"... allowing yourself to be vulnerable makes you weak
but also opens you to the nuances of beauty ..."
-- John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
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| Self portrait 4-2-14 |
"I am the keeper of fragile things ..."
-- Anais Nin, House of Incest
Trust is fragile. We all know that.
Artistic trust is particularly delicate.
Having artists for friends means I get asked from time to time to peek at their work before it's birthed. Before it's full-grown. While it's still incubating.
When someone trusts me with their art, I try to be extremely careful, to handle it gently and with extraordinary care. I try to be as honest as I can without treading too heavily on someone else's creation with my bulldozer of well-meant, overenthusiastic criticism.
Yesterday I participated in a reading of a new play trilogy. The playwright, Juliette, invited me and a handful of other actors to sit around a table and read her words aloud so she could hear them in voices other than the ones in her own head. The readers were carefully and specifically selected. We all had history with Juliette. We'd all had opportunities to trust her and to be trusted by her.
The fragile bond was still in tact.
The atmosphere was fun and energetic, but also reverent and respectful. We knew we were being allowed a rare privilege, to look at something before it was ready. We knew that our job was to help Juliette find flaws in her own work so that she could correct them. But our job wasn't to criticize or to suggest or to judge. She'd invited other people to do that dirty work later on.
Our job was simply to read.
I've been at similar readings where the actors are invited to give input and opinions about the play. Generally I think this is a terrible, terrible idea. There is no temptation quite like the actor's temptation to jump all over someone else's manuscript. It's like a runaway freight train. I've seen these conversations turn ugly, unwieldy and unhelpful. Damaging, even. I've watched the doomed, discouraged look of doubt darken the playwright's eyes as she sits there helpless while a roomful of divas tells her what they think the characters should say, or do, or want, and how they should say it or do it or want it.
It's a good thing last night wasn't one of those times.
At the end of the evening, as soon as the scripts were closed to a little round of well-deserved and honest applause, we chatted briefly of other subjects, packed up our things and went to our cars. I was proud of my fellow actors for holding Juliette's work gently and with such tender care. I was also proud of Juliette for having the backbone to invite others in to her creative process.
It was all good.
