I’ve always felt a little guilty as an actor when it came to my relationship with the things I was given—the set and props and costumes so painstakingly and skillfully created or obtained for me to use. Like someone was gifting me with the last pieces I needed to be complete, a puzzle or a robot, or a sandwich. Even if I’d helped paint or organize costumes I always ended up feeling like a houseguest onstage. Wearing someone else’s clothes, using someone else’s hand soap, walking someone else’s floors…in a play like Vanya, it was essential to know the ins and outs of the “house.” Of all people, Sonyechka was certainly not a guest there. Coming in and spending intimate time, looking hard not at just the whole picture but one piece of it for hours maybe. Getting to know a bookshelf intimately, painting every corner. High up on a wobbly ladder, texturing the walls of the arch room. Stepping onto the wooden floors I’d stained was so different from stepping onto magically pre-stained floors. Beyond the spirituality of knowing the set more intimately, I got to bug Sonya about her tricks and how she learned them. Watching a master at work is always a joy, especially when she trusts you to help her out. It reaffirmed my belief that the more time you spend with something, the easier it is to love.
Author Archives: Faye Goodwin
Audience Breath
Theatre people say funny things in funny ways.
The idea of the audience “breathing with us” was I believe imparted by our Illustrious Jules (honestly Jules, Illustrious has become your official title/first name at Duke).
Theatre jargon has a lot to do with breath, because theatre has a lot to do with life. Organic, resonant, spatial, experimental, meta-life, as a theatre person might say. And though I knew that “breathing with us” may have been metaphorical, I found myself listening for the audiences’ breath. In that fantastic humming silence, in those painful pin-drop pauses, between teardrops or chuckles, I listened for breath.
I heard.
Some nights I heard it from the audience truly, that cavern of eyes; some nights they sighed and gasped, “ha!”ed and “huh”ed, “aww”ed and “hmm?”ed. Some nights they fell asleep in the front row but some nights they breathed. But every night we breathed. Every night I heard the life-air of this pulsing aggregation of human beings pumping in and out of every act, an assemblage of cells forming this body, taking turns being the heart, a living, breathing thing. Vanya Lived. And the Others? Most nights Lived too, another force breathing back at us, exhale for inhale, or perhaps even in tandem, perhaps one body together, feeling the same hurt and bubbling up with the same laughter, breathing the same breath.
Maybe one of the unintentionally wonderful things about having watchers onstage was that while we watched ourselves, we also watched ourselves watch. I mean that in act 3 as I (somehow, still) gasped at the gunshots, I could see in the dark the earnest alarm, or at least concern, of the people watching us watch. I watched them laugh, and laughed myself. All eyes and eyes, mouths and mouths, breath and breath. When in theatre can you sit and watch it happen? But I saw my friends laughing at Thomas, sighing for Cynthia, covering hands with mouths when Nick and Ashley kissed or when they thought it was the end for Phil, I saw my parents and my friends’ parents and complete strangers watch and listen, as I watched and listened.
Everything about this experience has been so corporal and fundamentally human for me so I can’t help but say this funny thing in this funny way. I won’t project that every person every night was with us in such a spiritual way, or even with us at all. Some were confused about the doubling, or about the time period, or didn’t really like either. Many were depressed or unsatisfied, or at least emotionally exhausted, which in itself is good feedback. In many cases even if the show wasn’t completely digested, a solid appreciation for the incredible work, talent, design and music was reliable. We heard floods of good things, especially from people whose opinions at least I respect and whose admiration I crave.
But I have to say, no matter how organic-visceral-absurdist-meta-theatrejargon it may sound, that even on nights when the audience didn’t breathe with us, Vanya’s heart kept beating, and the breath of the show and the people breathing life into it
took my breath away.
–Faye G.
EmerSonya the Romantic and Self-Reliance
“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
I make a point not to become dependent on things. Not to rely on other people, nor on money or material goods, or the seasons. The only person I can rely on is myself. And Nannechka.
For six years life had been dependable, constant, predictable, and comfortable. Uncle and I worked and saved; Nannechka knitted, Babushka read her pamphlets. The doctor came to visit. We had tea at eight every morning. In spite of myself I began to depend on our comfortable routine, with all its occasional discomforts of hunger and want and hard work.
Then Papa came to live with us. Papa and his new wife.
They pulled up our lain tracks, they grew over our beaten paths, descended like hot clouds in an Indian summer sky to hold in their heavy, hot winds of change. And though it was nice at first to have Papa around, our relationship has always been formal and didactic. And this new woman. She could have been a sister to me. A beautiful, strange, queen of a sister. I was terrified and scornful all at once. I remember seeing her at the wedding, and how she stuck out in that crowd—a silver ruble among a handful of dull copper kopecks. Their winds rocked the foundations of our lives, but my self-reliance has held. And now I can find strength and validation in my own work. I can hurry and busy myself with a calm inside. I will gather the crumbling walls of the estate close about me, hold them in place, and pull back the creeping ivy sown by Papa and Yelena which slowly take hold.
***
The wind that blows our doctor in, Yelena’s perfume, the smell of candles burning into the restless night—these form a miasma that we’ve all breathed for too long now. The estate is slipping through my fingers as is my tolerance and my energy. I know I must do my best to maintain order but my patience is thinning. I actually confronted Papa tonight–I haven’t done that since before the wedding. And Uncle. I don’t know what to do with him, I feel as if he’s fading, fraying, pulling away from me like paint peeling from the walls. Astrov has him marinating in vodka and regret when the best thing for him is to fight, like me, to be strong. Astrov gets us all drunk. I certainly have no control over myself when he walks in a room, I watch my defenses and ambitions, my strengths and strongholds fold like garments around my ankles. He spoke to me tonight, really spoke, and I saw him completely and I think, I think, he may have seen me too. Even if just for a minute, a moment, a fleeting glimpse, but he saw. Maybe he saw. And then he was gone. And left me humming with a residue of words, all beauty, beauty, beauty. How did I stay standing? How did I not weep? How did I let go of his hand? Seems there may be strength left yet. And beauty, beauty swept in, but she wasn’t strong at all but needed me just as I needed her, and that night I surrendered to friendship, tears and laughter. My first surrender.
***
My next surrenders were my chores, my duties–those which had held me up all these years, the little tasks which formed the vertebra of my backbone were gently forgotten. My hurry is slowed to a shuffle, an ooze, while my inside is thrumming and churning. In six years he has never come this often. And his words and his face are beating at the insides of my skin, shouting beauty, beauty, and I wonder how I’ve never heard them before and the drumming gets quicker and nearly unbearable as my body grows listless. He’s here every day. He can’t hear my drumming. He can’t see past the creeping kudzu of beauty to the stone walls beneath, the crumbling stone walls no longer strong. And I’m crumbling. My self-reliance has laughed in my face, and dependence has flown away to roost in the words, the hands of the doctor. The heavy air is heaviest yet, pregnant with storm, ready to ruin me. And yet I don’t seek shelter, I surrender my happiness, as all of us have, to beauty. She asks him. I know what he says. The clouds burst open with my heart and empty, everything I’d grown to rely on flies away. Papa wants to sell the estate, my estate, to wrest the crumbling walls from my grip. I look into Uncle Vanya’s face and barely recognize him—my ally, my comrade. The dependable, inaccessible doctor never to return, never to return my love. My internal drum is suddenly silenced. Gunshots ring out in the still noise. I cling to my only refuge, still the only thing I can rely on—my Nannechka.
***
When I was little and couldn’t be consoled, I would hold my doll tight and tell her it was going to be alright. The only thing to stop my tears was to soothe my dolly’s imagined heartaches, to let her need me, to know I was needed. Uncle Vanya has given back the morphine. It’s still quiet. Goodbyes are muted and harness bells hushed. Yelena won’t let go of her pencil as we hug goodbye, as the beauty that I’ve loved and hated lets me alone at last. And reaching through the dark I find my work, and allow myself to be needed, my greatest comfort. My hurry will return but for now it’s a quiet emptiness, like the feeling after you’ve been crying for hours, and suddenly grow still, and weary. Yelena said I must learn to trust. But only myself, and the promise of rest.
—Faye G.
what a piece of work is (hu)man
One of the loveliest feelings I can have when I’m working hard on something or for something is the feeling of “This is why I do this.”
This is why I spend my time and energy on this. I hope you all are feeling that lovely feeling as often as I am through this process. I know I’ve said it a few times to a few of you, but the reason I love the performing arts so much is that they let you be—and force you to be—human. Theatre I think is the most visceral, primal, and rudimentary because it forces us to be exactly what we (as humans) are. Scared, sad, vengeful, lovelorn. And it forces us to do that by becoming uncomfortably real. All we do every day is put on the acceptable clothes, say the acceptable things, and move in acceptable ways. Sit, walk, lie down. I’m fine, how are you. And while I appreciate that that is how society functions I still feel such relief when we can come into the studio and use our bodies and voices. The realm of potential for physical and vocal expression is virtually endless, and we use such an incredibly miniscule patchy crummy sliver of it every day. What rich pleasure to scream and cry and laugh and sing and dance and fall and crawl and run with abandon! That in itself is fulfilling!
And the best part of this simple and wonderful four hours of humanity is that it is teaching us how to be humans. Specific humans, in this case, but who says that can’t give us some general knowledge as well? I bet we all have a heightened awareness of who is speaking to us at what pitch, and from what center of their body.
I can almost liken it to being this body with no sense of self. Kali helps us figure out how to move. How do people move? How does this person move? And why? And the why comes right from Jules and Jeff teaching us how this person might think or feel and what causes those thoughts or feelings and gradually we understand how to be a human being. Maybe one named Sonya.
What I usually hold in my left hand is the worry that the characters I try to take on aren’t distinct enough from who I am. How can I differentiate between myself and this person? Especially if it’s someone I feel like I know, who I can relate to. I think every person in the world can relate to Sonya. But the more I learn how to be human, the more I can see that I’m just pulling pieces of Play-Doh off of Faye to stick on Sonya because it’s all the same material. It’s becoming less “how can I be Sonya?” and “how can I be human?”
I think most of these ideas are sinking in so well for Vanya because what is it about if not humans doing human things. We talked about Chekov wanting his plays to reflect everyday life—the monotony and the discontent, the shuffling, sitting, standing, lying down, I’m fine how are you. This isn’t song and dance, not an acrobatic feat. But this fulfills us by utilizing that tiny sliver of human expression to reveal how much is really there, how much hurt and joy, and humanity. And for us in class or in the audience that is so satisfying. To look at humans doing human things and recognize ourselves. Quietly, with our hands in our laps.
Faye
You Shining Star
Eagerly anticipating our all becoming human together this autumn. My favorite thing about Uncle Vanya is how desperately human it is across the spectrum. If aliens came to Earth and asked for a representation of humanity, I might give them Vanya. Here, I would say, is a good idea of what people are. Angry, bitter, cynical, kind, ambitious, gentle, lovelorn, heartbroken, wasted, intelligent, suicidal, hopeful, faithful, submissive….here is every girl who ever loved a boy who didn’t love her back. Here is every aging man listless with depression and regret, and here is every weary laborer repressing and forgetting. And laughing about it.
I love the idea of having multiple people representing these characters because I think every feeling human in the audience will be representing them as well. As Cynthia and I slip in and out of Sonya, it will be as if we’re saying “this is me, too. but it’s also her. and you.”
Anyway. Humans.
also kittens