WordTheatre

Santa Monica, California – Amazing to me how some quite ordinary experiences become much more than themselves. I attended, for the second time, a performance of WordTheatre, the creation of Cedering Fox which brings our best writers together with our best actors for a series of dramatic readings. This performance is so much more than listening, let’s say, to books on tape. Here we are present and immersed and entirely involved with the stories, which, through the skill of the writer, are wonderful illuminations of ordinary moments in the lives of ordinary people, like us, the listener…and, in an odd way, gives a third dimension to the presentation. We have a chance to see the actor, the author from whose fantasy these characters are created, and include ourselves in the equation.

In the Edye Theater, part of the new Broad complex in Santa Monica, sat three writers and three actors. Sarah Clark performed Two-Step by Maile Malloy — a fascinating story of two women: one newly married, a pregnant wife who had “stolen” her husband from another wife, and the other the husband’s new lover. The second, Temporary, by Marisa Silver, is about the experiences of a temp worker. It was the third that took me by surprise.

Here were two men — one the actor, one the writer — connected by a story called My Ride My Revolution. The actor was a handsome young Latino, Jon Huertas, who my IMDb tells me has a role in a series called Castle. His reading was absorbing and involving. I slipped into the world of a young guy (who looks like Jon Huertas) living in East L.A.’s barrio. Part Indian, he wears his hair long, not because of his Indian connection but because he plays in a garage rock band. For a living, he drives a limo, parks it at home at night, bringing the world of the rich and famous of Beverly Hills to his neighborhood, where the locals so prize and admire the limo, they watch out for it. It is the collision of two worlds. We follow the driver’s adventures which culminate in a wreck when he uses his bad judgment and lets a prostitute drive the car.

The reading was impeccable. But then the Q and A brought the writers and the actors together with us, the listeners. We so admire the writer, whose imagination has brought this “illumination” of an ordinary situation into the bright light which makes it “extraordinary.”  And we admire the actor, who brings the story alive.  The writer is Juan Rodriguez, a middle-aged, chubby, rather ordinary guy…sort of…like us.  His are the stories that bring us the reality of living in the barrio. This quite ordinary guy requires the handsome young Huertas to play out his role, since we tend to romanticize  artists. Remember the old Pee-Wee Herman film in which Pee Wee’s story is played on the screen by this handsome guy? So Juan Rodriguez, who looks something like us, creates a story totally from his imagination. He’d never been a limo driver, never knew a limo driver, never played in a garage rock band, never knew this part-Indian guy. He just put bits and pieces of his experience together and came up with the story. Now, the handsome actor — who, in reality, explains his nervousness at coming to this reading, worrying that he would not do justice to the material — does just that. He is the limo driver.

So where are we in all this? The listener, whose ordinary lives often seem so routine, and we sit in fascination listening to others whose lives, we think, are extraordinary.

Thoreau said something like, “…we live lives of quiet desperation.”  Really not true, if you consider what you’ve just seen here — a very talented guy who looks something like us, dreaming up a situation made interesting because he’s turned his “illuminating” eye on it, presented by this handsome actor who is here, doing his job on an ordinary work day.

How we love to romanticize the writers and actors, and anyone in “the arts.” To be exciting and dramatic, it takes handsome, and the event unusual.

But, reader, it’s not them and us. They are an invitation. The moments of our ordinary routine can also, with “illumination,” be dramatically exciting. Here is a chance to look at our own lives, the actual drama of our ordinary day, which, if we make some effort to see events with the eye of creative “illumination,” can be just as exciting and just as revealing.

Or, if you’re not in the mood to “illuminate,” try WordTheatre.

WordTheatre, in association with PEN Center, USA, Edye Theater at the Broad Sunday afternoons.