Iron Goddess tea, given circumstances

It's a peculiar sensation to be, 5 days a week, building a play in blindingly short time -- for my process, anyway -- and 2 days a week be building another play with plenty of time. Obviously, the second play is shorter than the first one. And oceans deeper.

I feel like this is one big koan.

The best handle I have on it so far is finding people who have done big plays in even less time, without feeling rushed. Just knowing it's possible, even easy for some people, gives me hope. Like when you know a differential equation is solvable.

Sigh.

On other fronts -- Marina, a Russian/American actress in my class, took me to Thai food last night, to catch up on class which she'd had to miss. For any of you in the Seattle area, check out Thin Pan Noodles, a Thai restaurant in Kirkland -- and especially, try their thin pan noodles. Like pad see yew, but tastier.

Class yesterday was fantastic. Wild, bulgy, all kinds of breakthroughs. We did our last slowtens -- with two people with foot problems and one with hip problems, this form is not really available for us -- and they were beautiful. We did them holding a piece of Nature we'd just gathered from the rainy day outside -- a twig, a purple flower & forked stick, a small bit of leafy bud, a spidery branch, a tall leafy branch, a prickly twig. On the first cross, the people interacted. On the turn, the people disappeared and the Nature interacted.

I was happy with my introduction to Stanislavski's system, to how to meet the text. "Come to the text as to a lover," I began. And, "The playwright listens to god, and writes down what he hears. This takes all his attention." I KNOW things about texts now. About Stanislavski. For the first several years I taught, I repeated what my teachers had said -- but now I have developed that webbed underwork, the experience to know WHY we do this, and how it serves us. How sometimes it is our only lifeline.

As time goes on, I feel increasingly responsible to transmit the lineage precisely. In the early years, I was drunk with the golden moment -- I just wanted to immerse the actors in NOW, in THIS, in HUMAN BEAUTY, and leave them shining.

Leonid Anisimov says, "Do not teach your students to be students. Teach them to be teachers."

It is only now, my seventh year of teaching, that I am starting to know how to do that.

I think the Odin had a lot to do with it. While I was there, working with the apprentice actors, I just thought, "This is fun." I didn't want to leave it. After I got home, I started to realize how important it was. At Christmas, I heard from the Odin apprentices and realized -- it was one of the most important things any of us did, all year.

This present moment is all we have.

I always turn into a ballet master about week 4 -- suddenly impatient and harsh about the rules that must be followed, for the deeper work to emerge. It's related to cracking -- the same kind of insane climbing-out-of-my-skin pressure at being so close, and yet still outside the door. I HAVE to go in, we all do.

We had an incredible Moment of Beauty yesterday. Lyon brought a $50/pound oolong tea which he'd gotten in Hong Kong. Iron Goddess tea. He also brought four small and four tiny dark earthen teacups, set out on curling potholders; a thermos of steaming water; a small earthen pot filled with soaked tea leaves, and a small white porcelain pot to pour the tea into; a small white cup with a lid; and an orange tin of tea, showing the tea buds, dried & rolled by hand, before they'd been soaked. He had done part of the preparations at home, in order to have time to do the rest in class.

We ate fresh salami, soft brie cheese, crumbling blue cheese, onion bread, macaroni salad, and cocoa-dusted truffles, followed by an amazing presentation, history, and serving of the tea.

"You know," I said, as we were finishing out tea and handing the cups back, "In a Russian rehearsal, I would dismiss you all right now. Rehearsal is not going to get any better than this." They laughed. "But, as long as we're here, we might as well do some Stanislavski."

So on we went -- to Alexei Sergeevich's Given Circumstances, Imaginary Circumstances, and then explorations of the use of Animal, Sound, Color, and Shoes in character development.

What a perfect time for that profoundly intentional tea to appear -- on the day that the actors are learning how to intentionally, in great solitude, meet their character, their text, and their own selves. The day of Given Circumstances is a day of tools. Like a gardener being handed their first spade -- it's heavy, iron, and it works.

I remember when Mark Williams, my acting teacher with whom I had studied for a year, was teaching his final class before moving to California. I was listening, knowing I would be taking over as teacher when he left. To my disappointment, he didn't do any of the magic of theatre. He just settled into a long talky explanation of the opening of Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, and did the dryest analysis of Given Circumstances -- the time, the snow, the trains in Russia, how often a train came in those days and what it meant, how far it would have been from the estate to the train station, how cold it was, what Lopakhin's day would have been like, that he could not stay awake till 2:00am to meet it.

I stopped listening. I'd heard Leonid say it all before, and I was sad Mark was leaving.

On the way out, Mark looked at me with that swift practical Special-Forces glance he sometimes got -- he had been in the Special Forces for 7 years -- a military commander's look, and said, "Did you get all that? That was for you."

Well, no, I hadn't.

But now I find myself in his place, looking at the mooning students, and hearing -- in the crunch of peanut shells in their play's American bar at closing time, the scream and thunder of the Russian locomotive in silent snows, a century ago.