An Article

Not saying I advise "ruthlessness," but I do like things that link entrepreneurialism to an artistic life.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/shakespeare-the-hardheaded-businessman-uncovered-8555996.html

Closure

While the class may have been called “English,” Mrs. Metzger used its curriculum of great literature to teach us how to write, how to understand and engage in abstraction, and how to think for ourselves. In honor of the life of Margaret Metzger, one of my most influential teachers, I am posting a Closure ritual she taught students at the end of senior year at Brookline High. She focused the ritual on mining the depths of our transition out of high school, a major coming of age moment, but she also emphasized the need for healthy closure throughout our lives. From breakups to cast parties to New Years Eve, I’ve found these steps beautifully helpful, but for those of us who are always moving into and out of creative projects, it also feels like an important career skill, necessary for smoothing out the highs and lows of our transition between gigs. No, you can't always run the ritual literally in a professional environment – though in theater you often can! – but you can find ways to process it yourself.

Notes from Senior Year English, 5/12/94

The steps are:

• Think About It
• Plan ahead for the closure ritual. Invite the participants. Make sure proper time is set aside by all. Plan a location that allows for honesty. Put someone in charge of moderating.
• Deal with Red Tape
• Get logistics out of the way. Does anyone owe money? Anyone have something they need to return? Deal with all of that and get it done.
• Ask about Unfinished Business
• Is there anything this group wanted to achieve but did not? Can it be done? If so, do it, or make a concrete plan to do so. Or, as is often the case, should it be let go? Make the choice, don’t just let it fade away.
• Ask the Unasked Questions
• Give everyone the opportunity to ask the things they’ve wanted to ask of each other and of the group, including the tough stuff. Key: this is not a time for discussion, argument, or iteration. Each person gets the questions off their chest. Nobody is obligated to answer, and if an answer is given, the person asking has to accept that answer, not kick off a debate. (This is why you need a moderator.)
• Share Your Experience
• Everyone shares how they felt about the experience and what it brought them. Give a sense of the future: what can you hold on to from the experience?
• Celebrate
• !
• Say Goodbye and Let Other People Say Goodbye to You
• Let Go & Consciously Make Room in Your Life/Heart
• Walk Out, Close the Door, & Be Sad
• Give Thanks for Being Sad
• This is the most often forgotten, I’ve found. It’s a gift to have had an experience worthy of missing it. Be thankful for that.

Obligation

A year since the last post. That’s getting married for you – an amazing, deep, whirlwind of a life change. And then the holidays and the busy start of 2013, Unscreened, etc. But, really, also wondering if this blog matters enough. When I think of taking it down, just acquiescing to “I am not a blogger,” I feel proud of some of my writings and the times they’ve been a useful reference for students or fellow travelers (hello, John Russo). But often, when I think of writing – an experiment that began at the advice of a publicist and social media consultant – it feels like BS. “If I’m not honestly driven to write, then I shouldn’t write.” And then I think about Obligation.

I’ve been thinking a lot about obligation this year. In many ways, the thread began during the High Holy Days last year, when our powerfully insightful Rabbi introduced Yom Kippur with a question about why we begin that evening’s service with a freeing of all obligations. At a time when we’re trying to focus on becoming better, on taking an honest moral inventory of our faults, why would we release ourselves of a sense of obligation, the one thing that seems necessary to force ourselves to change? Among numerous other profundities, Rabbi Finley spoke of how, if we look closely, we run our personalities on a kind of software coded with/of obligations. We obligate ourselves to things constantly, and many of those choices – and they are all choices – are irrational. In those, we enslave ourselves.

And then, being married – or, really, getting ready to be married – has either coincided with or, I suspect, generated a calm reexamination of all my feelings of obligation. Being married involves a strong conscious choice to obligate oneself in duty to another. I was also pulled to make that choice because this person and our relationship, of its own accord, took on a position of priority in my life. In comparison to my marriage, so many old obligations evaporate.

So then there’s “being an artist” – the thing I thought nobody in my life would ever supplant in priority – which is something baked into my psyche but which has also included obligation. When I was 9 and I knew, on my first day of rehearsal of my first professional production, that I was destined to become an actor and storyteller, I both received something and generated it. What I generated eventually hardened, as I grew up, into a kind of obligation to myself that’s expressed in the title of this blog. I will do it “come hell or high water.” And that’s been brilliant; it’s gotten me through a lot and further than I often thought I’d come. It’s made many specific dreams come true. But I’m also just not sure I want to operate quite that way anymore. I want to do things out of something deeper than an obligation to my own 9-year-old or adolescent self and his sense of what is good or right in the world. So I’m shifting a bit, and the blog is included in that.

But, for now, I’m going to proceed with it as a tool to help build the artist’s part of this new, expansive phase of my life. And to the other artists out there: keep on obligating yourself to our tribe; we need to stick together. Also, there is no tribe; don’t.