ACTOR SPOTLIGHT: FINDING HOME IN TRADITION AND MYSTERY w/ Juliette Regnier
Two things about this play, at this time (literally right now), with these artists that delight me are Eric Coble’s Outside Forces featured in the script and the essence of home…and Chekhov. Anton not Michael. Oops. Three things.
I am a born and bred Stanislavski trained actor. Raised in the gritty world of American modern realism white, male-dominant playwright brilliance like Shepherd and Mamet while swimming in the school of the Moscow Art Theater (no doubt earlier training was peppered with Lee Strasburg and the Actor’s Studio’s influence), I loved it. I fell in love. I was loved back. I created and made and charged moments with the creative life-force and BECAME Martha, goddamnit (Albee’s, not Mamet’s or Sam’s). Dirt-real writing and acting with the gauze of Tennessee, the barrenness of Becket, and the melancholy of Chekhov (Anton not Michael) had, to good measure, cast spells upon me and I became possessed by the beauty of the Theater. A Theatre that sought to uncover and expose our raw human tendencies and absurdities, and then in turn give back truth and grace. All of it poetry in motion. I found home.
These influences also found their way into my work as a playwright, an earthiness that gives way the spiritual fusing the worlds of my Life and my Theatre. Mr. Coble (my limited exposure to his plays, a few) has embraced this path and the Mystery shows up. Hence, I am a fan. I am drawn to his laying the inexplicable on the table. I’m drawn to this aspect of his work more than I am to the desperate psychology of earlier playwrights, though I cannot deny their poetry, their beauty, their time and place.
I heard a staged reading of First Snow months back. I loved it. My actor-and-very-smart husband loved it. Folks bantered about Chekhov (Anton) as a model or guide or inspiration where nothing really “happens” but Change hovers and there is A LOT going on. A LOT. I did not care a whit that dialogue didn’t center on how “moving” the play was.
(GO TO MOSCOW!) The “slice-of-life/end-of-[something]” was captivating. The presence of “Something-Other/Bigger/Unknowable” fed my soul. So when auditions came, I showed up. And here I am. Grateful. Humbled. Excited.
And I am home once again. I am new to Seat of the Pants. Over the years, I have worked with many of the artists who are associated with the theater. But to be working at a company with a core, with artists who believe a core is to be adopted and nurtured, is a shelter in the storm. (Ah, do we find ourselves back to the play!?)
My Cleveland artistic community is central to my being. It was all company work when I began and I have felt…hmm,.…orphaned since, I think, when theater companies fractured and splintered. So any time I can be with familiar sisters and brothers, my fellows, I am better. Families take work. Communities take work. Homes take work. They require a collective consciousness and preservation of the whole and sacrifices of the self. (Ah….yes, back to the play!) Fractured and splintered, Mr. Coble’s play, as good plays do, mirrors life; and this play reminds me of what I hold dear, what I wish to emulate and embody…and what I do not. It’s a play that mirrors a “something-bigger-than-me” that may need to be the force that heals.
