Channeling our Mothers

Our rehearsals are in a gorgeous studio that feels like a tree-house at the top of Bernal Heights. Three women, Marilee, our Stage Manager, Ashely, and yours truly, perch high above San Francisco, watching a dark sky dotted with lights from the city and the Bay Bridge. In the foreground there's an old grand eucalyptus tree, framing our view.

Marilee's grandmother planted the tree 40 years ago. And here we are, looking out the window, three young women together in one room, as Marilee's mom, Lucinda, slowly takes shape before us.

In Marilee's body, Lucinda walks with a slow deliberation, holding her arms stiff, her chest out. She looks the other characters in this play directly in the eyes, and she gently (and almost imperceptibly) touches the walls as she walks to orient herself.

Our Lucinda is sharp and fierce.
"I'm just toughening your up for the real world. The world is a cruel place for people like us," she tells Marilee.

And then Lucinda sings the most beautiful lullaby you've ever heard. It makes me ache to hear it.

It starts to rain. Hard. In the break Ashley tells us a story about her mom, a fraught moment of tension in the distant past. I think of my own mother -- the way everyone says we have the same gestures & mannerisms. The way she knows me to the core; the way she can see through my brave fronts of indifference. The way she says, when I have worn myself out with care taking for others, pretending I don't notice how it's affecting me, "I don't know Riss, I'm afraid you inherited that from me."

...Here is an image of our beat up actress after a long night of wrestling with her mother character (just kidding, she's trying out a series of different gestures)

Rehearsals and The Cane

I've known Marilee Talkington for two years, and she is an incredible force to be reckoned with. She has a commanding presence (have you seen her biceps?), and she has this sexy, self deprecating humor that makes the room buzz with laughter and warmth. Marilee and I have talked theater; we've talked grad school and career choices; we've talked romance and lovers; we've talked great triumphs and sorrowful failures. But we've never once talked about her vision.

Until now. Here we are in a rehearsal room with a script she has written with Justin Quinn Pelegano, and we're faced with the incredibly intimate task of peeling back layer after layer of the script, Marilee's life, and the complicated overlapping landscape of the two.

How do you approach a text that has come directly from the inner stirrings of an actor's heart, and say to her -- "nice, but try it again with less irony this time"?
Not an easy thing to open yourself up to material that, although it's on the page, and although you penned it yourself, is rich and fraught with emotions. Material that cannot offer an answer, or a pretty bow all neatly tied up at the end -- "that was hard, but now I've solved everything and all of my vision has been restored." Material that is still living inside of you now, whose source you wrestle with daily.

Marilee, generous, gracious, and well trained MFA toting actor that she is, always takes a note. She opens herself up to finding a new color, a new way into a scene or descriptive passage.

I've taken to calling the Marilee character, "Narrator," because that can sometimes allow a thumb nail's worth of distance between who Marilee is in real life and who she is on stage. All theater is a construction, of course. No "mirror to reality" here -- just our construction of images, sounds, and gestures, compiled together. As the incredible performance artist Guillermo Gomez Pena says in his book DANGEROUS BORDER CROSSERS, performance is not "a mirror, but the actual moment in which the mirror is shattered."