Number 1 Theatrical Production of 2021

 Thank you, The Guardian. 

Hello Again and again and again

 When I arrived on the “shores” of New York City in the winter of 2011 I was what can only be described as a “total disaster human—” faking adulthood and literally living on Tyne Daly’s sofa. Don’t get me wrong— there are worse places to be lost, heartbroken, poorly dressed, couch-surfing and unfamiliar with such adult concepts as a credit score, the cost of milk, or how to get a mobile telephone despite being twenty-six years old and having had, prior to this moment, modest artistic success in London.

I feel like we’ve all been there: at the burnt out cigarette butt of a chapter of our lives, wondering if we’ll make it through until morning.

I’d arrived in America the previous year in need of a resurrection, (and absolutely acknowledge that I was privileged enough to be able to “start in the middle” of this circus called showbiz—with representation and some British experience under my hideous and poorly fitting belt—) and began auditioning. I didn’t know where the hell I was because I was managing to get lost (on a grid system—a grid system!), and, despite every effort to sabotage my life and reputation, I managed to book a few jobs as I wandered around North America zombie-sobbing between high notes.  

It was during the era of my life that I met Jack Cummings and auditioned for Michael John LaChiusa’s masterwork, Hello Again.

And when I say I auditioned? I mean I hurricaned into Whatever Studios on Somewhere Street, New York, New York, holding 47-ish pages of sides and music as the team (with incredible actor, TG alum, and high school classmate, Nick Westrate reading) watched me give them every. single. female-identifying. character. in. the. play.  
With (sensible) outfit changes.
And choices…
It was the second-most preposterous audition* I’d ever offered (to date**), and I was certain after an hour or so of insanity, I had solidified my reputation as a genuine eccentric.

 But by the end of the day I’d received what I would soon come to learn was a characteristic email from Jack Cummings III— effervescent, inspired, hilarious and perhaps most important for me at that moment in time: galvanizing. Someone had seen me in all my eccentricity and wanted me to be a part of something. Something deep and rich and strange and beautiful. And to be a part of it with a collection of human beings so talented, so singular, so epic in their giftedness and generosity, that they didn’t mind That Weirdo From London tagging along, singing “Tom” in my underpants, and giving me my first New York City family right when I needed it the most.

A few weeks later I was introducing myself to those glorious artists. They were Nikka Lanzarone, Max VonEssen, Elizabeth Stanley, Bob Lenzi, Bob Stillman, Blake Daniel, Jonathan Hammond, Rachel Bay Jones, and Alan Campbell— and that was just the cast. Every Edison lightbulb, every corset, stage manager, musical arrangement, and design, the team was a crucible of talent and the World of the Theatre I longed to be a part of. Before I knew it I taking my clothes off in a loft (with consent! with consent!) in the middle of SoHo, singing the most glorious music one can imagine, learning the true meaning of platonic intimacy and oh, that’s right: getting my Equity card.

We made memories that included Nikka and Cody Richard Renard being stuck in a service elevator, Alan Campbell graciously buying me lunch on the first day of rehearsal when my British debit card was rejected from a local diner, a midnight photo call, 3-am tech-rehearsal taxi rides home with Elizabeth Stanley, pretend-drowning on the Titanic, engaging in simulated acts of intimacy inches from the audience, the presence of a pet parrot, quick changes more impressive than NATO negotiations, the welcoming of members of the original 1995 cast at Lincoln Center; not to mention endless laughter, joy, belting, tears, pathos, sorrow, and community.

All for $245 a week.
All of it shared… with human beings that started as strangers.

[THE WHORE]
You
You
Hey there
Where you goin’ soldier?
 
[THE SOLDIER]
Who me?

 
Isn’t that the miracle of the theatre? 

The people. The chance meetings. The new arrivals to our day-to-day that deeply and irrevocably touch our lives for a moment, then poof: off it all goes into the ephemera like so much mist. Artists open their chest cavities to these emotional foreigners, and we sew them up just as deftly once the curtain has fallen.
10 years later the cast is still on a text thread. Some of those cast members and creatives are some of the closest relationships I have enjoyed in my adult life on and off stage. The group has shared it all from birthdays to silly inside jokes to huge career and life milestones.

And really, at the end of the day, at the end of all of this, isn’t that the medicine we all craved so desperately during the darkest days of our quarantines? The prescription we still crave: to bear witness, to be seen, to share intimacies, to sing in harmony, to create and collaborate.
To be together.
And to be changed because of that togetherness.

Back in the days of Hello Again, I had so much to prove. Mostly to myself.
Because I didn't realize that the only requirement was to simply Be. We are all worthy of love and belonging because we are human, and for no other reason. And there I was—like so many of us have been and will be: emotionally poverty-stricken and in the wrong outfit. But a group of strangers took me in and said Hello. Again and again and again. And when human beings do that for one another it is a transformative, deeply miraculous thing. 

These days we are starting to gather and greet one another in person once more. We meet through face coverings and vaccine screenings, scarred from the unutterable experience of what we have all been through collectively, but also, not truly shared.

I picture The Whore and The Soldier meeting by the Hudson River now. Masked. Broken. But alive at the end of 2021, and starving for connection.
It rings differently now:

[THE WHORE]  
Look here
Don’t you know my face?

[THE SOLDIER]
No

[THE WHORE]
You there
Come and tell your sweetheart
Where you’ve been
It doesn’t matter
Hello again…

 

______________________________________________________________________


* The first most preposterous audition is a now-infamous story of me being late for an audition for Terrence McNally’s Master Class at the Kennedy Center because I accidentally locked myself in the utility closet. Incidentally, I booked the job and the play transferred to Broadway. Because sometimes life is ridiculous.
** At least by 2010— I’m pretty sure Rachel Hoffman can attest I’ve been a huge weirdo in audition rooms since this story…

Keep lighting candles

Happy festival of lights.

 

Tonight the chanukiah will be full. It's my favorite night of Hanukkah.

 

This year I just want to keep lighting candles, over and over again, night after night, all winter long. Let’s get every dusty menorah down from the dusty back rooms and abandoned closets we haven’t laid eyes on in years, and just keep lighting and lighting until we fully illuminate every place, every space in ourselves, that hasn’t seen light for a very long time.

The miracle is the spark of hope, the possibility that tomorrow is a new day.

So let's go gather all of our chanukiot and as we light again and again, we will keep telling the story of the 1 jar of oil that lasted 8 nights, and the less-powerful defeating the too-powerful, not because it was true but because we believe it can be.

 

Chag urim sameach.

 

Happy Anniversary Healthy Body!

 This is the last photograph of my un-scarred body. The last photo of a sick woman. The final photo of Alexandra Silber with colitis. 

"Hey Colon? *BYE GIRL!* You were a huge jerk!"

One year ago today I took a huge leap, took power back over my health and my life, and after seven years of being an autoimmune warrior with severe ulcerative colitis, I (with the support of so many) made the choice to have my entire large intestine removed. It was the first of 3 major surgeries (the 2 to follow would turn my insides into a proverbial pretzel and me with an internal J-pouch, and leave me with nothing on the outside of my body but a scar).

One of my core values is courage--not as the "absence of fear," but experiencing the *presence* of fear, walking alongside your fear, and acting anyway.

When I took this photo at 5am, I was about to leave my home and head to the hospital. Ohhhh I was afraid. But I got in the car... and checked in... and put on the horrible surgery outfit... and got on the table... and counted backward as anesthesia put me out...anyway. 

 To be afraid and do it anyway. That's courage. I was brave that day. Thank you, Dr. F, Dr. K, and everyone at Mount Sinai and Cigna. Thank you, Mom and Alec, and the entire inner circle.

One last thing: even though a major organ is now missing, I am not "less." In fact, I am more myself than ever. I am still whole.

Happy Anniversary, Al's healthy body.

 

We did it.

 And just like that, the Troupe disperses. What a life we lead. The sacrifices made to serve as we do. For all of the emotional, spiritual and physical labor, we do it because we love it. We love to tell stories and hopefully affect change and offer insight. 

For this, we often aren't paid much, we are often far from family and friends, we miss important life events and don't often enjoy fame or the perks of glittering stardom. Theatre-people are chasing something else, and despite all of these sacrifices (and more) we still come back again and again, 8 times a week, to tell stories because we don't merely believe that art can change the world, we know it. We have evidence. We've seen it. We've felt it. We have been changed by the transformative power of art ourselves.

And our play was about the power of a play. 

So we returned. From all of our quarantines and corners of the planet, we returned. To tell our story.

We did it. The company of Indecent at the Menier Chocolate Factory went "down in the airplane" together on March 14, 2020, and 18 months later we got back in the air in 2021 and made it to the finish line. As a family. Words will never be able to capture what we shared. 

 I cannot believe that the world has gotten itself to this place— however fractured.  

I cannot believe this company got to the finish line healthy and in joy. 

And, I cannot believe that I am alive and well, having been rebuilt from the guts up— and survived to do this, the most beautiful work of art I have been a part of thus far in my career.

Ale brider.

Heaven is...

Darling Women,  

Pico Iyer said “heaven is where you think of nowhere else…” 

I love this definition so much. It captures something ineffable. 

I mention it because this experience has been so extraordinary, in ways I will be unraveling for a long while. The sacrifices of an actor’s life have always been vast— mind-boggling emotional labor, physical labor, mental sharpness, diplomacy, navigating egos and emotional intimacy with strangers, all while being so physically far away from the place we call home. I have loved Halina and all she portrays more fiercely than I’ve ever loved anything I’ve ever served. From the bottom of my heart I thank you all for it, my friends, my colleagues. 

….all this and yet I still miss Alec, Tati, my friends, even my local green grocer; I feel anxious to be away from my medical team and family. All to say: this can’t permanently BE “heaven,” because by Iyer’s definition, I do think of and long for them despite the innumerable rewards of being here…

But. 

When our beloved Fin says “without further ado, The God of Vengeance, Act Two…” and Anna plucks her fiddle playing Lisa’s peerless, straight-from-God melody… my inner-ocean swells, and nothing and no one exist but my Molly. Heaven is there. 

In that pool of light, in Molly’s eyes and embrace. 

I have tasted it. 

I have traveled there. 

Because of all of you. 

I think this play saved my life, beloved women. It gave me a reason to heal, to return to not merely a job or a place, but to the land of the living in body and in spirit. 

For this, and for so many things, I will never be able to express my gratitude enough. 

With my whole heart, 

Al

 

 

The Adult Censor

As adults, as we experience more criticism and feedback, are told to be “realistic” and “practical,” in our ambitions, imaginations and scope of the wider world; and as a result, the Adult Self becomes less open to playful and creative thinking. It starts to control everything about our waking lives.

That bossy, judge-y, grouchy, productivity-obsessed voice? Yeah. That’s your Adult Self. That’s the *INNER CENSOR* adult-brain trying to helicopter-parent your poor little child-artist. 

The Adult-Self interferes by over-scheduling your inner child for too many after school activities; by being critical when they don’t win awards, get into elite schools, or meet milestones in a timely manner. When they fear the inner child isn’t as good as the other inner children. 

This Adult voice says:

“Sweetie, NO, those colors don’t go together”

or 

“That looks nothing LIKE a unicorn”

or 

“Your singing is not as good as good as SUSAN’S.”

But the Adult Self does have a role in our lives! It’s the part of us that practices critical thinking and is able to discern good from bad. Your Adult Self has taste, a discerning palette, informed experience, training, and has gained practical wisdom.

But these parts of ourselves need to live in balance with one another.

Don’t helicopter parent your Inner Artist—they’ll learn to be small, quiet or worst of all: to shut down altogether.*


* or, I dunno, become a serial killer— which would be a whole other box of bees.

 

Right Now...

I've spent the last few decades of my life proverbially standing in a position of striving. In many ways that stance was probably responsible for my accomplishments and actualization. 

 

When I was running from grief, I was under the impression that achievement meant I had "turned out okay." It did not. 

 

When I was rumbling with my illness I used striving as a form of healthy denial, then a goal to meet in order to provide the appearance of "wellness," and eventually as a form of goal-setting— achievements and things to strive for? They also mean something to live for. To stay alive for. 

 

I feel this season of striving coming to an end. 

 

I am ushering in a new season of listening and receiving, rather than exclusively executing my will. Instead of a fist, and open palm. 

 

It doesn't mean I have fewer dreams or goals, it merely means I am ready to manifest them with a different energy, filled with so much gratitude and inner peace.

Listening...

Own Your Star

One of the most profound ways to fight Anti-Semitism is to live a joyful and proud Jewish existence. In times of hatred and annihilation, ✨JOY CAN BE A RADICAL ACT. ✨

So on this Shabbat, I welcome you to pause and fully experience your joy in any form it arrives in.
Dance.
Sing.
Make music.
Read poetry.
Be in nature.
Nourish your body.
Experience togetherness.
—Whatever makes you feel connected.

 

The Hillel International #OwnYourStar campaign was launched to create a public and shareable sense of peace, pride, community, and safety in Jewish students around the globe—by declaring our joy and “owning our star,” more Jews will know they are not alone in fighting the evils of hatred.

Shabbat Shalom, dear friends. 

Joy always.
Joy everywhere. 

 

 

The Puppet Barge

There is nothing to see here, folks. Just the entire company of Indecent trekking to Little Venice on a Wednesday to see our own Josh Middleton's family-run-since-1985 Puppet Barge theatre on the River Thames perform The Flight of Babushka the Baboon.

Autumn in London with art, whimsy and incredible friends. Joy itself.

We ride at dawn...

 Sometimes the American Theatre Tribe takes London.

Henry

Are these screenshots from me and Henry Goodman doing an advertisement for the Jewish Film Festival of London? 

Why yes it is.

Did we ride the train back to London Bridge together and say goodbye on the train platform... because that is always how Henry and I say goodbye? 

Also yes. 

Henry, "God alone knows when we shall see each other again," but leaving it "in His hands" is always a sure bet. I love you, thank you for sharing the most heart-opening scene of my career thus far.   It was a joy to affirm with words, after all these years, that it meant as much to you as it did to me.

 

 

20 Years

Today is the 20th anniversary of the death of my father, Michael Silber. I’ve been pretty overwhelmed with feelings about it. Sometimes this anniversary comes and goes, the world spins on. This year? I don’t know. Perhaps it is the milestone. Perhaps it is all that we have endured as a planet, society, and what my individual body has been through, but the event is having a profound effect.

Right now we live in an era of loss. It is also an era of agony, division, disconnection, anxiety, uncertainty, trauma, grief, and of course a confrontation with our own very real mortality.

I survived COVID, when so many have not.
I had three life-altering surgeries that permanently changed my body and saved my life.
These experiences have give me insight into my Dad’s final years and days in ways I never could have dreamed of or anticipated.
For these, I am grateful.

These days, I find myself thinking a lot about what it all means, or what it is all for, what the Purpose of Life is, and what MY purpose is here on earth, and whether or not I am adequately fulfilling it. I feel I have been spared. Saved. So… why? I have doubts. So many doubts.

And in the context of today, I think 20 years. My God. 20 years on and I wonder have I done enough?
Become enough?
Fulfilled his hopes and dreams for me as a human being?
Would I make him proud?
And of course, we that are left behind in death never receive these answers with any certainty. It is one of grief’s sharpest cuts and cruelest agonies.

And yet, I can say with certainty that I have had more conversations with him in death than I ever had in life. 20 years of silent dialogue that provides all the certainty I truly need, and ever will.

So on this milestone of a day, I take heart in the fact that after all we have endured, I will be spending this deeply personal 20 year anniversary right where my Dad would recognize me as happy and purposeful, and where I know I belong: in a theatre, doing a play. Contributing to the world in the very best way I can. And when I think about it, isn’t that all any of us can do? Make the world better by contributing as best we can. 

I’ll close with words I’ve found before, they are near the end of the book I offered about all of this (and honored my wonderful mom and all the friends who held me up 20 years ago today). I hope it contributes something to you today, to whomever might need it:

I have had the greatest adventures anyone could ever hope for.
I would trade it all for Only. One. Thing. 

But that is not how it works. 

And that is what still smarts. And probably always will. 

Whoever you are, no matter how despairing or isolated, know this: being fully alive and fully present in all of your experiences—joyful and harrowing—is a human right worth fighting for. We are limited in life only by what we believe we are capable of. I am not remarkable. No. I am a human being just like you—capable of everything from the most deplorable of errors to the vastest glories. As are we all. But I endeavor to show up: to work, to love, to grow, to life. No matter what any of it chooses to serve. 

When we stare deep into the black infinity, when we truly take part in the democracy of loss and mortality, we recognize that all of us—no matter how wealthy, beautiful, talented, kind, willful, adventurous— die. We all die. You will, someday, die. And in the end, we all must face the same questions: 

Was I brave?


Did I use my gifts?


What did I believe in?
What did I stand for?
 What did I stand against?
Did I do what truly mattered?
Did I love enough?

It has been said that wisdom is a guide upon which to chart the journey of the spirit.
Wisdom is precious.
 And wisdom is earned.


Zeyn in dinst fun — “to be in service of.”

 On 14 March, 2020, Rebecca Taichman's original production of Paula Vogel's Indecent played its second preview performance at the Menier Chocolate Factory.

Previews came after a period of detailed, emotional, and spiritually grueling work on the part of our extraordinary company and creative team, and as the day wore on, the world around us began its crash into the piercing silence we all came to know far too well.
 

That night, my heart surged with ache for the world, but in particular for our theatre community whose very existence relies upon its live-ness. 

Theatre is a sacred ritual— it has many of the sanctities of traditional ceremonies: the repetition of words, songs and intentions; the bearing of witness, and ultimately, catharsis. Rituals matter to human beings.  The most significant moments of our lives are all marked by them, and because the significance we create is far greater than any one of us, we call upon rituals to construct the towering cathedrals of Value under which we can reside. We pledge. We graduate. We celebrate. We bid farewell. Retire. Age. Move forward. It is impossible to decipher whether we create them, or they create us. At the very kernel of who we are, human beings long to make meaning of our existence. For many, formal Storytelling is as ancient and as sacred as any formal spirituality.

Toward the end of Indecent, ten “players” gather in an attic in the Warsaw ghetto and risk their lives to tell a play to the few souls brave enough to witness it. On March 14, 2020, we, just like the players in the attic, with no clear idea what tomorrow would bring did the only thing we could to survive the terror of the moment: we all agreed to speak the words we had rehearsed, we play our parts. Sometimes ritual becomes a form of survival. So we did our play. What else could we do?

The next day I boarded a ghostly-empty plane home to New York and we all know what came next…

Inside the narrow spaces of our locked down lives we transformed into different beings— all of us. For those of us fortunate enough to emerge from the Coronavirus pandemic healthy, we are the lucky ones. Some did not emerge at all. But none of us are unaltered.

Our company kept in touch over the last 18 months on a WhatsApp thread. We Zoomed. We shared jokes, sorrows, milestones. We aged, we altered. I myself lived through many personal joys and sorrows— I both got married and had three life-saving surgeries in under 6 months that cured me of a disease I’ve lived with for years. When we returned to one another on 9 August, every single item was in its place from the final preview—the same clothes, props, words, shoes, even the wigs in the middle of being re-set. Yet nothing was the same.
Not the world.
Not my physical body.

I don’t know that I had ever been filled with so many emotions at the onset of a first rehearsal.  

There is a phrase in Yiddish: zeyn in dinst fun — “to be in service of.”

All I could do, all I can do, is serve. The play, the character, and to quote Paula Vogel “those who set aside the time to be there in person.” 

As we began rehearsal it became clear that we could not “re-create,” we had to create anew.

And I believe that is precisely what we’ve done. This production is distinct not only because we are the London company, but because we carry with us into our telling of the story all that we have shared— a company bonded together in shared trauma and informed by a cataclysmic world event. We are as equally changed as the world around us.

And yet? The play is the same. Ritual. We speak the words. We wear the clothes. We sing the songs and move in the same lines. Ritual is beautiful because it does not change, YOU do.

One of the great joys of Taichman's production is the half-hour pre-show where the entire company sits in stillness and watches the audience enter the space.
On 3 September, 2021, our company watched with tears in our eyes, as the audience of 175 people slowly filled the seats in an act of post-war solidarity and need. What I have learned from the last 18 months, from the revival of our world, industry and the company of Indecent, is that the human spirit is inextinguishable.

Every performance feels precious now, and every audience member who joins us is brave. By engaging in this sacred ritual we have been deprived of for so long, we honour all artists, theatre makers, theatre lovers, the real-life people our characters represent, and above all: the 7 million global citizens lost to us—the audience that can no longer speak for themselves.

That is zeyn in dinst fun — “to be in service of.”

"End of Summer" by Stanley Kunitz

An agitation of the air,

A perturbation of the light

Admonished me the unloved year

Would turn on its hinge that night.

 

I stood in the disenchanted field

Amid the stubble and the stones,

Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me

The song of my marrow-bones.

 

Blue poured into summer blue,

A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,

The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew

That part of my life was over.

 

Already the iron door of the north

Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows

Order their populations forth,

And a cruel wind blows.

— Stanley Kunitz, "End of Summer" from The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz

 

Things I want to remember about this week 8/9-8/14: a List

Oh London. I have returned. I am new. I am unchanged. The World is altered. The World is the same.

 Standing in on the same patch of the South Bank I stood upon on March 16, 2020 -- the day before the world closed down, and seeing that the river, the bridges, the city, the sky-- are all still here. 

I will never tire of a stroll through Borough Market and the bells of Southwark Cathedral.

Reunion with my dearest London pals the day before rehearsal. So much has changed. So much has not.

Finding this "Banksy" on my walk to work...

Marvelling how every. single. item is literally exactly where we left it 18 months ago...