Daemons and Love Acts
My friend P’arang sometimes seasons her dharma talks with lists she has maintained of extreme acts committed for love. Dramatic breakups, serial phone calls, depression, heart palpitations, euphoria, shining headlights into the bedroom of one’s ex. I myself once kneeled in a puddle in a rainstorm, begging my girlfriend at the time not to leave me, and refused to budge until our relationship got a reprieve. How romantic. Ah-CHOO.
The very fact that I am still acting is worthy of such a list. I have no career aspirations to speak of anymore. In fact, I have a weird, knee-jerk resistance to it that I can’t explain. Yet there is something about doing plays that constitutes an irresistible, God’s will, super-magnetic pull. Jo Jo Dancer, Your Daemon Is Calling.
I love theatre. I really do. I love gathering people together into a space, turning down the lights, and presenting a story. The theatre may die. It has been debased and neglected enough that sometimes I think it should die – call it a fatal case of Creeping Mediocrity Meningitis. But still, for the power it has to assemble people, I love it; and want it to exist. I want the theatre to summon people to an intense experience of what it is to be human. I want the theatre to show them things they never imagined, to remind them of what they have forgotten, to plunge them into intellectual confusion, to piss them off, to get them hard or wet, to make them feel creative, to damn them to hell and to reclaim them.
Looking at it closely, I suppose this means that I love people. This is a notion that makes me laugh very hard.
Cintra Wilson’s unpublished play, XXX Love Act, also tells the story of extreme acts carried out in the name of love. The play is suggested by the story of the Mitchell Brothers, who conceived and built an El Dorado of porn in San Francisco. Their partnership ended in gunfire in 1991. In her play, Wilson portrays that burst of gunfire as one more extreme act of love.
Our production of XXX Love Act opens in two weeks at Company of Angels. That’s me at left, in a scene with Amy Lewis and Tricia Allen. For more photos and information, see the beautiful website Amy designed to promote the show.
Still acting. And yes, still getting up to bow at 4:45. Sometimes love is indefensible and inscrutable. Sometimes we are left to offer it in the cold, cold rain.
July 15th, 2005 at 12:10 am
Great post. “Sometimes love is indefensible and inscrutable. Sometimes we are left to offer it in the cold, cold rain.” Wow. Another one of those “I wish I’d written that” lines.