Mouth Wide Open Program: Program Notes: Director’s Welcome
MAY 11, 2011
A note from Mouth Wide Open Director Sabrina Peck.
When Amy and I began developing this piece together over a year ago, we were interested in the intersection of spirituality and celebrity. Amy has always been a seeker, someone who looks for transcendent experiences that can enlighten and inform. She is one of the most spiritual people I know, finding God in unexpected people and places, even a place as un-godlike as Hollywood. But always with humor: “The traffic on the 405 is my teacher,” she would lament on the car speakerphone, her kids making a ruckus in the backseat. We became interested in exploring how those two seemingly disparate worlds might be interconnected in ways not visible on the surface.
During the months that we developed the piece, another subject kept creeping into our bicoastal creative phone calls: her illness. As she got sicker, we spoke increasingly about how it was progressing, what she was doing to battle it and how she was feeling. One day I said, “I think this might be the story you want to tell.” So she wrote and I shaped, and together we created a play. Thus began our journey to discover how these three worlds – spirituality, celebrity and illness – interrelate.
“God and my body are connected,” she says in Scene 5. We kept coming back to this idea, discovering it in her experiences with Newali sacred dance in Nepal, as a child in her Connecticut Congregational church and in an evangelical church in Mississippi, desperate to give her body over to ecstatic baptism. The physical was her way in. I could relate: my first language for storytelling has always been movement.
Eventually it became clear that her illness would be her most important physical-spiritual experience to date, and Hollywood the context for that arduous, transformative journey. What is it like to project an external glamour, while inside the body twists and contorts with pain and decay? How do we find the courage to look into the mouth of our worst fear?
I was carried along by Amy’s courage throughout this journey. And the process of working with her to realize this story was personally transformative. We’d worked together in the past, collaborating with people in diverse communities, telling their stories through the lens of classic texts. It was a gift for me to be able to apply that creative muscle to this story – her story.
In the end, artistic endeavors, like physical issues, are never completed or fully resolved. As Amy writes, “Being human is a chronic condition.” Maybe that chronic condition for the artist is what Martha Graham calls that “divine dissatisfaction…a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive.” So we welcome you to this “First Look” at Mouth Wide Open, and we are glad you are now part of the journey, marching alongside us.
