen had nothing to do with the real Helene.  If her face launched a thousand ships, it was because she was the figurehead on their bows.

Helen

    Contemporary drama is populated with women who defy stereotypes and depart from the paths expected of them.  In a sense, Lady Macbeth is one of them.  She's deliciously wicked, duplicitous, strong, and then piteous to play.  But all of Shakespeare's women are complicated by being written for men in drag.  Whether they are obedient or independent, they are male fantasies. 

Lady Macbeth

    One of the fun parts of the feminist theatre of the 1970s and 1980s was that women played these characters.  While some feminist troupes deconstructed the narrative by changing male parts into female ones, I enjoyed watching women inhabiting the male parts from their ideas of males.  I would love to play Prospero in The Tempest both ways: trying to understand the maleness of the character AND transforming the character into a woman.  I'd like to see the royal Prospero as containing the beast Caliban and vice versa, as if they are two halves of the same character.  I'd like to play Hamlet with the same double analysis.  Even the great Sara Bernhardt played Hamlet.  Jean Arthur and Mary Martin both played Peter Pan on Broadway.

Sara Bernhardt as Hamlet

    Truth be told, however much I might wish to play these parts, I have incredible stage fright when I’m not holding a script in front of me.   The only way I can perform is by multiple-choice acting, a technique introduced to me by the feminist troupe Split Britches.  I’m mainly a stage director, one greatly influenced by theatre artist Ellen Stewart. 

Ellen Stewart

    I was the stage director for the feminist theatre company This River of Women when I met Ellen Stewart, the woman who taught me how to use the stage and the place of performance in a whole new way.  She was both a producer and a theatre artist.  I saw the tall, elegant, African-American Ellen Stewart speak at 2 separate conferences on Women in Theatre before I dared to ask her if I could write her biography as my doctoral dissertation.  She had spoken about the importance of expanding space, about “filling the need of artists to grow within their craft.”  A larger space, she said, “was an increase of the imagination for the musician, for the actor, for the designer, in what each can give, and writers, in what they can write.”  She said, “You have to make a space, see?  Like the venders’ carts on Delancy Street.  You move the pushcart along and invite persons in—and they all take you to where you want to go.”  Her ideas of and uses of space fascinated me.  They seemed an application of Peter Brooks’ The Empty Space.

She said no to a biography, said that she only talks about her theatre, without which she would be a zero.  She invited me to capture what La MaMa is and does, but warned that I’d never be able to explain La MaMa, because as soon as you say it is one thing, it changes.  But she opened the doors of La MaMa to me, and I moved in for parts of 1988 and 1989, including accompanying a production to Italy. 

In short, Ellen Stewart was the creator of LaMaMa Experimental Theatre Club at 74A East 4^th Street in Manhattan’s East Village.  Over the years it expanded from the two theatres at 74A, to the Annex at 66 East 4^th Street, to 9 floors of rehearsal halls on 3^rd St., and an Art Gallery on 2^nd.  As producer at La MaMa, Stewart is the mother of Off Off-Broadway experimental theatre just as Joseph Papp of the Publik Theatre is the father of OOB. Whereas Papp straddled a commercial and OO Broadway world, Stewart worked in poor theatre and international theatre.  Living space, for example, was part of the pay for theatre makers.

She was the first producer to create a space for international theatre in the USA.  Historians who label such things should note that the contributions of the Black Arts Movement included Ellen Stewart’s international theatre.  They don’t, partly because the Black Arts Movement didn’t accept that Ellen Stewart’s stages were not reserved for Black folks only.  According to Amiri Baraka, for example, Ellen Stewart was, quote, crazy.  She did the impossible, both in NY City and as a guest and UNESCO diplomat theatre maker that traveled the world.

In NY City, the first thing I noticed was the fore staging of the arts and the back staging of business.  In the lobby of 74 A, the walls were a collage of color from past productions.  The few captions were in more than one language and alphabet.  English was in the minority, which reflected what you were likely to see on the stages and in the rehearsal halls.  The theatre at La MaMa was small and intimate, a second theatre above it worked as a café, and the third, the annex stage two buildings away was a vast open space, a place to set up like a forest, a journey of many resting places, or a house with many rooms. Here sets were taken down completely between shows, and few set pieces remained, in keeping with Mama Ellen’s idea that once an item existed it tended to limit the imagination of the artist using the space. 

I had expected to see a great amount of cross-fertilization of the productions here, but LaMaMa was not a melting pot.  Each production team retained its own style and story, though curiosity compelled artists to visit each other’s work and come to know the artists involved.  La MaMa was a bee-hive of intensive activity.  Influences definitely occurred as did future collaborations, but like a United Nations of theatre, or vast quantum theatre, the shows over the years showed evidence of expanded artistry rather than a narrowing into zones of fashion.

Ellen Stewart’s own productions within the Great Jones Theatre Company were environmental, with the audience moving along with the actors.  In this company, artists such as Tom O’Horgan who worked with Hair, and Andre Serban and Elizabeth Swados who worked with ancient Greek texts established the environmental style and kinetic audience experience of each production.   Ellen Stewart took this further as a director.  In the Italian production of The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter which I documented, the action extended throughout an entire village and included a hanging and a suicide, both in full view of the traveling audience.  This staging invited the audience to move along with the emotions of the actors, a kinetic experience which differed greatly from seated audiences.  It was up to each audience member how close to the action they wanted to be.   In an earlier environmental production of Romeo and Juliet, at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies on Reinhard's estate in Austria she cast the play with actors and musicians form 16 different nations.  With the assumption that everyone on stage and in the audience was familiar with the story, she had them keep their original languages, and cast without regard to race or gender.  Again, the audience moved with the actors and experienced what they experienced

I would love to bring this exceptional Woman to the stage herself in a visceral performance revealing how she expanded expectations and acted as if boundaries did not exist.  I would love to show what the United Nations saw in her work—the bringing together of diverse peoples in projects where true cooperation could begin.  I would love to show her ability to have multiple productions share space and resources without feeling the need to alter their individual arts.  I would make it clear that curiosity is a driving force of love which has the power to bring people together.  As Mama Ellen knew, this doesn’t happen through war or détente, but when people build a work of art together.

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Aside: I used the unseated audience techniques as often as I could in my classroom as a HS English teacher, and noted the same benefits.

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Please respect my copyright.

© 2024 Susan L. Chast