Are You Running with Me Zeus?
A young impresario is putting on a play called Dionysus in 69. It's full of blood and naked skin, so you'll like it.
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From 9:30 until 10 the workout is individual; each actor warms up in his own fashion. John and Sue, who both have extensive dance training, start by running around the room. Jan sits in the lotus position, Jean lies down and goes into dance and slow calisthenics. Matt runs forward and backward and sideways, coming as close to a post as he can without hitting it, then backing off without losing a beat, an athletic kind of workout which is much more explosive and high-powered than anyone else's. Magda, who has the week before driven a nail into her foot and is gently crippled, does what she can without putting pressure on her purple-wrapped left foot. She does tumbling exercises and stands not only on her head, but on her neck, her head all twisted to the side. It looks impossible.
So does acting in the nude. The reason for nudity in the show, according to Bruce, is the reason for Dionysus in 69 itself. "For most people, nudity is the ultimate step in openness. One of the major points in the show is an invitation for them to be open, an invitation to experience the ecstasy that is in them, to express their own joy. The birth ritual is a structured way for the cast to say 'I open myself to you' to each other and to the audience."
I asked the actors what it felt like to run naked in the theater, to go naked through the birth ritual of Dionysus, to fall naked in a flesh heap. Sue: "Exhilarating. I feel free and wide open. This is me." Gordon: I've done it before in another show." Matt: "I don't like the idea that somebody might be looking at me just to look at my cock. You know? I mean, it bothers me."
Lying in a body pile is simply that, bodies piled up. "Sometimes you wonder whose arm that is across you—Is it Gordon's?—but you don't really feel the other people unless they're lying someplace where it hurts." And is there any sexual reaction? "No." Unanimous. "The show is asexual." Sensual, they grant, but not sexual.
I go to the workshops as a writer, but end up putting my pencil aside and taking part. We do exercises in trust of one another, in order to get the group together and to encourage psychic communion, "which is what the workshop ought to be about." (Jan)
A big wooden ladder is propped in the middle of the room. The actors groan. "Not the ladder! Anything but the ladder!" They are like captured spies in a war movie, being tortured by heartless Nazis.
It is an exercise in trust. Jean climbs up three rungs. We form parallel lines straight back from the ladder. She puts her hands beside her body and, eyes open, falls straight back without bending. We catch her. Everyone applauds her success. She climbs resolutely back up the ladder to the fourth rung and then to the fifth. Now this is a big wooden homemade ladder, and the rungs are far apart. The fifth rung is high, about six feet. She does it. Whoom and we catch her. Gordon is next, His body small and round as an angel's, he bends slightly each time and is harder to catch. It is my turn. I climb up three rungs and feel what I am feeling, which is terror. My heart flutters like a thousand birds, my legs quiver, my head cries WHAT AM I DOING THIS FOR? Bruce speaks lovingly, encouragingly to me from behind the ladder and I believe him, I know they will not, would not let me fall, I trust them. But—I cannot let go. Twice I pump my legs, but no go.
Finally what urges me to fall is not a gathering of courage but a sense of timing. They are waiting, it is not even my workshop, it has gone on too long, now or never, it's getting boring, do or don't, and I do and die on the way down. Stop. Dead. Come alive again in their arms. I hate it. But I am after all participating and believe in earning credentials and so continue. Fall from the fourth and the fifth rung, it gets no better and no worse but six feet up is pretty high. I cannot keep my eyes open. One time, because I reach my arms out for support, I hit John in the chin, which among other incidents proves that this exercise is much more dangerous for those doing the catching than those getting caught. The actors reassure me that they are frightened every time and while they have all done it before, that repetition does not lessen terror. They fondle and pat me. Still, you're never prepared for the fall or the jolt when you hit and no matter how many times you do it, you still die on the way down and it grabs your heart like lightning…every time.
Everyone does it, even Bruce. All are afraid. But I am the only coward.
Group working and group living is not always easy for the company. They did get a larger place, which helped but still, as in any nuclear family, tensions arise and build.
Sue: "The problem is, we are never away from one another. And what we do at the theater is an extension of how we live at home. It's a continual working-out."
John: "I not only have to learn to relate to Matt at home, it's my job to do it at the theatre too."
Matt's enormous ego probably has more difficulty confining itself to group priorities than anyone else's. "It's good for me, living in a group like this. But—I can't help it, it drives me crazy. I need to be alone sometimes. I lived in a commune once, but it was in the woods and whenever I needed to, I could just go out and be by myself." Matt's dark and strong beauty, his drive, his cunning, his competitiveness and his talent give him the capacity to really make it in theater, movies or television.
He and Lawrence are the only members of the company who admit to being actors, to feeling any life's ambition towards performing. Lawrence: "I'll never do anything else as a career. Either an actor or a mime, it's all I want to be. Anything else would be a drag." Matt: "It's my destiny. It's what I have to do." Magda: "I have no feeling of career. If this doesn't work out I'm going to move on to something else. Maybe medicine or living in the country."
The actors' salaries will increase if the show is financially successful as will the staff's. How Houston theatregoers will react to the nudity in the show and the show itself is an open question. What the people who burned down the movie house that tried to screen I Am Curious Yellow will do is an unknown factor. How many people care about seeing Dionysus in 69 at all is another. If this show doesn't go, or if it does, Bruce has other shows in mind, one on the life of Billie Holliday, not necessarily the same kind of show as Dionysus.
The people at Houston Laboratory Theater are serious, Deadly serious. You might get an investor to talk about the nudity in terms of commercial drawing power, but not an actor, or any member of the company. Matt: "This is the most perfect theater I've ever worked in. However bad it gets sometimes around here, it's the best any of us has ever had." Lawrence: "It's harder than I ever thought it would be." John: "We have to make it work."
Gordon: "You do understand what we're trying to do here, don't you?" Jan: "Reaching out and touching people, that's what it's all about. People you don't even know." Magda: "Please, people, we have to stay together!" Sue: "Anything you reach out for, it's usually ego that keeps you from getting it. That's what I fight against, ego." Gerry: "Theater is a temple, a shrine. Actors worship there." David: "We're going to open. It's going to work. If we have to build it with our own hands. Tell me, what do you think of it?" Bruce: "I've always wanted my own theater."
This is where they are as I pack up my pencil and paper and go home. Thinking back about why they let me become a part of their explorations, I think they would have let in anyone who did not disturb the "process," who did not impinge, impose or disrupt. I have heard them say to other people, to potential investors, to curious hangers-on, "Come, join us in a workshop." I thought I'd like to be in the show, too, at one time, but I don't think so now. Somehow for me to gambol naked at the Macatee would be ridiculous. I'm going home and let the process continue without me.
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