The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows (57 page)

Collectively, these three women gave me on-the-job training in Benedictine devotion, friendship and determination.

Soon after this collaboration, I became involved in numerous projects Mother Dolores provided, up to and including this memoir. Early on, I directed and videotaped a reading of Helene Hanff’s charming
84 Charing Cross Road
with several nuns playing men’s roles. Part of Mother Dolores scheme for this project was to give the women more self-confidence in their ability to read well at mealtimes and, in the process, unseat their innate timidity. Twenty some years later, it would give me pleasure to know that a number of the women considered our little reading a breakthrough.

Difficult to imagine, but I managed to stage a vigorous rendition of
A Chorus Line
’s signature number for the novitiate’s annual presentation to the professed Community—complete with gold top hats over veils, scapulars over tights. Not all of my efforts were successful. Very quickly I found I was not the right person to translate the life of Saint Gertrude the Great into play form.

With each new mission it became clear that Mother Dolores was making me available to the Community. I remember Mother David telling me, “She throws out the line.” Well, she was not stingy with me.

My home during these projects was Saint Joseph’s, the men’s guesthouse, which had been both chapel and living quarters for the original nuns from France. On the second floor there are eight small cells, which, unlike the cells in the monastery building, have running water. Each has a narrow cot—a three-inch mattress on a wood frame, no bedsprings. I’ve done time in most of them and have never slept as soundly anywhere else in the world.

The downstairs area—basically one huge room dominated by an impressive stone fireplace and a long table that can easily seat a dozen or more—reflects the original purpose of the building as a recreational facility for the factory workers. You can still see dart holes in the walls.

Three meals are served daily. Although the Benedictine Order is vegetarian, meat, fowl and fish are frequently on the guest menu, which always boasts homegrown vegetables, fruit, the best bread in the world and, if you’ve hit it right, Mother Scholastica’s peach marmalade.

A basket containing the carte du jour must be picked up by a guest at the main entrance, but a nun is on hand to set up and serve. Guests are expected to do the dishes and tidy up after meals and, upon departing, to remake their beds for the next visitor. Wednesday is bag-lunch day. It gives the women who work in the kitchen a breather, and, because I worked inside the enclosure, it gave me an opportunity to get to know some of the Community by sharing this lunchtime, a custom that began with Mother Jerome and Mother Irene and continues to this day.

I came early to the thought that Regina Laudis is the crossroads of the world. The guests who have visited make up a varied as well as impressive list of men and women of achievement in all fields—religion, government and politics, journalism, literature, nutrition, broadcasting, the military and the arts. I have broken bread and done dishes with many of them in Saint Joseph’s.

During the work on the 1980 film, I frequently did dishes with Stephen Concordia, a young student who was in the land program. Stephen was studying for his master’s degree in music at the New England Conservatory of Music, and when he got wind of our film he eagerly offered his services to compose a score based upon Gregorian chant for the finished documentary.

Chapter 53 of the
Rule of Saint Benedict
states, “Let all guests that come be received like Christ.” Thus, cordiality and generosity expand the Regina Laudis maxim of prayer and work to include the basic human act of hospitality.

I was alone in the guest house one evening when five priests arrived—four from New York and one from the Philippines. Mother Maria Immaculata, who has been in charge of Saint Joseph’s for a number of years, wasn’t available to meet them and later asked me how tall they were. I thought it was an odd question. Not so. She needed to know so that she could assign them to the right cells because some of the beds are longer than others. That is Benedictine hospitality.

—
Maintaining all the diverse works here would never be possible without the participation of our guests and the assistance of many generous lay professionals. We do not give formal retreats, but guests are invited to reflect on the monastic experience and welcome to join us in manual work. Working together or meeting together provides a context for giving Saint Benedict’s spiritual principles a practical application, connecting the body with the soul and one person with another
.

The night we finished the film, Mother Dolores got permission for us to share supper in the carpentry shop. Our table was a plywood sheet atop two sawhorses, but there were flowers and candles on it. We dined on the famous chicken pies from Phillips Diner in Woodbury—baked for us in the monastery kitchen—and we were able to toast the completion of our film with a decent red. It had been over twenty years since we had had dinner together.

The 1980 film spoke to me while it was being assembled, and it has continued to put me immediately and emotionally back into the time it was made. It visually writes Community life, and two sequences have special meaning for me: the first firing of our kiln and the building of the dovecot
.

The outdoor kiln was fashioned after an ancient Italian design by master potter Alexander Giampietro, Mother Perpetua’s father. The first firing began at Matins, and Community members and guests took turns feeding wood into the furnace throughout the night and into the next day until the inside of the kiln reached the a temperature hot enough to bake clay
.

The door to the kiln has the shape of a human form walking right into the oven, pot in hand, and the analogy to our development in monastic life made me gasp. Before it is fired, a pot can be remolded, but afterward the only way the clay can change shape is if it explodes. Consecration is the high fire of monastic life. We live the same process and in the same suspense
.

The dovecot was the first big undertaking for the Closed Community. It was also an important moment in the life of our Community because it was the first structure on the hill that Lady Abbess had envisioned as the site for the future monastery
.

The project represented years of commitment, from collecting the stones to building the archway. Completing the archway was exciting. We placed in the center of a wooden form the arch stone, which is the one that all the other stones press against to stay suspended. We interlocked the rest of the stones on either side of the arch stone. But the wooden form supporting the arch would have to be removed, and we didn’t know whether the stones would hold together or collapse
.

The moment the form was taken away—and this is captured in the film—we heard a loud crack. We held our breath as the stones settled into place. The arch held! The nuns and the laypeople clasped hands and joyously danced back and forth through that proud arch
.

For me, building the archway is a metaphor for much in monastic life, specifically the work of the Education Deanery. Just as the builders carefully placed stone upon stone over the wooden form, the deanery was fitting new sisters into the Community in relation to the needs they fulfilled. The builders didn’t know if their archway would stand, and neither did I know if the deanery would prevail
.

Thirty-Four

At the time of my First Vows, I awakened to a new sensitivity. I not only recognized the need for change but might now be in a position to influence changes
.

The reading at mealtimes, for example, had always disturbed me because it is a daily obedience—all of us have to read—and I couldn’t help but be aware that a lot of the women just didn’t know how to present a reading. I thought I should try to do something about that, and the best way could be through plays. It would give my sisters access to a kind of experience I believed they needed. As far as I could tell, no demands beyond skits to entertain the Community on feast days had ever been made of them
.

The skits were a time-honored slice of monastic life—as a novice, I took part in a number of them—and, though the amateur level of performance was endearing, I found myself itching to improve the presentations
.

Mother Placid was the first to encourage her: “The skits were the way we let off steam. It was all fun, but not a real vehicle to take the instinctual stuff and hook it up where it could be useful for a person to grow into another level. I felt from the beginning that, even as a novice, she pushed for that. She understood the dynamic. She was living it, coming to grips with it, moving with it in a way that could start a reform.”

The first collaborative venture was an allegorical playlet
, Synergetic Myth,
which Mother David wrote and I directed as a puppet show. We presented the show over and over in a series of very short performances in the art studio, which was the only space available and could accommodate an audience of just four persons at a time
.

Other short exercises were presented until I found a little gem of a one-act play based on the Old Testament story of Sarah and Tobias. I thought this play offered us a challenge to begin to experience sacramental theater and hoped it might lift the women to a new self-awareness. Reverend Mother gave me permission to proceed, and Miss Jantzer volunteered to add choreography
.

I began to appreciate any possibility that gave me a step up. Inspiration came from my Broadway days. I sent for a Samuel French catalog and searched for plays that contained good scenes for readings. I also expanded my theatrical boundaries and wrote and directed a one-act comedy I called
Mousepiller,
which would accommodate all of the novitiate in their annual presentation for the professed Community
.

Interest among the Community in these amateur theatricals swelled and affected what we chose to present at our traditional Mardi Gras evenings. By the eighties we were regularly presenting more ambitious offerings—scenes from Shakespeare with the whole Community participating
.

“I guess you could say Shakespeare brought us together”, recalled Mother Lucia Kuppens. In the mid-seventies, well before her entrance, she was Patricia Kuppens, a member of the Closed Community. “I was then doing my doctoral work on Shakespeare at Yale and some of us in the Closed Community had the idea to present a full production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. I was elected to speak to Mother Dolores about the project.

“I asked Mother Dolores if she would work with us on it. ‘Do you want me to answer you as a mother or as a professional?’ she asked.

“I bravely said, ‘As a professional, of course.’

“ ‘Well, then, there is no way you can do this as a conventional production. Why don’t you try it as a puppet show? I think that’s probably proportionate to what you’re capable of.’

“It was a good moment, a characteristic one as I came to know Mother Dolores. She’s always insisted, ‘Start with something that’s
real
.’

“You know, we did it
—A Midsummer Night’s Dream
with puppets. We spent the whole summer working on it, with Mother Placid making the puppets and Mother Dolores helping me direct it. We did it for kids but mainly it was for us. It was for the pure joy of it.”

The group got compliments and requests for more
. Snow White
and
Beauty and the Beast
were presented, again for children, this time in a tent we called the Unicorn Theater. There was a natural, almost organic evolution from those little entertainments to presentations before adult audiences at our summer fairs. The fairs had started in August 1950 as a fundraiser organized by friends of Regina Laudis; we sold our jam and our cheese and took kids on hayrides. By the late seventies we were hosting thirty thousand people each summer
.

In 1978 Lady Abbess had an inspiration to do Alfred de Musset’s play
A Caprice.
She remembered this comedy of manners from her student days in France and felt that it would have significance for a modern audience. I seized this moment to enlist the professional participation of my Paramount friend James Douglas and his wife, Dawn
.

James and Dawn Douglas first visited the monastery in 1967. They visited again the following year. When James left the Hollywood TV series
Peyton Place
in the mid-seventies, he was offered a leading role in
As the World Turns
, produced in New York City. He packed up his family and moved to the East Coast. Jim and Dawn maintained a close relationship with Mother Dolores, becoming oblates when the transplanted Douglas family moved from Manhattan to Connecticut to be nearer to her.

“It was bound to be”, Jim said with a smile and a shrug. “When Dolores left Hollywood, we gave her a farewell dinner on her last evening. After dinner, when Dawn and I were doing dishes, Dolores wine glass and mine both fell to the floor. The stems of the broken glasses formed an unmistakable cross. Dawn looked at me and said, ‘Well, I guess we’re in for the long run.’ ”