Mixed Feelings

A thought: 

 

Experiencing mixed feelings doesn't mean you're failing or that something is "wrong" with you. I believe it is a sign of one's emotional maturity, depth, and the capacity to hold and examine a wide range of experiences, simultaneously. 

 

Mixed feelings are also a reminder that it's perfectly acceptable to hold space for ambiguity, for discomfort, for nuance, and for multiple-- possibly conflicting--emotions to be present at the very same time. Being able and willing tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity is the ultimate sign of emotional maturity.

 

All of our feelings deserve to be validated, no matter how mixed they may seem. It doesn't make feelings facts, but if we do not validate the reality of their presence, they will return, next time, stronger.

 

For example: 

- Being confident and driven doesn't negate feeling lost or exhausted. 

- Feeling focused and energetic doesn't mean you can't also feel distracted and uninspired. 

 

Navigating these mixed emotions requires grace, skill, distress-tolerance and above all? Self-compassion.

 

The only person you can heal, change, and fix is yourself.

Note to Self: The only person you can heal, change, and fix is yourself. 

 

Let go of the idea that you have to be the savior for everyone around you and embrace the freedom that comes from focusing on your own growth and well-being.

 

People are not projects.

 

By nurturing yourself, you create a ripple effect of change and healing that inspires others to embark on their personal journey to self-discovery. 

You don't have to say much. 

You don't have to save anyone. 

Let your actions speak. 

Let others be a witness. 

Your evolution can sometimes be the best encouragement.

Healing by example is a beautiful thing. 

 

 It took me a long time to realize that it's a form of deep respect to others, to let them have their lessons, struggles and challenges. By attempting to expedite their growth, was not really fair to them, and was more about me. Others are sovereign beings who decide when and how they grow into more of who they want to be, when they are ready to do so. Sometimes this deep acceptance and lack of interference or meddling, with no agenda is the healing agent. It's so liberating to pour that energy into one's own growth and to (like a dance) invite or let go of whoever can flow with that. 

 

 

 

Alec's Debut

Four years ago exactly I met Alec Silver on the first day of rehearsal at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. I introduced myself with a shocked-but-casual “Hey Alec Silver I’m Al SILBER… we have the same name!” He then proceeded to astonish me in the first table read. I knew he’d go far.  But I had NO idea how far we’d go together.

On Nov 6, 2018 sharing a night like this with Alec Silver would never have crossed my mind.
 
Last night, after a little over three years in New York City (two-and-a-half of which were a worldwide pandemic) Alec made his Off Broadway and New York acting debut in the profoundly moving GOOD ENEMY at Audible's Theater at Minetta Lane. 

The play by Yilong Liu is gorgeous triumph of generational trauma and what we "owe" our family. It is directed by Alec’s greatest artistic advocate Chay Yew, is a triumph— superbly cast, acted, designed and executed by all involved.
 
Alec’s work was spellbinding. So skilled. Deeply observed and wildly out of his “type.” I barely recognized him as Dave and was equally if not more astonished by his work as I was by his Francis Flute on Nov 6, four years ago.
 
But what floored me, was the people that showed up to celebrate Alec in this moment. Friends, colleagues and Chosen Family all collected over the last four years that showed up in a ten-strong cheering section, evidence that lives worth living are BUILT— day by day, with every conversation, connection, good work done, generosity shared and promise delivered. 

 My Alec, four years to the day of being dazzled by you I am dazzled not only by your work, but by the life you have so courageously manifested. I am in awe. What an honor to celebrate you in this moment.
 
Thank you to Adrienne and Alex Balducci, Katie Spelman, Etai Benson, Alexandra Socha, Tony Cloer, Carman Lacivita, Elle Rigg, and Alley Scott  for being a part of *The Silver Squad.* 

📸: @liachangphotography — genius.

Escape from Cleveland: A Melodrama

On November 4, 2022, five character actors drove to the airport having recently completed a week-long workshop at the Cleveland Playhouse of Ken Ludwig's latest play, Moriarty: a Sherlock Holmes Mystery. The week had been splendid. A group of hilarious, intelligent Broadway veterans gathered together to exchange ideas, perfect a play with one of the most collaborative playwrights in the world; plus shared several delicious meals, experiences and stories after rehearsal. 

What a week working (laughing--good GAWD the laughing) at Cleveland Playhouse with great friends and insanely gifted artists—directed by Mark Browkaw—working on a reading of Ken Ludwig's latest— MORIARTY giving 12 or so comic tertiary or five, and Irene Adler to old pal Santino Fontana's Sherlock Holmes. 

All in all: the week was a great success. Behold our happiness post reading: 

cast + creatives of the pre-production of "Moriarty" at Cleveland Playhouse

But THEN! Then: the following morning, the cast of five-- a merry band of players-- all headed to the airport to catch the 12:15 Delta flight from Cleveland to LaGuardia. And that, my friends, is where the plot thickened...

But as if daily laughs and nightly meals weren’t enough, there’s more. All 5 actors arrived at the airport Friday morning to learn our flight to NYC was CANCELLED by Delta.
 
So instead of moping, we made lemonade outta lemons, rented an SUV and? 5 CHARACTER ACTORS DROVE FROM CLEVELAND TO NYC FOR AN IMPROMPTU ROAD TRIP!
 
We didn’t turn the radio on once, because we were talking and laughing and getting real and laughing so much. Thank you Ken Ludwig and Cleveland Playhouse for bringing us together. And thank you Santino, Andy Groteluschen, Pun Bandhu and Jill Abramowitz for the forever-memory—this gig was one for the BOOKS.

PS) the whole road trip is a highlight in my “stories” titled “ESCAPE FROM CLEVELAND!” About 5 mins. Worth it. 

"Honk if You Agree"

 Honk If You Agree

— On October 8, 2022 Kanye West tweeted to his 30 million followers “I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” The following Saturday, members of a White Supremacist hate group stood on an overpass above the 405 Freeway in California, performing Nazi salutes behind a banner that read "Kanye was right about the Jews. Honk if you agree.”

*

Just as an ancient house, demolished
    liberates the vermin
    so we see them now
    in all their flagrance
    and undisguised monstrosity.

Honk if you agree.

Many rats
    are killed in falling mansions
    but some find other houses.  

Hate—it turns out— is not dark.
It blazes with the cruelest light
and rings to petulant music—
    the rage of car horns on the highway.
    the ear-splitting silence of indifference.

Hate is born with you
    it howls in your first howl.
Impatient loathing
    coiled behind our tongues like a python.
    
This hate is ancient.  
And my People’s pain is insignificant, some say.
Our victim card, expired
Our terror, irrelevant.

So I shall exit the 405 for today—
Knowing it is a road I cannot ignore.
I shall without a doubt read its signs again
and again
and drive across its bloodied highways.

But tonight is Friday
so I exit to light candles
    that pierce into this darkness.
I shall be a good ancestor—
one that paves better highways for the generations yet to come.

To see with clarity
but also with hope
For hath I not eyes?

Honk if you agree.

End of "Lend me a Soprano"

What a magnificent experience from top to tail. One never knows how an away-from-home experience will go— personally or creatively, but from the downbeat Soprano has been nothing but joy.
Ken Ludwig was collaborative and generous.

Our director Eleanor Holdridge created THE safest, most loving, most creative and playful playground to ask any question and try any idea.

Our Stage Managers were above and beyond. And our very generous first laughs!

The actors. Oh the actors. This was was one of those remarkable sets of conditions where every single actor was drama and ego free— no one fought for “their” laughs or “their” moments. Everyone fought hard for “OUR” laughs and the PLAY’s moments. I can’t recall an experience like it. Where everyone was so devoted to making the play everything it could be, concerned only with how they might best serve it.

Creating a role is a rare experience, and it was my honor to chisel Elena Firenze for Ken Ludwig, for our company, our audiences; for MY soul, for every actor to play Elena in the future long after I am gone, and above all for Elena herself.

Actors— ask not what characters can serve for you, but what we may do to serve our characters. Elena could not sing without me, and it was my honor to provide her very first voice.

Addio e addio, Elena.
Never to be forgotten.
Until we meet again.

X

 

"The Day Beauty Divorced Meaning" by Leslie Harrison

Their friends looked shocked—said not
possible, said how sad. The trees carried on
with their treeish lives—stately except when
they shed their silly dandruff of birds. And
the ocean did what oceans mostly do—
suspended almost everything, dropped one
small ship, or two. The day beauty divorced
meaning, someone picked a flower, a fight,
a flight. Someone got on a boat.
A closet lost its suitcases. Someone
was snowed in, someone else on. The sun
went down and all it was, was night. 

Multiple layers of freedom and celebration

 

End of Summer…

Sure sure, this photo is a thirst trap (and I’m 39 so that’s already a feminist STATEMENT) but very VERY real talk: I have spent so much of my life in the depths of sorrow, grief, and self-blame; truly loathing this one and only body of mine, missing out on irreplaceable experiences just to avoid being physically observed.

Then the *moment* I meaningfully healed that disordered part of my psyche? My body was hit with a ulcerative colitis — a debilitating disease that robbed me of my life force. Thus the work began all over again…

I am so relieved and proud to say that after 20 years of all kinds of adversities, I am healed mentally, and cured physically.

It was a war.

But I look back upon it and acknowledge that I faced it like a soldier.

So sure sure— this thirsty photo might appear lame on the surface, but it represents multiple layers of freedom and celebration.

I purchased this swimsuit last spring from an ostomy website so that I could swim in the last few weeks of my bag-life. But I KEPT it because
      1. It’s hella cute and
      2. It reminds me that being fully alive is truly worth fighting for.

Fight on, fellow warriors.

"The Bench Scene" from CAROUSEL for The Transport Group

Ah, the healing and transcendent power of music, theatre, true friendship and community.

Thank you Transport Group for the chance to return to Julie Jordan and the ‘Bench Scene’ after over a decade, and to share the experience with the huge-hearted genius pal that is Tally Sessions and a 30 piece, first-rate orchestra conducted by Joey Chancey.

It was a gift.

You know a theatre company is special when every single artist on stage donates their time and talent to support it. EVERY. SINGLE. ARTIST. May the Transport Group long continue to make great American theatre.

📷: @graceecopeland

Ask Al: The Energy Behind the Decision

a little perspective

Dear Al, 

I have a career-related question and would love some advice: 

I just got re-offered my national tour contract. I am two years in to said contract, in a leading role. I had previously said no to year three of the tour, but now I’m thinking of returning because I love the production, the role, and performing— especially post pandemic.

It just feels potentially foolish "career-wise—" am I robbing myself of pursuing new opportunities? Am I pigeon-holing myself into this tour and role and not allowing myself to try new things? I wonder all of these, but also feel this new contract is a gift from the heavens after everything the performing arts world has been through. Am I looking a gift horse in the mouth? 

I would love to know your thoughts.

R

*

A few thoughts on this, points of various “camera zooms”

1. Big picture:

 
I think often we as actors—particularly female actors— feel that we are in a position of being PAWNS. Meaning, that we have very little power to choose our path with a lot of AGENCY. The truth is, on some level that’s true. Not all of us are Emma Stone.

Thus we fall into... 

2. Lack Mindset. 

Because Opportunities don’t come along as often as we’d design, we perceive ourselves to somehow be in deficit, and it can perpetuate a “Lack Mindset.”

The lack mindset sounds like the inner monologue of “NEVER ENOUGH”— (I’m never successful enough, thin enough, good enough, rich enough ...) And when we make decisions from the place of lack, we operate from a place of survival--a place of very-real desperation because we feel our livelihoods are actually on the line.
 

But the Lack Mindset? Is a GIANT LIAR.
It is crucial that you don’t make this choice from a Lack mindset, or dis-empowered female actor “mental space” because

 

3. There is no right or wrong decision here 

— EITHER will effect your life and future with likely equally worthy experiences and momentum—
But making any decision out of FEAR or LACK? I promise you will lead to some kind of deep regret. (I’ve made this mistake a few notable times...)

What I mean by it being a neutral decision is this:

• You will return and continue on an awesome national tour to play a truly rewarding role in (maybe?) less exhilarating cities.
• You might be a little bored sometimes but, whatever!
• You’ll stash money away.
• You’ll be employed an an actor IN THESE INSANE TIMES
  
• and finish your Tour story on your terms.

OR

• You leave the tour
• and grab the momentum of a re-energized show-business in NY or LA
• And roll the dice! Taking a chance at your next big break!
• Meet new people, make new connections.
• It might yield “nothing” or it might change your life. Only giving yourself a chance will tell.
• This choice gives yourself a shot to super charge growth and expansion beyond your pre-pandemic self....

But
Neither is wrong. Both have their pros and cons.

4. Final Point:

Always?

It’s not about the choice.
It’s about the energy behind the choice.
And if there is any whiff of fear inside that energy? Run the other way.
In the end you won’t regret it. 

A Very Personal Statement on Roe v. Wade

My name is Alexandra Silber.
And a legal right to safe abortions—as safe and accessible healthcare— is a very personal issue for me.

Now it is not just personal to me because I have a uterus, identify as a woman and am currently in child bearing years. It is not just because I support all oppressed people, everywhere.

But it is because in 2001, at the age of  18 — I had on abortion in the state of Michigan. I had become pregnant against many birth-control odds, with a committed, and incredibly loving partner I was with throughout high school through college.

This termination took place just 7 weeks after my father had died of cancer, at an incredibly precarious time in my life and the state of the world. Not one human—including if not especially the unborn—would have benefited from that birth taking place. Despite doing “so much right” in the safe sex department, the birth would have destroyed the lives of many, including my own.

Do you wanna ask me what it feels like to be a statistic?
Do you want to hand me a religious, political, or reductive high and mighty take on an 18 year old grieving girl’s  humanity?

You wouldn’t be the first.
To assume, accuse, or to call me a murderer to my face.


If Roe V Wade is overturned the incredibly correct choice for me, my partner, the unborn and both our families, that I made in 2001 at the age of *18* would be—according to polling data—an utterly illegal and criminally punishable act in the state of Michigan. If I had survived an “underground” procedure, I’d be imprisoned for it.

Look:
I am a white-passing person with on again off again access to decent American healthcare. In 2001, I had friends and connections that might have funded my ability to fly to another state to have the procedure done safely and legally. But the MAJORITY of Americans are not in that position. Abortion will never stop happening, it will stop happening safely. More people will be impoverished, hungry, disenfranchised, and of course DEAD because the government is threatening to make a decision that has held as “precedent” for 50 years.

I am currently 38 years old. I’m a “successful” self employed Millennial whose generation has been struck down a few times by the 2008 recession, the 2020 pandemic—my generation isn’t lazy or irresponsible, irrevocably woke or lacking in a concept of hard work. I now possess the maturity and wherewithal to raise a child— but I STILL don’t feel I dependably have the means to properly provide for that child is so precarious a country. But above all— NO ONE should ever have to be pregnant who does not want to be pregnant.

Our culture has hated and oppressed women since the dawn of time.
This is an attack on women. Yes.
But in a broader sense it is an attack on any human being who is not a white, Christian, cis-gendered male in a typical nuclear family Model.

I am angry. And I am terrified.
And if you are too — I’m with you.

I do not publicly talk about this because I’ve always considered the decision and chapter to be private, and honestly I’ve felt extraordinary terror about sharing this information for the violence it might —as HAS— inflicted upon me when it is brought up. But privacy doesn’t exist in a country where the government is inside our bodies.

Perhaps in sharing this, perhaps in giving a human face to what for many feels like a theoretical issue, Someone out there might PAUSE, think, feel, and acknowledge that I am someone’s daughter, sister, aunt, friend, colleague and neighbor. I’m a person you might not think this issue has affected, but it has. Profoundly. I am you. I am your loved one.  And it is hard to hate up-close.

Take a look at me:
I could be someone you know.
I am only here today making any kind of difference because I was able to make a choice SAFELY and therefore did not die or end up in prison for making a medical decision about my own body.

I am here today doing everything in my power to make the world a better place because the life I chose was the only life I COULD choose.

March. Write. Call. Donate.
And for the sake of all the women and womb-having siblings you care about: vote.

Thank you.

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Endurance is Universal

Have you been to rock bottom? No shame, fellow rock-bottom-visitors; I’ve been there! But I want to put forth a not-always-meme-able idea: that the un-nuanced glorification of an individual’s capacity to endure isn’t always productive. 

Why?
 

1. It doesn’t allow for the truth, ugliness and raw humanity of intense frustration, sorrow, frustration, grief, despair. We must feel free to experience all the states life has to offer.
 

2. We all have this capacity-not JUST a “special few.” Stories that glorify a singular protagonist (Hulu’s version of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,” for instance) often subliminally express that our protagonist is NOT an Everyman—but rather that THIS protagonist is special— they and they ALONE possess and extraordinary capacity to be tested and prevail. It sells us a false narrative that THAT special human being is so unique; that THEY ALONE can face extraordinary hardship, but not EVERYONE. “You want to thrive? No. You have to be special. You have to be chosen,” this Narrative dictates. But how do we know that? Short answer: we do not.

There is a Yiddish saying: “When we must, we can.” Ostensibly, does this saying mean that we never know what we are capable of until we are asked to face The Unknown? Should we be generous and expansive in our understanding of ALL that could mean? I welcome us to be.

Human beings have great capacity. All of them. Not just a “special few.” Yet not every human being will make the same gigantic leaps as another, because they won’t have the same adversities thrust upon them, or identical stakes, circumstances, supporters, and wherewithal to make those leaps in those moments. 

As the war in Ukraine approaches it's second month, we are reminded of humanity at its lowest and at its very finest. The images are shattering, but also gobsmacking in the shimmering humanity.

 

All evidence that our human capacity to endure is universal. The level to which we ride and fall? That is unique to us. And thus, we are not to judge.

So whether you are hanging out at rock bottom, soaring to new heights, languishing in purgatory or somewhere in between— take heart. I see you. I believe in you. Triumph looks different on everyone. You’ve got this.

 

Greetings from The Bottom