A clean theatre and a clean yard is a loved theatre and a loved yard

This saying of Eugenio Barba's gains more meaning when you see him come in on a Saturday to vaccuum his foyer and office. Or pause on his way to rehearsal to remove a dead leaf from a lobby plant. Or you see Julia stoop to straighten the shoes outside the White Room door. Or when you get assigned your own room to clean -- as does everyone at the Odin -- and you realize how this changes things. It's not THEIR theatre any more, where I'm a guest... it's OUR theatre, and that's MY hallway you're tracking mud through, and hey, hey, hey! It puts us all in relationship.

"Ethics is relationship," says Leonid Anisimov.

When Leonid's Vladivostok company arrived in 1998 for their Seattle/Tacoma tour of Lower Depths, they went straight to the theatre. This was after having flown for 12 hours. "No," we said, "We'll take you to your host families, you can have a shower, sleep." But no -- to the theatre they went.

"This space is full of lies," said Leonid, looking around the blackbox where they would be performing. "It is not possible to clean it entirely." He looked some more. "It will be difficult to do good work here." And with that, the whole company dived in, to begin their very good work. Which involved mops, brooms, dust cloths -- things that that constantly-used school theatre had not known in years.

I am kinesthetic. I had felt the jangly static of that space myself, but didn't know a word for it.

Two days ago, I met with the Starbucks manager. It went well. We talked for over an hour. She asked what I did. "I'm a theatre director," I said. "Which means I'm good at reading the energy of a space." I paused. "Like here," I said, feeling for it. "This feels like it's half full of a new, young, growing energy -- like young plants, or a new river -- and half full of something inert, stuck, blocking." Her eyes widened and went glazy. "That's exactly right," she said, "EXACTLY. In more ways than you know." And with that, she was off -- that's when we really got down to it, talking about business.

So what's under all this? I am realizing that my home -- where home means house, yard, money, body, habits -- does not look like a loved house and a loved yard. It looks more like an unkempt backstage -- except for my housemate's areas, which are spotless.

You can't have good ethics in theatre and bad ethics in the rest of life. Ethics may start in theatre, but they spread.