An Improvised Life (16 page)

After the scene with mother and son ended, there was a long heavy silence in the group. Each moment in the scene had been true and fully realized, but the event was filled with despair and painful to watch. We sat in silence for a while, drinking in the sadness of what we’d witnessed. I couldn’t bear ending the workshop on that note, and I found myself saying, “What can we do for this boy? Where can we take him? Is there anyone in the world he can talk to? What’s next for him?” I wasn’t comfortable leaving either him or the class in this state. Brad thought he could talk to one of his friends. That didn’t make me comfortable. I was concerned that the scene would turn into a joint complaint and become another downer, so I asked the group for a different idea. “He could talk to his grandmother,” Brad said. “Okay,” I said. “Who’s going to be the grandmother?” The woman who’d played the pawnshop owner that morning raised her hand. “I’ll be the grandmother,” she said. She got onstage with Brad and they jumped into the scene. It was somewhat more comfortable than the last one; Brad clearly loved his grandmother and she him, but the advice she gave wasn’t sitting well with him. She asked if he was going to stay home, he didn’t know. She told him to speak to his mother about what was troubling him, he wouldn’t agree to do it.

The scene, although less tense than the first one, reached another dead end, and I faded out with the two of them in a loving impasse. Again there was this brooding silence and
sadness in the group, and again I found myself asking, “Where do we take him now? Where can he go? What can we do for him?” I wasn’t going to end the day on this note. Fidel, the man who’d arranged the workshop and brought us to the college, called out, “We don’t want any Hollywood endings!”

“I don’t want any Hollywood endings either,” I said. “But isn’t there something between a commercial lie and this terrible impasse? Isn’t there some way to open him up? To give him a future of some kind? Some hope?”

There’s a technique in dream analysis that I learned a few years ago when I was doing some work in that area, studying with a wonderful teacher and friend, Anita Hall. In one session I presented her with an unpleasant dream fragment that trailed off into a negative limbo. “How would you end the dream?” Anita asked. “It didn’t end,” I said. “It just trailed off.” “End it,” she said. Her direction confused me. I had always thought that dreams were impenetrable, as if they were some kind of event coming from another realm. What she was asking seemed kind of sacrilegious, but I tried it anyway. Not wanting to veer too far from the original material, I ended the dream in a dark tone, in keeping with the substance of what I had dreamt. “Does that ending make you happy?” Anita asked. “Not really,” I said, “but it seems to be what the dream was heading toward.” “Why don’t you head it in a direction that makes you happy?”

Her request felt strange and improper, as if she wanted me to tamper with the work of an important writer. But I
tried what she said. I gave the dream a happy ending. It was shocking, as if I’d broken some unspoken and archaic law. It was the first indication I had that we don’t have to be enslaved by our dreams, that we can direct them, reshape them, and even eventually, by doing so, change the substance of our unconscious minds.

I began reworking my dreams wholesale, giving them endings that were in keeping with what I wanted consciously for myself. If a dream was frightening or depressing, I fixed it. I ended it in a way that made me happy or fulfilled. I wanted the same thing now in the workshop. That doesn’t mean I’m not willing to allow people their pain, or that I’m asking people in the workshops to not share things publicly, moments that, if shared, might mean the release from some private hell. But there’s a difference between presenting a picture of a painful past and projecting it into the future, telling us that this is the way things are going to be, the way they
must
be. It’s easy to feel the difference. In the first instance you will feel compassion. Empathy. In the second instance you will just be depressed. I don’t like to be depressed. What I wanted now, in this series of scenes, was for the group to experience the difference. I hoped that if I badgered them a bit more they might wrench themselves out of this collective bad dream, but there was still resistance.

I jumped into the work area. “Look,” I said, “what goes on in here is make-believe. It doesn’t have to be a literal representation of our walking-around lives. In this arena
we can do anything we want. We can make life anything we imagine. We can create myths, legends, comedies, tragedies; we can dance, tell jokes, sing songs. Why can’t we imagine some step for this kid that can help to take him out of his pain and to some slightly better place? Is that too much to reach for?” They sat silently for a while. “I could be his father,” Fidel said. Brad liked that idea.

“Where is he?” I asked. “Where does the scene take place?”

“The father’s dead,” Fidel said. “He’s coming to his son as a spirit.” “I’ll be asleep,” Brad offered, and jumped into the scene. He lay down on his back in the playing area. Fidel came up to him slowly and crouched by his head. He began speaking, and what came out of his mouth for the next ten minutes could have been written word for word by one of our great playwrights. Every single word was un-self-conscious poetry.

“I’m coming to you to apologize, my son,” Fidel said. “When you were born I was so proud, so proud of having a son, of being a father, that I went out and celebrated. The celebration went on too long. I got drunk with my friends and coming back to you and your mother I smashed the car into a tree and killed myself, so you and I have never met. We’ve never spent a moment’s time with each other. But I have come back to tell you that I have always known that you were
special
. That you had something important and beautiful to do in this world. And I also came back to tell you that I love you.”

At this moment Brad slowly came awake. He slowly sat up and turned and saw his father for the first time in his life. He looked into the spirit face of his father. Slowly he reached out his hand to touch his father’s hand, and as they touched I cut the scene. I had an instinct that what would transpire would be either talky or maudlin, so I cut it. “Where can we go now?” I asked. “What’s the next scene?” “He can go back to his grandmother’s,” Brad said. He was starting to become filled with energy. “He needs to tell her about this.” “Okay,” I answered.

The woman who played the grandmother came back onstage. Immediately they went into the next scene, and this time there was some enthusiasm from Brad. A sense of wonder at what had just taken place between him and his father. The grandmother, too, was excited by Brad’s account of his meeting with his father. Both treated his dream as if it had really been a real event, and a significant one. The grandmother encouraged Brad to now go back to his mother.

I cut the scene and the woman playing Brad’s mother came back onstage. The grandmother left. Brad came into the house with a newfound power. He had things to tell his mother now with the courage that he’d found by bonding with his father. The mother sensed this and tried to circumvent what Brad was leading up to, but he didn’t allow it. He forced his mother to listen to him, to hear things about her old boyfriend that she didn’t want to hear. “He raped me,” Brad said. “Not once but continuously, for four years.” The mother shut her ears. She denied and denied it, but Brad
forced her to accept the truth of what he was saying, and that somewhere, despite her denials, she knew. The scene ended again in pain and despair.

“Where do we go now?” I asked again. By this time the group knew that I wasn’t going to let go until the boy was somehow redeemed and given a life. A woman in the back said, “I have an idea.” “What is it?” I asked. “Can I just tell Brad about it?” “Sure,” I said. She talked privately with Brad for a moment and jumped into the scene. She pulled up a chair and was instantly in a car, driving down a road. Brad came onstage as a hitchhiker. The woman picked him up and after he settled himself in the car she asked him where he was going.

“Santa Fe,” Brad said.

“What are you going there for?” the woman asked amiably. “It’s my home,” said Brad. “School’s out and I’m going back to be with my mother.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” said the woman. “Where are you in school?”

“I’m ending my senior year,” Brad said. “Then I’m going to college.”

“What are you going to be studying?” the woman asked.

“Astrophysics,” Brad said.

“That’s an unusual thing for an Indian to be going into.”

“I’m joking,” said Brad easily. “I’m probably going to be a teacher.”

They chatted pleasantly for a few minutes, the woman rambling on happily about her plans for the weekend, and
I slowly faded out on the scene. Brad had given himself a life. He was back in school, somehow reconciled with his mother, and envisioning a future for himself. The resolution was subtle, upbeat, and very moving. Realistic, plausible, and positive without a Hollywood ending. The entire event had taken over an hour and every moment in it was true and honest and perfectly placed. It felt like a brilliantly conceived play that had been rehearsed for a month and had already received rave reviews. The workshop was over and I breathed a sigh of relief.

I found out the next day from Fidel that the people in the play had called each other that night and were planning to get together and try to write a transcript of what they had just created. They had a vague plan to piece it together and perform it around New Mexico. “We’re probably going to change the last scene,” Fidel said. I didn’t press the point. I loved the way it had ended. I thought it had been quietly revelatory, but it wasn’t my piece. I found out a few weeks later that they had abandoned the project. It had been too much of an ordeal.

As I went over the experience in the following weeks, and got past my own intense emotional reaction to material this difficult, I could not help but believe that their creating it, sharing it, putting it out there for each other in such a communal and embracing way had a lasting, positive effect for all those who were involved.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

So Suzanne and I are in Hawaii, doing a week-long workshop. There are only about nine people in the group, and as a result the work is pretty concentrated, pretty intense. Among us is a sweet, gentle Japanese-American woman in her early forties named Karen. She’s a psychologist, quite serious, attentive, and intelligent but also reserved, and her work is not terribly inspired. It’s as if she’s trying to go unnoticed.

This is a rather odd syndrome for someone taking an improvisation workshop, but it often crops up, and when it does I begin to see it as early as the first exercise, the imaginary-ball-throwing game. Invariably, there are three or four people who never get the ball thrown to them; they seem to have negative magnetism. It’s fascinating. During the many times we’ve played this game Suzanne and I have tried to find some common thread that runs through these people. What could it be about them that seems to repel the ball?

We watch carefully. They are not particularly unattractive, imposing, or unfriendly looking. They are not actively hostile. It’s too early in the experience for any of the others to have developed hostility toward them because at this point in the workshops everyone is too busy trying to make a good impression. So it can’t be an intentional shutout, and there’s nothing in their demeanor that is particularly off-putting, but I do sense a kind of cloud around them, a haze that renders them somehow invisible. Perhaps they’ve come here because they’re aware of their invisibility and are trying to find a way to break out of it. I don’t know. Suzanne and I have finally come to the conclusion that they must be unconsciously projecting a quality that says, “I don’t belong here. I’ll never be part of the group; no one will ever throw the ball to me.” We can’t figure out what else it could be. But when we see this taking place Suzanne and I both make an effort to include these people in the game. If no one else throws the ball to them, we do, and at this stage of the workshop I don’t feel badly about forcing the issue a little. Later on when people are designing their own scenes, and picking the people they want, the issue comes up again. Some people don’t get chosen, others end up being in half a dozen scenes, and at this point I have decided to keep out of it. Perhaps there is a better approach to this issue but I haven’t found it. Yet.

But back to Hawaii. On the evening of the third day, at the end of the session, Karen comes over to Suzanne and they walk up the hill to dinner. People often confide in Suzanne when they’re shy about approaching me. Perhaps
they feel they don’t want to burden me, perhaps they’re afraid of what they’ll hear, I don’t know. With Suzanne they know they’ll get a sympathetic ear.

“I’m frustrated,” she says to Suzanne. “Why?” Suzanne asks her. “I want to be funny. I want to do something funny,” says Karen. “Well, it’s probably better not to force the issue,” Suzanne replies. “You know the workshop isn’t about being funny, it’s about being spontaneous and present in the moment. All of your work is very present, very accessible. Some of the best scenes all week have been very serious. You’ve seen that yourself.”

“Well,” says Karen, “I want to be funny.”

Suzanne commiserates, trying to make her feel better, but it doesn’t help, and Karen goes back to her cabin frustrated and unhappy.

The next day we’re doing scenes where the instruction is that each participant has to be a leader of some kind. Karen has decided that she is going to lead a group therapy session. It’s a bit of a stretch, but it’s in the ballpark, so she gets ready. She sets up a group of chairs in a semicircle and asks for a volunteer to be the patient. A woman named Beth says she’ll do it, and the scene begins.

“
The
patient? One patient in a group therapy scene?” I ask myself. “How’s she going to handle this?”

Beth knocks on an imaginary door. Karen says, “Come in.”