Portrait of the Critic as a Young Seeker

For most of my life, I have been obsessed with two things: theatre and the possibility of divine encounter. I participated in theatre from a very young age, mostly as a performer, and began an extensive exploration into various world religions from the time I was in high school. It began with encountering myths from diverse cultures and flowed outwards from there, as I eagerly acquainted myself with the many ways humans engage with the sacred. All the while I also had the good fortune to grow up in Texas in the nineties, when major arts funding and important artists were readily available. The Alley Theatre cultivated a relationship with Robert Wilson, and I learned from watching his Hamlet: A Monologue about what Robert Edmond Jones called the “livingness of light.” The second opera I ever saw was Wilson’s revival of Four Saints in Three Acts at the Houston Grand Opera. I saw a production of Happy Days directed by Edward Albee. At the University of Texas, I saw Pina Bausch’s company, heard Philip Glass play his latest composition, Les Enfants Terribles, was blown open by Sankai Juku, and witnessed the joy of Kathakali performed by the famous dancers of the Kerala Kalamandalam. An embarrassment of riches, if there ever was one. I would wish this viewing education on anyone, but for me, the little seeker, I was especially delighted by the meditative quality of Wilson, the Buddhist dimensions of Glass and Sankai Juku, and the sacred stories embodied by Kathakali. If the theatre could be all of this, I wanted more.Meanwhile, in my teens and twenties, I looked for and found divine encounter everywhere, in a multiplicity of paths and places. In high school, my first job was in a pagan shop during the nineties occult revival, selling candles and herbs and tarot cards and other witchy wares. Lucia of Lucia’s Garden was an ex-novitiate who found her way from Mary to the Goddess, and she created a cozy space that became an early center of the Houston pagan community. I sometimes went to Jewish services; later, I sometimes went to Mass. In college, the Evangelical student group Campus Crusade for Christ approached me as I picnicked on the Quad at UT, so we read the Bible together for a few months. They gave me a little hand-colored, laminated bookmark with a line from Psalm 42 that said: “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” It seemed true. I chanted with Hare Krishnas in Dallas after their Sunday night vegetarian buffet. I went to a Sufi and yoga retreat in Texas Hill Country on a ranch owned by the founder of Whole Foods. We ate communal meals of 365 products: jars of tahini and jams and seed bread and then chanted dikhr under the stars late into the night, whirling through Arabic names of God. You could dismiss all this as spiritual tourism or dilettantism, but for me I simply wanted to know how different people encountered the divine. I wanted to see what Robert Orsi called “lived religion,” and I wanted to live it, too. All of it.At university my two obsessions came together. At nineteen, I read The Empty Space, and I took Brook’s “Holy Theatre” very seriously. His idea that the theatre could make the invisible visible captivated me. Originally an actor, I always wanted to understand how to do that as a performer—how to conjure the sacred in performance. I saw one of Brook’s late pieces, Tierno Bokar, and there was a quality to the silence that I wanted to understand, to live in, to replicate. I thought I needed a master teacher, a guru, both as an artist and as a spiritual seeker. I had faith in that old saying: when the student is ready, the teacher appears. So, I would make the invisible visible. I wrote a letter to Peter Brook, and I asked: How can I learn from you? Can you teach me about those pregnant, radiant silences in your work? How do you do what you do, and how do I do it? My almost intolerable earnestness oozed off the paper, I’m sure. But to my great surprise, one day I received a letter from Paris, with a stamp from Bouffes du Nord. Peter Brook had written to me. To me. And he told me that he could not teach me because he had nothing to teach, and he said I would have to find my way in my own way. Just what a guru might say to test a prospective student, I thought. But I took him very seriously. I remember lying down on my floor and crying, elated that he had bothered and bereft that this was clearly not the teacher I sought. And maybe there wasn’t one. Not a guru, anyway.About this time, I discovered I wasn’t really an actor after all, and I wondered how I had any agency to create the possibility of divine encounter in art. Directors, of course, could do this, so I thought perhaps I should be a director. A colleague then wisely encouraged me to direct something. This seemed immediately like a terrible idea, and so I quickly discovered I was not a director either. I also discovered that I was interested in dramaturgy and criticism, and so I set my sights on training with people who thought about criticism as an art form, even if I didn’t really know what that meant.There were a million formative moments at Yale—mind-expanding, challenging, fascinating moments. One highlight, however, was a very strange thing that happened at the end of one of Jim Leverett’s Tragicomedy classes. He was talking us though the ending of Amphitryon, Heinrich von Kleist’s reworking of Molière’s comedy which emphasizes a particularly Romantic fascination with the divided self. I don’t even remember the exact revelation he led us to as we parsed the moment Amphitryon’s wife, Alcmena, realizes that the man she thought was her husband was, in fact, a god—Jupiter himself—in disguise. I remember only that the final line of the play was Alcmena’s outburst: “Ah!”—a deeply bizarre and unsettling end. Was it a scene of recognition? A swoon? A person in psychic distress about the nature and ground of reality (Kleist’s specialty)? And with Jim’s interpretation—whatever it was—came a peculiar sharpness to the afternoon sun, which I could swear, like it might in a novel, brightened in the room just then. I felt a sensation like the top of my head coming off, and I began to feel a little dizzy.Those of us who later took Elinor Fuchs’s class on theatricalism joked constantly about whether we were “ontologically destabilized” by any given work. Pretentious graduate school humor maybe, but I actually recognized this feeling: being dazzled, rearranged by an encounter with theatre such that the surfaces of the world become slippery, and one’s own self seems to dissolve a bit. These are ego-breaking moments—sublime, in that deeply Romantic sense—in which, faced with some wild enormity, your whole being declares what Alcmena declares without even knowing exactly why: Ah! I knew I had been ontologically destabilized by art before. I always wanted more, because it seemed to me to be deeply akin to being dazzled and rearranged by God. But to be dashed and split open, dazzled, and rearranged by criticism. This was something new. Ah!How could I then write the kind of criticism in which the top of my head felt like it opened and something streamed in from beyond? The writing that might make the fine hairs on my arms—or someone else’s—stand on end? I generally thought those kinds of responses were reserved for art, and I secretly feared perhaps that critics are what Beckett says they are in Waiting for Godot: the last and lowest on a list of insults. But something else was clearly possible.For me, critical writing is certainly about interpreting and contextualizing, and I’m attracted to work that I interpret and help contextualize within this larger realm of the sacred. I argue in my writing for ways in which the work of theatre reflects and retains some vestiges of the spiritual encounter that it depicts. But I want the critical writing itself to capture some of that sacred encounter as well. Rather than, in some Platonic fit of despair, worry that the written interpretation is just a downgraded copy of a copy, I hope—through my close attention—to capture and reveal those hidden elements, make them present in the writing itself. In The Symbolism of Evil, Paul Ricoeur wrote about the role of criticism after the dominance of critical theory and what he famously called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” A genuine naiveté about the sacred cannot be available to “us moderns” born after the advent of critique, he wrote, because criticism generally demythologizes; it destroys the “immediacy of belief.” But Ricoeur asserts that criticism that turns away from suspicion can be restorative, re-enchanting myths and pointing us towards what he terms a “second naiveté”—an altogether new faith after an original faith has shattered. He goes on to say—and here’s the crux—that when criticism performs this act of restoring sacred meanings, the critical work itself might serve as a manifestation of the sacred. It could make the invisible visible, you might say. And this I take very seriously.I felt for a good portion of my life that I never had a “real” spiritual practice, in spite of the ways in which I’d experienced the sacred in all of those various forms. I’d chastise myself: Why can’t I just sit down and commit to meditating twice a day? Work my way through religious texts with the fervor I give to plays? Couldn’t I commit wholly to one of these holy paths? I do now regularly attend religious services, and I do have active personal devotions that I perform in my own home, many of which have nothing to do with the religious services I attend. But it wasn’t until recently that I realized, perhaps my truest, most regular act of devotion, the one that keeps me most alive to divine encounter, is the act of writing criticism. In the best moments it feels as if something, indeed, comes through—something that is not me. Or more than me. And I feel like the top of my head opens and the fine hairs on my arms stand on end. Maybe I’m even rearranged or dazzled. Mostly I’m writing words about other words, but I’m arranging and interpreting and pointing out or hinting at this other possibility that’s streaming through. And I try to capture it, and I hope others will see it and feel it, too. I think I want to write the way George Innes painted. Sure, his canvases hold lovely images of the Hudson Valley. But look again, and you can see that they’re suffused with the very thing that Gerard Manley Hopkins tells us the world is charged. And there it is, in the tonal palette, the hazy trees and natural expanses, there it is, flaming out, shining, and gathering to a greatness.As someone who found a home for critical writing at PAJ at this still early point in my career and at this late point in the journal’s life, the end of this chapter leaves me feeling bereft. PAJ has been the foremost place to think critically about performance and the sacred, and I am so grateful to have been included in that conversation, particularly as a contributor to the recent issue on “Spiritualities” (2023). I hope that those of us who devote ourselves to that often unfashionable, yet vital subject will continue to dialogue and find new homes for our work. Now, as Brook said, I think we must find our way in our own way.