To Self-Produce Take Care of Your Self
#10 & #11 of 13 Ways of Looking at Self-Producing
The Roman poet Juvenal coined the famous phrase ‘Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano’ — You should pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body — around the end of the first century. What’s the connection installments 10 & 11 to our series of 13 Ways of Looking at Self-Producing, or to theatre at all? Juvenal did think of his lacerating satirical poems as a kind of drama in which he “compares human affairs to theater and games.”
But the more important connection to our experiences in self-producing is the imperative to be in shape before and during your self-producing efforts. As someone recently pointed out about me, I am at the age where I have been 12 years old six times over. So, ‘being in shape’ will possess different contours for me. Yet my conversations with much younger participants in this kind of enterprises also confirm that the rigors of shaping a self-production require the playwright to stay in pretty good physical and emotional shape. More hours, more tasks, and more stress. Embarking upon this effort requires additional energy and fortitude. Your plan should include a regimen that assures the proper rest and diet. If this sounds like you are training for a marathon, the comparison is not an idle one. You don’t want to drop out or get injured when you hit one of the steep hills that are sure to be part of your producing landscape.
The first self-production in this turn on the merry-go-round for Knowledge Workings Theater occurred in 2019 with Alms by Joe Queenan and me. The lesson of this essay about the necessity of physical fitness and mental/emotional acuity was not yet absorbed by me. The stress and strain of getting to and through opening night including last minute rewrites and welcome but unexpected ‘oversales’? Those my body and mind absorbed and then shut down. The day after opening night was spent in a hotel bed wracked by an exhaustion never experienced previously. Happily, I recovered but then resolved never to put myself in that precarious and very uncomfortable state again.
One testimony to the wear and tear of self-production surfaced in an excellent essay here by Peter James on his now ended career as a standup comedian.
(BTW Peter ironically perhaps employs ‘@afailedcomedian‘ as his Substack handle, but I consider anyone who can write such an insightful piece as anything but failed.)
Don’t look to me for specific fitness routines physically. Seriously, have you googled any photos of me and the twenty pounds that has taken up residence an unwelcome long-term house guest around my waist? Walking and biking along with a hodgepodge of morning yoga works for me IF I do those things daily. The main point is to figure out how to do something. Obviously, each person’s physical needs will be different. For example, our show last fall, The Jester’s Wife, required mammoth feats of construction because of the amazing set by Gloria Novi. Look at the video of its strike here A pulled muscle at that stage of self-production could prove disastrous.
If # 10 is about the physical demands of self-producing, # 11 of our Thirteen Ways concerns the mental and spiritual. Again, each must find their own way, but my advice — indeed exhortation — is don’t neglect this realm even when pressed by a ferocious schedule. For me, a kind of meditation or centering prayer works but if I miss even one day while in the middle of a project because of hurrying off to handle some crisis that deficit usually rebounds on me later that day or week. There’s no makeup class for self-reflection and calming routines.
During the day and especially during the time with other members of your team, breathing looms as a critical exercise. There are many sources on breathing techniques — some of them associated with theater training — but I go back again and again to Thich Nhat Hanh.
Part of this concentration on taking care of yourself physically and mentally must involve taking care of your relationships with others. I’ve always found the metaphor ’frayed nerves’ compelling because it suggests that some forces are rubbing and unraveling the ‘wiring’ inside of us until it’s ready to snap and break. But the original meaning of ‘frayed’ — “to affect with fear” — actually included the effects of stress and startle. There’s more than a little of that about any theatre effort with those discordant forces buzzing and beating at our bearing but their numbers and potency abound in self-producing. Keeping calm, asking questions, seeking first to understand are all good moves to keep those pests from fraying those precious nerves of yours. Anchor yourself in an affirmation of what transpires. Hold what happens — good, bad, or indifferent — a little outside yourself so that those circumstances don’t hold you.
Why? It’s a really bad idea to let the vibrations and consequences of that stress play out on other people. I wish I could claim to be ever innocent in this matter. In a show just several months ago, I lost my temper one night at dropped lines weeks after our agreed ‘off-book’ date. You can’t take back a growl and a scowl to an actor. I regretted the effect that it had upon me and the other person. If you do not control them, those explosions will cause collateral damage to your demeanor and the consequences will ripple through the work. The self- in ‘self-producing’ must be your best self.
On both dimensions — the physical and the mental — Betye Saar inspires me even though here field of creation is not theater, but she is certainly a self-producer. The 97 year old assemblage artist reflecting recently on her long brilliant career said, “The main challenge, I guess, to being an artist is how to make a living. But being a creative person means you have to find ways to do this.” Making a living is broader than just susbsisting; it includes figuring out how you operate at your best. Just remember that ‘YOU’ denotes a being with finite physical resources and delicate spiritual and mental capacities.
Take care of yourself. Next time the finale: Ways #12 & 13 complete this series, but we’d love to enrich this catalogue of ideas with your impressions, questions, and dissents. Send them our way or comment on one of our platforms.
