An Improvised Life (17 page)

Beth comes in. Karen says, “Hello, and welcome. I am Dr. Ping-Pong. Are you here for the group therapy?” Beth
says she is and introduces herself. Karen says, “Well, nobody else is here yet, so we’ll just wait for the rest of the group to come.”

Karen has turned herself into an immigrant Chinese woman with only a moderate grasp of English; she is serious, gentle, and meticulous. She points to a chair, Beth sits. Karen sits. They remain there in silence for what feels like half an hour.

Finally Karen says, “Well, it looks like no one else is coming so we will begin the session.” She motions for Beth to begin and Beth starts to tell Karen her problems.

“No, not yet,” says Karen. “First you have to introduce yourself to everyone.” Beth looks around the room. “There’s no one here,” she says. “Well, this is group therapy, and we have to do it the right way,” says Karen. She motions to the room. Beth introduces herself to the imaginary people and then jumps right in, telling Karen her problems.

“Not yet,” Karen says again. “You have to let everyone else introduce themselves.” She motions to the circle of chairs and waits perplexed but calm, while the nonexistent patients introduce themselves. Beth is starting to look slightly crazed. After all the patients have introduced themselves, Karen says, “Well, Beth, since you are the new one, why don’t you tell us what brought you here.”

Beth tells us her issues. Karen listens attentively and then says, “Would anyone in the group like to comment?” She listens attentively to the comments of the nonexistent
group, occasionally nodding and agreeing, Beth looking more and more uncomfortable.

By this time, all of us watching the scene are in hysterics. Beth is playing her part with a deadly seriousness, and Karen’s performance of the therapist is brilliant. Her work is quiet and careful and patient. And funny, from a very unusual place—I can’t recall any other comedy performance that came from this specific place. The scene goes on until we’re all coughing and choking with laughter, and I finally yell “cut” because we’re in too much pain to watch anymore.

That evening Karen told us she called her husband, who was another therapist. “Do you think I’m funny?” She asked him.

“No!” he said without hesitation.

“I made everyone in the group laugh today!” Karen said proudly.

And for the next two days she played Ping-Pong in every scene. No matter what was called for, she found a way to fit Ping-Pong into the mix.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

In another workshop, at The Crossing in Austin, Texas, a woman named Billie gets up to do a scene. It is toward the end of the weekend, during the free-play section, where people can do scenes about anything they want. My only requirement is that they choose something they have a strong feeling about. It can be funny, sad, whimsical, something from their life or imaginary—I don’t care as long as it comes out of a strong personal impulse.

Billie needs to vent. This workshop has twenty participants, eighteen of them women, which has given this weekend a feminist cast, and an aggressive one at that. There are no raised clenched fists, no obvious men-bashings, no shouts of “Sisterhood Is Powerful,” but you can feel it in the room. Each workshop develops its own particular personality, and, who knows why, this one verges on the militant.

Billie’s scene takes her to a restaurant where she is meeting her ex-husband to ask him for more child support. Although it isn’t stated, it seems clear that she is trying to
work out something from her own life. She talks briefly with the man playing her ex and the scene begins. Billie decides to be late for the lunch, which puts her immediately on the defensive and in an apologetic frame of mind. The ex, it becomes instantly clear, is a son-of-a-bitch who hates Billie. He knows why she is there and is intractable and abusive. Billie takes it and takes it, and as the scene progresses she becomes more and more powerless as her entreaties about needing money fall on deaf ears. Billie begins to cry and beg, which makes her ex even more abusive.

After about ten minutes, Billie, in a fit of despair and rage, pulls a pistol out of her purse and shoots her ex pointblank in the face. He falls off his chair, dead, and the workshop breaks into wild applause. I let it die down, and ask, “What’s the next scene?”

We haven’t played this game in this workshop before, so it takes a minute for Billie and the group to catch on. The event isn’t over. We don’t go far afield, deciding to simply continue with what would probably take place in the restaurant immediately afterward. Billie goes back to the table, and we get a restaurant manager to surreptitiously call the police.

Billie is sitting, gun in hand, stunned, but filled with relief and a quiet sense of triumph. Two officers quickly show up, talk to the restaurant manager, and then quietly and carefully approach Billie, who has jumped right back into her role. Her feeling of triumph is short-lived under their questioning. They gingerly demand the gun, which she reluctantly
gives them. “You’ll have to come with us,” says one of the cops. “Why?” Billie asks. “You just shot and killed someone in front of twenty witnesses,” he answers.

Billie is confused, and her sense of righteous indignation starts to flag when she is handcuffed and questioned. She tries to explain the frustrating and abusive relationship with her ex to the cops, who are of course disinterested, and they drag her off to jail. They put her in a cell, lock it, and leave. Billie, now coming down from her high, is in a state of shock and confusion. She’s gone from being a heroine to a jailbird in a couple of minutes.

“What’s the next scene?”

Billie is a fine actress and is caught up in her emotional state, so she is unable to help in structuring the next step. I suggest that we just take it to the next logical place, which is a visit from her teenage daughter. Billie is okay with that, and a young woman volunteers to play the girl. Billie settles herself in her cell again and the daughter is escorted in. Billie rushes over to hug her, to get some comfort; the daughter freezes.

“What’s wrong?” Billie asks.

“What’s wrong?” the daughter says incredulously. “You killed my father!” The scene progresses for a while with Billie trying to explain why she did what she did, and although the daughter has some understanding of Billie’s pain and frustration, the daughter forcefully lets Billie know that she is now without a father and a mother. The daughter then exits, having left Billie completely unable to make any real connection with her.

“Where do we go next?” I ask. “What’s the next scene?” Billie still can’t wrap herself around what’s happening, so I say, “Well, why don’t we get your lawyer in here. Let’s go into your first meeting with your lawyer.”

Billie is okay with that idea and nods her assent. We give her a few moments to get used to her jail cell; then a woman who volunteers to play her lawyer comes in, escorted by a guard. The guard leaves, and Billie, excited and hopeful at seeing her lawyer, asks what lies ahead. What the possibilities are before her. “Where are we? What are we going to do?” she wants to know.

The lawyer is stern, tough, even unfriendly. There has been no time for the woman to work on her part or decide what she is going to do, but in two seconds she is a completely realized character. “What’s going to happen?” she says. “You shot and killed a defenseless man in front of twenty witnesses. What do you think is going to happen?” Billie tries to explain the extraordinary level of frustration that she’d been feeling, the years of abuse she has suffered at the hands of this man, but the lawyer tells her no one is going to care. “This is Texas,” she says. “If you’re lucky you’ll get off with a life sentence.” The lawyer gives her a couple of pieces of information and then leaves.

Billie is left alone in a state of real-life despair and confusion. Her sense of triumph and vindication has collapsed. The fantasy of her ex’s death being a happy, final resolution has gone up in smoke.

“What’s the next scene?”

We decide to jump forward a couple of years. Billie is now in prison, serving a life sentence. The scene is the prison yard, exercise time. Billie is just sitting. Waiting. Her life as she knew it is over. I send in a woman, Joanie Mercer, to be a friend. In about two seconds Joanie completely transforms herself. She has become an elderly Southern woman, and it is immediately evident that she’s been in the prison for a long, long time, although we never find out why. It’s also clear that she is a thoughtful and dignified person.

She goes and sits next to Billie, who is now lost and resigned. After a short greeting and some pleasantries, the old woman says, “Billie, I have a couple of things to tell you.” Billie looks at her. The old woman goes on: “Billie, I’m dying. It’s something I’ve known for a while, but they confirmed it for me in the infirmary just now. I don’t have much more time to be with you, and I wanted to tell you right off.”

Billie begins to cry and holds her friend. The old woman consoles her, completely devoid of concern for her own condition. When Billie is able to control herself, the woman says, “There’s something else I have to tell you.” Billie asks her what it is. The old woman says, “You know, I have heard you say over and over again in the time I’ve known you that you want respect. That you need respect. I have heard you talk about that so often that I went to the library and I looked up what that word means. And do you know what I found out? The word means to re-look at something. To re-examine something. And my guess is that it means
you have to re-examine yourself. Re-examine something about yourself. And I thought it might be something that you might want to consider.”

Once again Billie starts to cry, and I let the scene go on for about a half-minute, with the two women holding each other, warming each other.

“What’s the next scene?”

The event isn’t over yet. It still needs something. I gingerly ask Billie how she feels about going back to the restaurant, back to the very first scene with her ex-husband, and doing it over again. She says okay. She takes a minute to collect herself and goes back to the restaurant. Her ex has placed himself in the same position he was in when they first met. He’s adopted the same pose and has the same intractable attitude. Once again Billie rushes in, late, but there’s a new, self-sufficient air about her. Her bearing is different. She doesn’t apologize for being late. She sits down and after a rather formal exchange of “how-are-you’s” she states her case.

Her ex begins to abuse her as he had done in the first scene. She tells him crisply and politely to stop doing it; she has no intention of pursuing the relationship in any way, and wants only an answer to her one question. “I am having money difficulties. Will you give me more child support?” The ex says no and is about to go into his rant, continuing his abuse, but Billie gets up and, with all of her dignity intact, cuts him off, thanks him for his time, and leaves the restaurant.

The applause was deafening. Billie seemed to be in a state of mild shock for the rest of the day. In an e-mail about a month later she wrote that the experience was life-changing. Joanie told me afterward she had no idea where her character came from, that it was a person completely out of her conscious frame of reference.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The last exercises over, there is a bonding that takes place that seems out of proportion to the scant two or three days we’ve spent together. Hugs, tears, exchanges of phone numbers, e-mail addresses, lots of picture taking. There’s been so much deep revealing done with such abandon, so much trust, so many funny and tearful moments, so many forms of theater found effortlessly as a result of honesty and need, never to impress.

We often sit around and talk informally for a while. Nobody wants to go home. And I get asked this question after almost every workshop.

“How do we bring this back to the real world?”

The first time I heard it I was shocked and started laughing. “What was all of this?” I said. “What was going on the past two days? Was this fake? Was this all an imaginary experience? Do you think I did it for the money? That I put on a performance? Do you think that the other twenty people here were busy trying to con you into some vision of
themselves? This
is
the real world! It’s as real as anything you’ve ever experienced!”

But after hearing the same question a number of times I began to realize that what’s really behind it is the sense that these people, for a few days, had found a place they enjoyed, where they were accepted and allowed to express themselves openly, without reservation, with a group who gave them nothing but support and encouragement in return.
That’s
what they wanted to bring back into the “real world.”

Why did it happen? Why could they do that, here? I know some of the reasons, but not all of them. I know that part of their ease comes from encouragement, which allows them to be unafraid and completely present and in the moment, here and now, with no expectations other than their own unfolding. If something is to come out of the experience it will come out of devotion to what is taking place right now. I believe this fervently, both in life and in a workshop: that if this present moment is lived whole-heartedly and meticulously, the future will take care of itself.

I also know that if a performance was going to come out of the experience, if we were going to put on a show, it would all change. People would start watching themselves, protecting their turf. Hidden hopes and dreams for an imaginary future would take hold and infect the atmosphere.

So what I tell people now, after insisting that there has been not one moment of faking, or trying to impress anyone, on my part, or Suzanne’s, that these few days have been
as real as anything they’ve ever experienced—what I tell them now is that they are under an
obligation
to bring whatever was alive for them in this room—the sense of freedom and flight they’ve touched upon here, and which has become embedded in their consciousness—that they bring this back into the world, into their “real” lives, and that it finally inform every part of their existence.