PCR
COMMENTARY:
Reflections of an Amateur Actor |
Greg
Schneider, Pacific Union College
In May of this year I played "Tevye," the
male lead in "Fiddler on the Roof." In an ambitious move
for a small college theater troop, we performed in the newly remodeled
Lincoln Theater, on the grounds of the veterans hospital in Yountville,
California. It is the largest and perhaps most expensive performing
arts venue in Napa county. We sold almost 4000 tickets in five
performances and finished the production in the black. With each
curtain call we brought the audience to its feet. It was one of
the most demanding and satisfying things I've done. Kelly has asked
if I have some reflections on the experience from the perspectives
of Person, Culture, and/or Religion.
Starting with culture, or subculture
in my case, I am Seventh-day Adventist by birth and nurture. Seventh-day
Adventism is one of those American originals, a denominations that
emerged out of antebellum America's ferment of religious freedom
in what came to be called the "burned-over district" of hinterland New England
and western New York state—"Burned-over" because
of the persistent waves of Protestant revivalistic fervor for which
it was known. Seventh-day Adventism in my upbringing retained much
of its ascetic rejection of the worldly habits and pleasures and
its zeal for holy work that would win people to its sectarian gospel
before the imminent advent of Jesus Christ. It also set itself
apart from nearly all other Christian groups by its insistence
that the only legitimate day of worship was the seventh day, a
sabbath to be observed from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.
Thus I began my life among a "peculiar people"—we
used the phrase as a badge of honor when I was a child—a people
deliberately on the margin in human eyes, but uniquely precious
in God's eyes.
Sabbath-keeping was and is a major part of my
religious and cultural identity. One of the best ways to evoke
an intimate conversation among people reared as Seventh-day Adventists
is to ask them how their family welcomed the Sabbath on Friday
night. Every family has different traditions, but nearly every
family has given their children something to remember, and mostly
the memories are warm and nourishing. In general, however, the
mode of observing Sabbath day was derived from the Puritans, not
the Jews. Sabbath was the day to refrain from doing your own pleasure;
to restrain the body for the sake of the soul, a weekly reinforcement
of the subculture's pervasive inner-worldly asceticism.
One powerfully
expressive bodily activity that the subculture not only allowed
but nurtured, however, was singing. Congregational hymns, vocal
solos for "special music," and especially
choirs in church and church schools were staples of my growing
up. I have come to appreciate more and more Erikson's brief but
repeated mentions of music and singing in the story of young Luther's
epochal Protestant identity formation. I am a child of Luther at
least in that sense. Singing has long been a passion for me, congregational
hymns my favorite part of Sabbath worship, and singing in choirs
my chief form of artistic expression. Indeed, if I had had the
talent and the confidence, I think I might have made music my profession.
Ever
reminding me that I had neither the talent, nor any foundation
for the confidence, however, has been the defining tale of little
Greggie the first grader, coming home breathless with excitement
and pleasure with himself, to tell Momma that he was a "WHISPERER!" It
was a tale told enough times by my parents, and occasionally my
siblings, to make clear to me 1) how musically "challenged" I
was and continued to be as I grew up and 2) how ridiculously inflated
and out of touch was my 6-year-old grandiose self. Early in my
first year at church-sponsored elementary school, the music teacher
discovered that I was one of those few who could not carry a tune.
In accord with longstanding pedagogical custom, we the tone-deaf
were instructed to sit on the first row of the music classroom
and whisper the songs, while those in the tiers rising behind us
sang out. The hope, apparently, was that we would pick up the tune
from the flood of sound flowing around us. Concerned for our young
self-esteem, the music teacher staged a conversation with the school
principal to the effect that we who had been shushed should not
take it to heart, that there was yet hope for us.
The only fragment
of this dialogue that I "got" was
the part where the two women told us that some members of the "Treble
Choir," the school's elite touring singing group staffed by
imposing, eminently idealizable seventh and eighth graders, had
been whisperers in their early days. Oblivious, at the time, to
the shame of wearing the equivalent of the musical dunce cap, I
concluded that being a whisperer put me on the fast track to stardom,
and that perception is what fueled my grand announcement to Mom
that day.
Eventually I did learn to sing, even to the point
of membership in the Treble Choir and solos in my seventh and eighth
grade years, including a syrupy romantic piece rendered in high
soprano for my sister's wedding shower. There were, and are, distinct
limits to my musical prowess, however. Although I sang in choirs
from third grade on, I did not catch on to reading music from a
vocal score until sometime in my first year of college. I got by
entirely by memorizing the musical lines I heard from other singers
or from the piano. I can't count to save my life, again relying
on memory and a kind of felt intuition about rhythms, rather than
on any firm knowledge of the theory of time signatures and note
values. I am pitch challenged, often confusing pitch with timbre
and having to recalibrate my sense of intervals depending on what
register of my voice I am using. Sometimes I'm sharp, sometimes
I'm flat, and sometimes I can't tell which. I learned not to thrust
myself into the limelight in musical groups, for fear my meager
resources would fail me at a time of maximum exposure.
I warned
Mei Ann Teo, director of our production, that getting pitches
and making the music work would be a challenge for me, but she
chose me over the other guy auditioning for Tevye, a professional
music teacher and performer with several major roles in community
musical theater to his credit. My voice in auditions for Fiddler
sounded thin next to his, it seemed to me, but nothing to be
dancing, in my upbringing, happened only on
the Devil's territory, the land of illicit and inarticulate erotic
enticement that would lure me to destruction
ashamed of. I have a decent voice, actually,
and that, plus my readiness to be a good "heads-up" team-player,
seems to have kept me in demand as a choral singer despite my other
limitations. So I have kept singing, kept looking for my expressive
space and place in the one kind of music I can make. I guess I
wanted this role in part because I hoped that maybe the late-blooming,
slow-learning fifty-something singer, himself a father of adult
children, could claim the artistic place in the sun that the grandiose
six-year-old had imagined would be his.
There were other reasons.
There was and is this obscure push to confront and overcome anxieties,
to surmount self-consciousness, find a zone where the message
matters so much more than I do that I can lose myself in it. But
one must find the self before one can creatively lose it. I've
just talked about finding my voice, a major component of the self.
I also had to find my body, and that was a lot harder.
"Question: `Why don't Seventh-day Adventists make love standing
up?' Answer: `It might lead to dancing.'" An old joke, I know,
and used by a lot of groups other than Adventists. Nevertheless,
dancing, in my upbringing, happened only on the Devil's territory,
the land of illicit and inarticulate erotic enticement that would
lure me to destruction. Curiously, I find in myself a deep connection
between dancing's threat to self-cohesion and that posed by athletics.
Team sports were always a locus of dread, for me, as much as attraction,
a place where the jocks excelled and I was always uncertain of
both my skill and my manhood. In fact, though not particularly
gifted, I was often better than I thought I was on the softball
or football fields or the basketball court. Athletics demand confidence,
however, so I was consistently an underachiever. Nor did I ever
understand or accept the phallic banter and self-promotion that
seemed a inevitable part of ball-field discourse, a ticket into
the community of players. I never wanted in, that much, but I dreaded
the derision that came when either I stayed out or tried ineffectually
to act like I was in. The connection between dancing and team sports,
it seems to me, has something to do with the impermissibly proud
presentation of the body. But why impermissible? Because pride
of "the flesh" is immoral, unspiritual, or maybe just
because pride goes before a (the?) Fall, the unbearable shame of
making a cosmic fool of myself?
Along comes "If I Were a Rich Man," the
longest solo in the musical and the moment when Tevye first appears
all by himself to convey his inner life to the audience and win
them over to his story. It's a life story that demands to be danced,
not just sung. But I can't dance! The quiet but firm message from
director Mei Ann and choreographer Casey Dacanay, moreover, was
that the basic ideas for movement were going to have come from
me; they weren't going to tell me what to do. That created an unbridgeable
gap, because I did not know what to do. Indeed, standing on the
rehearsal stage and singing, "Daidle deedle daidle digguh
digguh deedle daidle dum," I did not know what I was doing.
They told me that Tevye, all alone in that scene, would be necessarily
the focus of the audience's attention, and that I did not really
have to move "that much." What did "that much" mean?
What I knew was that there was a buzz of expectation in the wider
college community, and that every other person who talked to me
casually about the role said something like, "Oh yeah, `If
I were a rich man!' Are you gonna do the dance?!" Some of
them even fell into poor pale caricatures of the dance from the
movie, arms high and flailing, hips gyrating, making pathetic and
ridiculous what Topol (lead actor in the film) had made funny and
glorious. I cringed inside, thinking, "Oh God! That's what
I'm going to look like." But I also knew that our audiences
would be looking for me to move, not just sing and talk.
So it was
not moral scruples or residual sexual guilt that made "Rich
Man" such a huge mountain to climb. It was the threat of shame,
the deep narcissistic wound of putting the body and spirit on display
in an all out effort to win the hearts and minds of cast and crew,
first, and then of our audience only to earn their derision, contempt,
or mere boredom instead. That lurking dread became particularly
intense at the first all-day rehearsal we did in Lincoln Theater.
The space, populated by 1200 elegant, empty purple seats, was intimidating
enough just in itself. I dropped lots of lines and, sure enough,
missed lots of pitches, as I struggled to control my distraction.
Early in the first act, as I delivered the monologue leading up
to "Rich Man," I felt a dull persistent pain in the back
of my consciousness, a weight dragging me down, sapping my energy,
making its presence most emphatically felt at the moment I began
to sing. I have come to personify that dull pain as a kind of demon
child who, confronted with a demand to perform, runs screaming
into a corner and curls up in a sobbing resentful fetal ball. There
were private moments following that grueling day when I was literally
in tears.
I felt a dull persistent pain in the back of
my consciousness, a weight dragging me down, sapping my energy,
making its presence most emphatically felt at the moment I began
to sing.
My little demon brat might well have got the
better of me had not our choral director and vocal coach, Gennevieve
Kibble, given me a hand up. I had sung in her choirs for several
years, and she had told me last summer that "Fiddler" was coming up, making a point of asking me to audition. When I
admitted to her that I was at a loss about what to do for movement
during the refrains in "Rich Man," she turned our vocal
coaching session into an impromptu dance class. She worked out
a basic grammar of steps that over the next few weeks I was able
to elaborate into something Casey and Mei Ann could work with.
It was wonderful when, after a run-through of what I'd worked out,
Mei Ann exclaimed that this was so much better than before. "That's
because I didn't know what I was doing before," I replied.
Then Casey smiled, "Well you do now!" Coming from our
choreographer, whose every move was grace and beauty, whether walking
down the hall or walking our 32-member cast through an ensemble
dance number, that remark was magical. In the end, I never found
the spontaneity and joy in movement, still less the precision,
that I think Gennie, Casey, and Mei Ann had hoped for, but I didn't
embarrass anybody either. (Except, perhaps, my children, the younger
of whom said watching me was, "Weird!") The most common
compliment I got about my dancing was that it "looked natural." Given
where I'd come from, that was plenty good enough.
What really made
the personal struggles worth it was a great story and the quality
of the community that formed around the project of telling it. "Fiddler
on the Roof" is a major moment in Anglophone culture in which
a story of Jewry becomes a universal story. A key point in opening
up the story, it seems to me, is the quiet but tremendous change
at the end of the play when Tevye includes his estranged daughter,
Chava, and her gentile husband, Fyedka, in his prayer of "God
be with you." In Sholem Aleichem's Tevye, The Dairyman,
the book that inspired the play, Chava is accepted back into the
family only on elder daughter Tzeital's desperate demand and only
after she leaves her gentile husband and returns to Tevye's house
to join her family in exile. In the original story; the gentile
husband has no name and, finally, no place in the family. This
change in Fiddler makes Tevye's story accessible to all of us who
have tried to love and protect our children and give them a home
in a community and tradition even while we recognize that leaving
home is inevitable and that tradition exists to serve love, not
vice versa.
Stories of Jewry and Judaism have been equipment
for living my gentile life during all my adult years. The film
version of "Fiddler" has
been part of my imagination since it appeared in the 1970s. Before
that, finding Chaim Potok's The Promise during my
first year of graduate school was a major help in making sense
of the cultural shift I was undergoing by choosing to go to Chicago
and transcend my Seventh-day Adventist ghetto upbringing. That
was also the year I found I and Thou, Martin Buber's
lofty mystical classic that half-converted, half-confirmed me in
the truth that "all real living is meeting."
As a parent
seeking to reconstruct a tradition for my children after having
deconstructed it for myself, I found the practice of having challah,the
braided Jewish Sabbath bread, a useful ritual, one that my children
loved and that became a center of hospitality for them and their
friends. More recently the officers of our campus chapter of
Amnesty International, for which I am faculty sponsor, have identified
Friday nights at Schneiders with challah as
one of the indispensable perks of student leadership. Challah also
became my gift to the cast and crew of Fiddler during the extra-long
rehearsal and performance days when we did pot-luck to keep us
all fed and functioning. I think the bread got reviews at least
as good as my singing and acting, and certainly better than my
dancing.
Elie Wiesel's The Trial of God,
a potent exercise in theodicy via reader's theater, became another
point of identification with Jewry and Judaism when Mei Ann directed
it as a readers' theater performance five years ago and cast me
as Berish. Berish is the rage-and-sorrow-filled tavern keeper who
in the year or two prior to the action of the play has watched
his daughter's wedding day broken up by a local pogrom in which the
rabbi and the groom and most of the guests were murdered and his
daughter gang-raped, all while he was forced to watch. The trial
of God is one he demands of a traveling troupe of Jewish players
who stumble upon his bleak inn during Purim, hoping to earn some
money by entertaining the local Jewish community. Berish plays
prosecutor, while a shadowy stranger in the tavern is the only
one who can be recruited to defend God. The stranger reveals himself
as Satan at the end of the play, just as he invites in the Russian
rabble to finish the pogrom they had only interrupted earlier.
One
of the significant challenges of learning the role of Tevye was
to get it into my mind and body that Tevye is NOT Berish. As late
as the last dress rehearsal, Mei Ann was coaching me on "If
I Were a Rich Man" to play the rubato coda, "Lord who
made the lion and the lamb/ You decreed I should be what I am .
. ." as less angry and more pleading. I learned that sorrow
and rage are pretty easy for me. Tevye's way of being with God—a
special blend of joking/complaining/pleading submissiveness, all
within an uncanny familiarity—was something evolving for me
all the way through the performances.
Perhaps this fact merely reveals
my individual character, but I wonder if this difficulty in getting
beyond anger and grief also reflects our current age of terror,
revenge, mirrored ideological rigidities, and the horror and shame
I feel at being party to my nation-state's blind, stumbling violence
in Iraq and elsewhere. My more deliberate response to the war was
to help found my college's chapter of Amnesty International. Even
though "Fiddler" competed
with the local chapter for my time, I felt that doing the play
expressed motives akin to those that keep me going in the work
of human rights advocacy.
Identifying with the Jewish experience
in the sense of being the Other, pariah people, eternal outsiders,
worked well for me years ago as sectarian conservative Protestant
making his way into what I took to be a bastion of liberalism and
unbelief, the University of Chicago. It worked also for the incurably
inhibited nerd amongst the "big men" on my high school and college campuses.
It worked just as well in a kind of perverse/reverse as I returned
to the Adventist ghetto (western edition) of Pacific Union College,
Angwin, CA, city set on a hill, and found that my education and
credentials from "worldly" Chicago made me "Other" to
the ordained ministers who made the majority of PUC's Religion
Faculty, especially after the "young turks" of my first
years at PUC were purged in the aftermath of the heresy scandals
that erupted in my denomination and centered at my
I wonder if this difficulty in getting beyond anger and grief
also reflects our current age of terror, revenge, mirrored ideological
rigidities...
campus during the first five years of my career.
All these peripheral positions made imagining myself a Jew in time
of pogroms all too easy, easier than it should be, given the real
horrors of pogroms and the merely metaphorical use I've made of
the stories.
There was further paradox in all these feelings
of identity with the marginal. In the play I was not marginal;
I was the lead, the man whose role, and eventually whose person,
was essential to the production—marginal everywhere except among
the people playing the marginalized people. I got sick about three
weeks before we opened, and the director told me not to show up
to rehearsals for a couple of days. When I came back, the response
of the diminutive young woman who played Bielke, one of Tevye's
not-yet-marriageable daughters, condensed a widely felt response
among the cast:
"I'm so glad you're back!" she exclaimed. "Everyone's
been kind of depressed and kinda dead without you here; you energize
the whole show."
It was a remark meant to be complimentary, but
I knew enough of Durkheim and social systems to tell myself not
to take it this observation too personally. The lead actor in most
plays, and especially this one, serves as symbol of the whole,
as "totem" for
the social bonds and moral energy of the group. The cast would
have felt "down" regardless of who was supposed to be
there as Tevye but was sick instead. Nevertheless, the cast and
crew of young, talented, and dedicated musicians and actors were
consistently supportive and affirming of me and each other during
the weeks and months of rehearsal we shared together. One of our
gatherings on stage for "notes" at the end a dress rehearsal
became a ritual of community with something of the feel of the
old revivalistic meetings for testimony and prayer that I knew
from growing up Adventist, and from studying Methodists as an academic.
So much of the positive energy focused on "Tevye" that
maintaining psychic balance and resisting the rush to grandiosity
and inflation was a challenge. The whole experience was an especially
intense version of the precarious balancing act we all perform
through our lives: how to learn who we are and what we can promise
to the world and how to claim the space and attention we need in
order to serve justly those who count on us to make good our promises.
As
I suggested at the start, the performances went well, and I delivered
on my promises to cast, crew, and wider community. I still meet
people who go out of their way to tell me they enjoyed the play
and my part in it. I have a file on my computer in which I have
collected notes on such encounters, and in an entry dated two weeks
after the close of our production I find the following: " I
really did do something good. Not enough people in the world are
lucky enough to be able to say that sentence with so little qualification
as I am able to right now."
That was then. Despite my best efforts to keep
from getting carried away, coming down off the high of performance
made finishing the school year and pulling myself together in order
to plan for what comes next a good deal harder than usual. And
what comes next is not quite the same this year. Entirely unexpected,
but very welcome, has been a year-long appointment to an endowed
position that will relieve me of most of my normal teaching load
and set me up to renew a research and writing agenda that, candidly,
I really thought was dead. Next Spring, about a year after my stint
as Tevye, I must deliver a lecture to the campus and a report to
the board of the endowment, telling them what I have done with
the extra time and money they have invested in me. It is a bit
scary. I don't know for sure that I have anything further to say,
academically, that really needs to be heard. But I do have a day
job—I am
a teacher, a curious calling that combines knowledge and performance.
I've recently had a good experience on the performance side. So
now I return to the deep play that undergirds the knowledge side. |
