Race you

@James.T.Murray

Back to 'I Wish' after a year away! There were postponements and jobs and travels and health battles won for some of our team! And in the end? What a joy to gather together once more and celebrate at 54 Below. I feel so especially grateful to gather together in health and wellness in the presence of Drew Wutke post-liver-transplant-miracle-man, and post-4th-bowel-surgery me. We are here!

 

This being our 10th I Wish (since the first one in 2018), I struggled a little with what to sing. So many of my "wish" moments have been realized-- in true productions, or within this glorious series. I had to think outside-the-box. And that often requires me to dig a little deeper...

*

 

In truth, what's been on my mind lately has been personal (and I hate that it currently feels political as well...). I don't discuss it here. At least I never have. It feels like a phantom, a shadow of shame and sorrow too tender to give credence to. Merely thinking about it, let alone giving it shape in any kind of language feels too dangerous, too unwieldy, too fully formed for a phantom. Best let it haunt me, not unexplored but certainly un-uttered. And what is this? Well. It is the fact that I will possibly never raise children, and certainly not give birth to them, biologically. 

It's been on my mind since roughly 2015, when I was first diagnosed. At the time I was 32, chronically-sick-as-a-dog with no solutions in sight, not dating anyone seriously, and I hadn't even thought about kids. Then one day after a few failed attempts at remission, I was presented with a very intense drug that promised to help quell my ulcerative colitis. It was essentially chemotherapy in pill form. It could be magic bullet. It works for thousands of people, they said. It would forever compromise my fertility but the options were slim and growing slimmer. I went for it.

 

And in the end? the drug didn't even work for me. 

 

 

I'm not usually lost for words, but the sense of loss was palpable. This was one of the many things I didn't cry tears about. Who had the time? I cried no tears for the children I'd never have—after all, they were a figment, a not-to-be-hoped-for addition. And I was focusing on the "lucky-to-be-alive" part. At the time I had no partner to raise them with (something I insisted upon, when my imaginative musings drifted toward parenting), a chaotic schedule as an actor, with a volatile income, distant family infrastructure geographically far away. None of it seemed reasonable. Possible. Or above all: like something I was even "allowed to want."

 

By 2021 my surgery further solidified the story of a life without biological children. The scar tissue from the surgery would settle around my reproductive organs, and would mean IVF was the only option for pregnancy with anyone's eggs.  

 

My surgeon was compassionate. 

All his fellow associates and nurses too. 

I signed 100 consents forms. 

They checked and asked me over and over again-- including moments before the surgery itself-- if I was "sure." 

And when I said I was, my wonderful surgeon reminded me that I had grown up with a sick parent, and it had been a source of tremendous pain not just in his death, but in his illness. He wanted me to know he felt my choice to get well set me up to be the best I could be for everyone currently in my life, and anyone i welcome in to my family in any manner, going forward. 

I knew he was right.

 

 

Still. The sense of grief has been unutterable. What began as a vibration became a whisper which became a roar, and over time it has only grown louder.

Over the years the feelings have evolved. I met Alec—younger than I and likely not even courting the concept of children when we started dating. The greatest tragedy feels like robbing him of being a father, biologically so, without a lot of say in the matter. But we both understood what we were walking in to as we continued to commit to one another.  

Then JD V*ance started going on and on about childless cat ladies. About "biological responsibility" and the selfishness of a woman who does not bear her own children for the generations to come. Again, there just weren't words to describe the experience of hearing that from an elected official, after everything. 

I don't know that I'll ever have the words. But there are a few, to start.

[insert: complete, abject, unfathomable silence]

 

*

So with all this at the top of my mind in recent days, I turn to the best discussion of grief, parents and children and healing I know: The Secret Garden.

  

The story is about a family ravaged by illness and grief, that discover the ultimate healing exists within nature—all symbolized by a dead garden returning to life. 

It’s also a story about parents and children…
 

In this song, Archibald Craven— unable to parent his son Colin because of the enormity of his grief, visits him as he sleeps and tells him an ongoing, bedtime fairy-story.
 

I know a lot about the themes of this story. (I once wrote about them, here)  In so many ways I identify with the children— growing up with parents, lost— to death and to grief.  But as I age I come to see myself in the adults too. And as so many parents are quick to remind me— I am not a parent. Yes, believe it or not, I am keenly aware that I don’t have first hand experience with raising children because I don’t have any of my own.

 

But sometimes? 

Dear Gd. 

How I wish, I did. 

 

Farewell to Our Class

There aren’t words for what this role, play, group of creatives, and telling a story like this at this moment in history has meant to me as an actor, a Jewish woman and a human being. 

As an actor, I don't know that there has ever been a greater ask of me: the challenge and privilege to play a single human being from the age of 5 to the age of 83 across the spectrum of her entire (incomprehensible) lifetime. I love "little Rachelka" as much as I love "old Marianna," and I marvel at the twists, turns, glories, broken dreams, acts of unimaginable violence, and spine-breaking moral quandaries this one woman faced from 1919 to 2002. 

It was an honor to portray so complex a woman. It was a great exercise in the role of an actor to not judge their character, but to breathe life into them, animate their body, give voice to their words, and very simply: to portray them. 

Rachelka/Marianna taught be so much about the arrogance of a 21st-century American sensibility: who are any of us to judge human beings in circumstances we will likely never experience? Who are we to be arrogant enough to presume we would know what is "best?" Or what we believe we would do if presented with identical circumstances? The truth is: no one knows what they would choose, or who they might be when squeezed beyond our imaginations. 

 *

We live in a time when the hate many people hold within themselves has been given "permission" to be released into the world without consequence. I never felt particularly like a "Jewish actor' before the last 8 years— perhaps I identified more as "an actor who happened to be Jewish." I'm not certain. 

But what I do know, is that as hatred perpetuates, so does the muscularity of my Jewish pride, onstage and off; and an extension of that is the calling to do plays that speak to these themes. To have audiences know these people I portray— and those they represent. 

It is a Jewish belief that souls are with us as long as they are remembered; specifically remembered by name (one of the many reasons we name our children after the departed, and why we speak the names of the departed aloud so often). Audiences might not know Rachelka and those like her without plays like Our Class and actors like myself to bring them to life. 

It feels like a very real mitzvah to tell these stories.

 

 

 

I think with difficult material there is a tendency to indicate to the audience that you must watch with great seriousness. But that actually [prevents you from] entering into the space with the same open heart that we hopefully walk through life with. What Igor captures so beautifully is that difficult things happen alongside joy. Through all the seriousness, there's love and humor and ribbing each other. If we don't laugh and love, we're not honoring the people in these stories.                                                                                                                                                                                                       I don't think Americans fully grasp that everywhere else on Earth, Judaism is not merely a religion. It is also an enth-religion, a culture, and in many parts of the world, it is related to blood: to racial identity, for better and for worse. I'm a "successful" American assimilation story on some levels. My ancestors were able to shed all of the accouterments of their visible Jewishness and become Americans. 

Perhaps that robbed me of countless Shabbats and Hanukkahs and prayers. But through my theatrical life, I can reclaim sacred traditions. There's something about the theatre that shares ritualistic sanctity with, in my experience, Jewish traditions. Why is this night different from all other nights? Because tonight we're doing the play. Rituals say that this moment is distinct and sacred from the moment that comes before and the moment that comes after. And what is theatre if not that?

 

Plays about the past can make us very complacent as theatre-makers and as audiences. But this isn't a play about the past at all. This is who we are. 

 

The second act of Our Class could almost be subtitled, "How they lived with what they did." Some of them didn't do very well—even though they survived, they were not fully alive. 

 

One other thing that I've been thinking about a lot is how, for a lot of the late 20th century and early 21st century, art started to exclusively focus on victim stories. Not that that isn't important. But by failing to focus on the perpetrators, we fail to be exposed to how we might be like them. Both these plays focus on the humanity and inhumanity of people just like us who behave in monstrous ways. It's art's purpose to show us these corners of humanity. 

 

 

I think it's incredibly important, especially now, to see that in "them" there's a whole lot of "us." 

 

 

For now, all that’s left is chalk dust, memories, and gratitude.  

 

 

Call Me Adam: Merchant of Venice

1. I can't believe it's been six years since our last interview together! At that time, you were starring in Camelot in Washington DC. How would you say you have changed the most since that time?

 It’s almost unutterable how much I have personally changed and how much the world has too.

I have had a major organ removed and reconstructed. It saved my life.
I fell in love and got married.
I turned 40

There was a worldwide Pandemic. And the world is even more inside out and upside down. 

2. This fall you are starring in an updated William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice at Classic Stage Company. What made you want to sign on for this re-telling of The Merchant of Venice?

It is a dream-like opportunity to portray one of Shakespeare’s great leading roles in New York City—a dream I have had since childhood. To be a Jewish actor (born into a Catholic-Jewish largely secular family) in this particular moment in world history, telling a story that involves Jew hated, feels like another sensitive, challenging and important task.

It’s a thrill to ask hard questions in the room, to know we might never find answers, and to be a vessel for complex dualities onstage and off. 

3. Why do you feel audiences should come see this modern version?

We live in a world of knee jerk reactions, polarized camps and a culture that feels obedient to loudly chanting the “right” ideas for fear of estrangement from our communities, rather than arriving at points of view on our own — of much more nuanced.

I think The Merchant of Venice is a play that people have a knee jerk reaction about — assuming it cannot be done (and thus cannot be viewed) without a moral indictment of those both creating the production AND viewing it.

I welcome modern audiences to walk in ready to be confronted with very hard questions and thoughts and ideas— but leave room within themselves for growth and awe and surprise. Igor/our take on this piece is bold and yes, confrontational— but not in the ways you might assume. I welcome you to join us and be surprised. Have your expectations and your assumptions exploded. I won’t say more than that because of spoilers!

4. In the show, you are playing Portia. What do you relate to most about her?

Her loneliness and isolation.
I’d like to think we share a fierce intellect and large capacity for love. 

5. What is one quality of hers you are glad you yourself don't possess?

Even though your previous question asked about complimentary shared (pardon the expression) *qualities* It would be arrogant of me to assume that I — or anyone— don’t share all of Portia’s less favorable qualities as well. We contain multitudes.  

And I’ll admit that while i do not love, and endeavor daily to overcome, them , I possess such negative personal attributes such as

• self-obsession
• self righteousness
• Snobbery
• Manipulation
• Conscious and unconscious bias + “isms”
• Selective memory
• Elitism and classism

The list goes on.

Don’t you …posses those too?
In some level, Don’t we all? 

Knowing something is bad or wrong doesn’t eradicate it from our psyche — it gives us an opportunity to overcome it and behave differently despite ourselves. To offer ourselves and others grace and dare I say it? “Mercy.” 

6. In this re-telling, Superheroes and their archenemies battle it out to protect good in the face of evil. Considering the tumultuous times we are living in, how do you protect the good of the world with so much evil lurking at every corner?

I strive to do what I can in the ways that feel natural and accessible to me. I have always been on the quieter, slower and more thoughtful side of political, philosophical and ethical thought—preferring long and deep conversations to protests or more traditional advocacy. That is where I think I thrive, and where my gift for humanizing the “other,” for empathy, asking deep questions, the power of story and story telling, can be a light in the face of darkness.

I don’t always succeed. Many days I flail and fail. Some days I hang out at my rock bottom. But I endeavor. 

7. In our 2011 interview, you had mentioned that one day you hope to work with Director Matthew Warchus, act or sing opposite Audra McDonald, and be in the presence of John Adams. Have any of these come to fruition?

None. But I have new dreams now. 

8. What is the best advice you've given, but not taken for yourself?

“Don’t wash wool.”

9. What is something that you and your best friend like to do together?

Send texts and voicemails that begin the middle of an ever-on-going conversation. 

10. When you watch an episode of "The Golden Girls," the ladies would always solve their problems over cheesecake. If we were to sit down to Cheesecake:

* What problem of your own would you want to solve?
* What kind of cheesecake would we solve this problem over?

Ohhhh nothing huge just:
What in the heck shall I do with the time that has been returned to me post surgery, and that I blessedly have left on this earth?

Blueberry. 

11. What didn't we get to talk about in this interview that you'd like my audience to know about you?

I’m an introvert.