I finally added that last post 7 hours after I wrote it (faulty coffee shop wi-fi, damn you!) and now I'm on to a new one before I conk out. Tdawg is ti-ti, ladies and gentlemen. (As in rhymes with "mai-tai", no dirty thoughts just because I'm in frat land.) Translation: I'M TIRED.
This freaking show gets me in a new way every time. Tonight I had a full on freak out after my last speech in the first act, right before I die. I went offstage, and my hands and legs were tingling, and then lost feeling, then I got dizzy so I got down on the floor in Child's Pose while tears just started streaming out. I don't know what specifically will set me off sometimes more than others in this show. Tonight I definitely lost some breath when the actor who plays the farmer (a dear, sweet man named Lloyd who was a Jesuit priest 1960-69, and then dropped out and had four kids, all of whom go to Penn State) talked about the plane that crashed into Pennsylvania, and how people were calling their loved ones to tell them what they were trying to do. How they were trying to save some people on the ground. More on that in a paragraph...
Usually, I always leak a tear or two when the waiter does his second speech about having to choose between the window or the fire in Tower One, and how when he got up that morning he never thought he'd be thinking of suicide. At that point, they flash this absolutely horrifying slide behind us of a man freefalling out of the Twin Towers. His arms and legs are splayed in the air as the pressure pins his body against gravity. But tonight, I just couldn't get my breath back. And then I have to get up and speak, alone, to this audience I can barely see past the blinding lights, and jump off a building myself as I tell them about mangled and charred body parts on Church Street, and then describe looking up at the sky while a skyscraper topples down. That's it. That's my death scene. I walk off, and everyone keeps talking, and I just lose it. I lose my shit, alone, backstage.
So. I do have some idea why the farmer got to me. Yesterday afternoon, right before I left Philly to come here, I had a discussion with my mother about the movie "United 93," and how she thought it was great, and how I had zero interest in seeing it. Truly, I have not had one desire to watch that movie. So then she says to me, "Oh, but there is this one part, where this young, 22 year old girl calls her mother and says she doesn't think she'll make it, and her mother just says, 'Just stay on the phone with me,' and she stays there, talking to her daughter, watching out the window at the children playing outside." And my mother and I just stared at each other for a second, and I think the meaning of that hit both of us. Ugh, I'm crying right now. In one sense, that's amazing, because she could be there for her daughter when she was facing her own death. But then I think, that woman had to listen, and then be there when the phone went dead, and then had to keep breathing and living after that. How do you go through something like that? How do you listen to your child die? I'm not sure who I'm weeping for, me or that girl. Or her mother.
What's interesting about this show is how it has rocked my world in such unexpected ways. I had no idea I had such a well of emotion thinking of death, mine, or my loved ones, or thinking about my country, about war and children and the future and the clear lineage of 9/11, about our connection as human beings. By far, what's been shocking to me is how difficult it is as a performer to keep doing your job when you are terrified on stage. These are issues I buried so deep inside me, I didn't know they existed. Once I get onstage and my buttnaked emotions flash themselves like sunfish with machetes for fins, I have these full-on flip-out sessions once I exit. Because when I'm onstage, I can barely hold it together. Fine, I know that my good old acting teachers would be like, "That's what's interesting, Teresa. Act THAT." Bullshit. I'm trying to act that, but there are sunfish everywhere! With MACHETE-FINS!!!I wonder how anyone could do a run like this long-term. I don't know if I could. I guess I'd have to get some therapy first.
One final thought. My senior year, I did a NYU School of Ed production of "I Never Saw Another Butterfly." It's based on the true story of one of the few survivors of a children's concentration camp outside of Prague. Similar writing style to 9/11 Fringe Play. I could not eke out a tear for the life of me in that show. I couldn't get involved. I did research. I assigned sad songs to scenes. I analyzed and over-analyzed. I did movement exercises. I painted watercolor word-associations. NOTHING. But for this...I couldn't stop the overflow of pain and fear if I wanted to. Maybe it's because "Butterfly" issues were never my fears, and jumping out of buildings and loving my mother so much I can't deal with it are. (PS I'm crying AGAIN.) I've never been persecuted. My childhood was happy, and safe. There is so much suffering in this world, but, as an actor, I don't know how to talk about them all yet.
