Influences I

Introibo ad altare Dei...and if you recognize the antiphon which kicks off the Tridentine Mass, then you're showing your childhood religion and your age at the same time; or else you're a James Joyce fanatic. Hard to believe I served Mass as an altar boy before school, before the age of nine. Influence number one?

Well, I was already addressing my angel most nights, sensing his presence, too, whilst sensing a kind of bisexuality in that holy invisibility. After all, there was the long hair and the long dress-like apparel we saw the priest wearing. One of my earliest memories is lying in bed working out the sheer numbers of people, animals, not to mention the weather, all things God is charged with managing, well, creating, then, now, and in the future. I knew the direct line to God notion was rather tenuous, let's put it that way. So I addressed my angel.

So there's a lot there in that early influence, a plethora of Greek and Latin, the superstructure of Catholicism in our lives, the lives of the saints, the authority of the priest coinciding with the humanity of the priests whom I got to know and work with as an altar boy—by the way, never any hanky panky, mostly positive, only one cranky curmudgeon, with one devoted pastor in the old sense of one who looks after his sheep, taking us to Weston-super-Mare on field trips, rehearsing the various kinds of services with patience and wisdom—which brings me to the profound theatrical nature of the Church service.

The church in which I served, still there as far as I know, is called St. Mary's-on-the-Quay, Bristol. Right there you have an early grasp on hyphenation! Right there you have a sense of Bristol's own history, with the word "quay" weighed and qualified over and over till I understood Bristol's romance with ships. And in the architecture you have the Greek columns, Ionic in appearance, although the structure was built in 1840. Those columns loomed monumentally to my eight year old self. When I revisited the place years later, everything seemed smaller, though the echoing of single steps upon the wooden floor within still rang out. A Palladian symmetry one finds in theatre in no small way. Most of the theatres I've worked in were Palladian by design. The concept of the "fourth wall" that separates audience from players, that of the proscenium arch which frames the drama, was intimately familiar to me in form and function by the time I was five years old.

Backstage was the sacristy, where we got ready, put on our costumes, and on Sundays, for high Mass, readied our ceremonial candles.

I was fascinated and gratified to read George Bernard Shaw's comments in his "Our Theatre in the Nineties" regarding the origins of the Christian Church, "founded gaily with a pun...where you must not laugh...giving way to that older and greater Church to which I [Shaw] belong: the Church where the oftener you laugh the better, because by laughter only can you destroy evil without malice, and affirm good fellowship without mawkishness."

In that same essay comprising "The Author's Apology"——you can find it in Shaw's "Prefaces" 1906——one significant influence in my life dovetails beautifully into another when Shaw writes: "...if the theatre took itself seriously as a factory of thought, a prompter of conscience, an elucidator of social conduct, an armory against despair and dullness, and a temple of the Ascent of Man." The context of that manifesto-like statement is that Shaw notes how play-going in London may well have replaced church-going, which is fine, he says, if only the theatre took itself seriously. I took Shaw so seriously that I look back in wonder at how I left it, how many years it's been since I was a stage door regular, and what the devil——what the angel!——am I doing about it now. I could say I'm doing my best to chronicle the things I experienced while I did the work in the theatre. But somehow I know in my heart of hearts that's not enough. Once you've experience the power and possibility of the theatre, and you believe in it like I came to believe in it, there's not a day goes by when you don't say to yourself you owe it to the community in which you live to make it happen. That is another topic entirely.

Church and theatre as early influences come easily to the fore, that's the point here. And with that, a fascination with audience. What makes them work? In the I Ching one finds Thunder over Earth in the 16th hexagram, an arrangement of lines where one strong line makes its way into the fourth place, a shift in balance, so to speak, a shift heavenward... Wilhem writes "This begins a movement that meets with devotion and therefore inspires enthusiasm, carrying all with it. Of great importance...is the law of movement along the line of least resistance..." Wilhem goes on to describe the birth of theatre in his commentary on this hexagram. Finally, he quotes Confucius, "He who could wholly comprehend this sacrifice could rule the world as though it were spinning on his hand." For me, that's a sparkling jewel set in the ocean of book called the I Ching. "It is good to organize helpers and to set people in motion," writes our friend, Blythe in her version of the I Ching at this point, where "thunder comes resounding out of the earth."

I suppose I've come to this island in the Pacific to get as far away from theatre as possible, in order to "see it". That is a generous perspective written after the fact of moving here, but there's a truth in it that I recognize.

At a very early age I saw the activities in the church where I was a backstage regular produce an effect on the audience, though it ranged from season to season. Christmas Mass was a power to reckon with. Day in, day out, yes, yes, yes, we will go through the motions, speak the lines, carry the heavy book from one side of the altar to another at the given point, tinkle our small bells at the raising of the host, but the nature of worship seems to depend so much on props and a kind of duty to a trinity of powers, the higher power being worshiped, the medium power of the church mucky-mucks, and the low power voltage of the handful of worshipers who attend daily Mass. Come Christmas, all that changes. The colorful vestments come out. The number of acolytes is more than quadrupled. Four times that! Who are these guys? Never seen them before! And they're all bigger than me! And the congregation? No room at the inn. They're lining the streets, squeezed into the portico, pressed against the inner walls of the church itself where the Stations of the Cross threaten to knock them on the heads...where were you people last week? last month? This was a tremendous influence on me, to see this show of strength from both sides of the divide, coming together with intonations, concatenations, bells, books, candles, colors red and gold, incense for the divine, voices raised in glory...you just want to shout out, Oh My God! And I guess you do, at various points in the proceedings. And I'm just a pipsqueak in red and white, not the usual black and white of everyday Mass, but I'm "in it" and it's terribly powerful, this coming together, this Enthusiasm, as the I Ching rightly points out. Oh the collection baskets are full on Christmas Day!

Early influences...