I’m a big believer that for artists, our work is how we metabolize the world around us. How we turn it into fuel that keeps us going.
On January 30, 1962, The Flying Wallendas—one of the most storied circus families in history—were performing their famous chair-pyramid high wire stunt, when one performer came out of balance and the seven-person pyramid toppled, killing two of the wire walkers and paralyzing a third, after falling 35 feet from the high wire. Over 5000 people watched it happen, live in front of them, at the Detroit Coliseum. They’d paid money for a day of losing themselves in spectacle, beholding the outer limits of what human bodies and imaginations can achieve; excited to give their children (and let’s be real, themselves) the gift of believing the impossible by witnessing it. Instead, some of the most accomplished acrobats in the world crashed to the ground and died, because that sometimes happens in the circus/life.
But in the split second immediately after the accident, what happened was this: the circus’ clowns went out and did a turn around the ring. People who knew these performers intimately—who traveled with them across the continent and shared meals with them— sprung into action and rushed onto the sawdust-covered stage, makeup and all, to entertain as best they could. One of them put it simply afterward: “I went out and started clowning around.” In the exact moment that human beings were being pulled offstage on stretchers, the clowns put their own bodies between the audience and the gruesome scene of their colleagues’ deaths, and performed.
I’m a big believer that for artists, our work is how we metabolize the world around us. How we turn it into fuel that keeps us going. The show must go on because it’s actually how we take care of ourselves and how we take care of our community, our audience. For sure, the clowns were in shock that day in Detroit; were gutted by the sudden loss and profound confusion of the moment. But a clown’s role (not just under the tent, but in the grander sense) is to allow the messages of what’s highest to flow through them to the people. To be a kind of servant, a conduit. It’s a serious duty to provide people that necessary, lifted time and space. When we do, we help keep ourselves and our audiences alive by helping us all stay focused on an imagined better-than-this space.
These days, when I get on stage, I’m not (at least not yet) there to obscure the view of dead bodies right behind me. But the more bombs fall on Iran and Lebanon (and who knows where else by the time you’re reading this), the more keenly I’m aware of the bodies I am obscuring with my little show. You’ve put your phone (a 24/7 bodies-cam) away for 75 minutes, and we’ve all agreed that right now, for everybody’s sanity, for the sake of being able to wake up and keep going tomorrow, what needs to happen is that we all focus on something that is not those bodies for a few minutes. Behold! My clown show!
As a child actor (I have always been like this) I was raised in the gospel of “the show must go on.” I internalized it like the rules of long division, like an unbreakable law of physical reality. As an adult, I’ve performed through food poisoning, breakups, asthma attacks, fevers. And meanwhile while my social media feed fills with memes and screeds about self-care, resting, and how You Are Not Your Productivity. I couldn’t agree more.
But. And.
The show must go on.
A lot of ink has spilled lately on the topic of “theatre kid” as insult— as a way of being that’s shamefully, shamefully cringe. Of course this is the case. It’s not new.
Performing plays is cringe because it’s literally playing pretend in front of a bunch of strangers. We get on stage and pretend to be someone else, in some other version of reality; we’re letting people know that we’d like to spend some time there—in some other, imagined version of this world. One that is more joyful, more at peace with its own ridiculousness, one not hell-bent on cruelty and arbitrary suffering. A world that can hold the biggest versions of ourselves and where we can just be together and listen and breathe.
The one time I performed when I was really quite ill, I did it because that one show paid my studio rent for two months, and without it, there was not another plan for how to keep the lights on. Should artists receive sick pay, so as to prevent this kind of thing? Of course. But at least here in the US, that reality is political lightyears away. So in very practical, survival-style terms, the show had to go on that day.
Which is why when I see these memes about resting, about going easy, all of that, I wonder a little bit. Yeah, we could all really use a nap (or ten). But nobody’s served if what I ditch to take a nap is the one supremely life-giving hour of my day—the hour I’m on stage.
Why not give up all the other stuff? The driving and the parking and the posting and the scrolling and the online banking and the tax filing. Maybe “The show must go on” is the same as “Damn everything but the circus!” Maybe it’s actually a mandate to place imagination and life and exuberance and being together in joy and wonderment above all else. Because the bombing will go on. The reminders that rent is due will go on. The building of data centers and the tossing of single-use plastics into the ocean will go on. And for myself, I want to make sure I’m pushing back as hard as I possibly can be with my own small offering of what a preferred version of this place and life could be. For my own sake I want to make sure that when and where I find rest, the show—possibly the least destructive thing I do in the course of a day or a week—isn’t what falls by the wayside. Maybe everything else can go dark so I have enough fuel to keep the lights on for that one hour. Maybe all the other stuff, the stuff that keeps me, us, in this version of reality is the stuff that doesn’t need to go on. But the show, the other vision, the world of imagination, it has to go on. One could say it must.
The Van Gogh Shogh is on at CPT Wed 8 and Thurs 9 April at 9pm.
Click here to book
