My mentor died last week.
It was not unexpected. In
fact, it was one of those long goodbyes. But the loss cuts deep. There are some
people who, no matter how much water under the bridge, will always have that
tidal effect.
 |
| Shireen Strooker |
I use water imagery for a
reason, but what’s more immediately appropriate is – she was and is a star. The
writer/director/producer/actor of hundreds of plays in the Netherlands, Europe
and the US, some with the radical theater company Het Werkteater, many after that with her own company and others.
I was in my last year at
Berkeley, and two of my actor/director friends, Karl Hamman and Andy Myler, had
gotten a grant to bring Shireen over from the Netherlands to teach a company
acting class, culminating in a play. The demand was so high that two classes
were formed. We were theater students. Ridiculously young, impressionable,
ambitious, pretentious. It was ages ago, now. Many of us are best friends to
this day. Those of us still in theater and film trace our inspiration back to
that class. No one who took it was not transformed in some way.
I’ve always loved that Kafka
quote: “A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.”
Shireen was an ice-axe.
She was brutal.
Like many great artists, she
didn’t have the time or the patience to be encouraging or supportive. She
didn’t sugarcoat anything. She went straight for the jugular.
The very first day she walked
into our company class, the very first improvisation she had us do, she cast me
as a child molester.
I’ve written before that one
of the defining and traumatizing moments of my life was being approached at
nine years old by a sexual predator who tried to grab me off the street.
Did she know this about me?
Of course not. We’d never met, and it wasn’t something I could articulate at
the time. That took a lot of therapy, later.
But I did the scene. You
didn’t say no to Shireen.
After the improvisation,
which I don’t remember much about except that it didn’t go well, she yelled at
me for facing upstage for most of the scene “So we couldn’t see your ugliness.”
It became a theme between us.
I’m not sure if that was a theme of hers in general or just what she was
determined to bring out in me, particularly. But I heard it over and over from
her. “Where’s the dirt?!” “Show me your ugliness!”
Or this gem: “You sit there
like a giant spider in your web, always watching everyone.” I was twenty years
old. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear about myself.
I hadn’t grasped the concept
of Beauty and Truth.
Shireen demanded Truth.
Would she finally have been
satisfied with the dirt in the Huntress series? Or am I still not being quite
ugly enough? I’m getting enough hate mail these days from people who are
disturbed by my last book. But still, I wonder.
I do know that however far
I’ve gone in the Huntress series, she wouldn’t think it was far enough. For
her, that was the whole point of theater, of play-making. To cross every line
and shatter every barrier.
And to that effect, she
wanted her players raw.
I don’t know if it was a
deliberate strategy or an unconscious one: to break actors so that they would
do ANYTHING you told them to do on command. Much like the military.
I teach, on occasion, and
some of my students see me as a mentor. I ask myself sometimes if I am being too
easy. If I wouldn’t do better for promising students by being more cruel. Being
easy is the easy way out. Cruelty is no way to raise children - but maybe it’s
the way to shape a professional artist.
It’s definitely what she did.
She said horrible things to us. Horrible because we believed in her so
absolutely. We wanted so desperately to please her. And the lessons weren’t all
brutal, though they were always shattering.
One priceless lesson I
learned from her is synchronicity. That when you start a play (a book, a film,
a dance piece) – EVERYTHING that happens is relevant and belongs in the play. I
heard her say hundreds of times, “But we MUST have THAT in the play!” And so it
was.
"Dare
to be bad" was another concept. When you think about it, what's the worst
that can happen on stage, or on the page? You can suck. Furthermore, you're
going to suck. Guaranteed. Sometimes you just suck. But once you get over
your fear of sucking? That fearlessness translates into a confidence that takes
you places you were always afraid to go, before. And once you've made a bad choice,
you've eliminated something that doesn't work and are one step closer to
finding something that does work.
She taught me not to care
about what anyone else thought. She was loathed and mocked by the mostly male
and casually, devastatingly sexist professors of the Department of Dramatic
Art. It was abundantly clear that they were terrified of this feminine force.
It made us love her more.
Everyone else around her was
profoundly influenced.
My friends Jess Winfield and
Reed Martin – Jess, author/screenwriter, tv and theater producer, one of the
creators of the Reduced Shakespeare Company. Reed, who became part of the later
RSC company and went on to co-write, produce and star in numerous other RSC
shows. Phil Abrams, an actor all of you know from television, whether or not
you know his name. Nina Ruscio, my brilliant production designer friend
(currently designing Shameless and Animal Planet), who taught me one of the
most career-making lessons in visual storytelling that day when I tagged along
with her into the depths of Zellerbach Hall, to the prop warehouse, to create
the look of our play Ondine. Stan Lai, now the
most famous theater writer/director/producer in Taiwan.
We were a cult, really.
Shireen
and I became very close that year, which was in a way unlikely.
Our company class was
rehearsing an improvisational adaptation of Jean Giraudoux’s Ondine.
I was quite
possibly the worst actor in the class. I just never cared as much about what I
was doing in my own role as I did about the big picture. I’d wisely given up acting
completely for writing the year before, and was only reluctantly persuaded into
the ensemble by Andy and Karl (for which I owe them more than I will ever be
able to repay).
But
Shireen needed an assistant (actually she needed as many as she could get) and
I knew I needed to hear – or observe - WHY she was doing what she did.
I
didn’t get praise from her. I got assignments. But for Shireen to turn to me
and say – “You will write this for us to do tomorrow” was better than praise.
It was a specific acknowledgement of what I could do.
And the
lessons went on and on.
Including
one I teach in all my own workshops: The Dark Moment. All is Lost. The Dark
Night of the Soul. In other words, you must lose everything before it all comes
together.
And in almost all mentor
narratives, in Act II:2, the mentor goes away.
Which is what Shireen did, a
few weeks before Ondine opened. She
had another play on in Amsterdam that she had to get back to. But we all threw ourselves into rehearsing ourselves.
The night she came back and
saw our run-through, she ripped into us as I’ve never been ripped into before
or since. She ranted at us for what seemed like an eternity, saying we’d
unraveled all the work she’d done with us. She told us we’d have to cancel the
performance.
I’ll never be sure if that
was what she really thought or if it was another way of getting what she wanted
from us.
Because in effect, she
terrified us into working 24/7 for the last week before the show. (I’m
remembering now that for the first and only time in my college career I told
one of my drama professors I’d have to turn my final paper in late because of
rehearsal. This highly mediocre professor was one of Shireen’s detractors and
told me that if I didn’t get the paper in on time I’d fail the class. I was
pretty much a straight-A student, Phi Beta Kappa, and I’d seen him give
extensions for performance to any number of his students - it was a theater
department, after all. He refused. I told him to fail me. It didn’t occur to me
to take the issue higher – I simply didn’t care. I don’t think he actually
failed me, but I do have those dreams, you know… that you realize you never
actually graduated from college….)
We lived in that theater for
that week. We slept there, some nights.
And the show was – beautiful.
 |
| Shireen's 210 company class in Ondine |
For all Shireen’s talk about
ugliness (maybe only with me), Ondine was
a shimmeringly romantic fairy tale. There were moments so poetic I heard
audience members gasp aloud. There are whole scenes from that show I will
remember in entirety for the rest of my life.
My favorite moment was
neither artistic nor poetic. Among other roles I played the Queen, and there
was a royal court scene that the whole cast could never, ever get through
without collapsing into hysterical laughter. A lot of this was because of the
King, Reed (he of the Reduced
Shakespeare Company), a brilliant comedian who every rehearsal went out of his
way to find new ways to make the rest of us break.
But of course you always somehow pull it together for opening night, and we did several performances without a hitch. And then - one night when King Reed stood in all pomp and circumstance from his throne, one of the pearls from his ermine robe caught on the mesh train of my gown. And as he started walking downstage, both our robes rose, grandly enormous, filling the stage like the wings of giant swans.
Well, the courtiers almost lost it. The audience totally lost it. But we were professionals, or aspiring, anyway, and the courtiers got hold of themselves and somehow Reed and I did a little shimmy and two-step to get unhooked, shooting each other marital looks of annoyance, and we resumed the scene.
And it happened again. Same pearl, same mesh, same swan wings.
It was pandemonium. We could not stop laughing. Literally. Could. Not. Stop. I know from this moment what it means to be rolling on the floor laughing, because half of the actors on stage were, literally. I was doubled over on my throne, laughing my guts out. Reed was collapsed in my lap. The audience was shrieking. We could hear Shireen out in the house just wailing with laughter. It went on for minutes, which on stage is eternity.
I don't
know how we finally pulled ourselves together, but somehow we did. And after
the show I have never had so many people thank me for the best laugh of their
lives.
And Shireen
told us backstage, “That is the BEST gift you could have given me.” It was the
most pleased I ever saw her.
That
moment was something so much more than theater. It taught me that precision is
nothing, compared to the truth of a moment.
I can only remember one
spoken compliment I ever got from her. Not a compliment, really – a validation.
It was when I sold my first
screenplay, for an enormous amount of money to me, and enough fanfare that I, a
complete Hollywood outsider (and a woman, one-fourth as likely as a man to get
paid for it) suddenly had a screenwriting career.
I visited Shireen that winter
in Amsterdam and she said to me, “I knew you had this in you. From the first
day, the moment I saw you, this was all there.”
Was that true? I wonder. It’s
so easy to say in retrospect. But I like to think that she saw that in all of
us.
Because we do all have that
in us. I will always believe that.
But some of us are lucky
enough find a Shireen to hack it out of us.
With an ice axe.
-
Alex
-->
