(ensemble and costumer, "sprung!")
 

Random Memories and Meditations:

When i was eight years old, my family moved from Ann Arbor to Birmingham, MI, and i discovered my true passion for theatre. Everyone had always known i was an actor from the very beginning (my mother tells wicked stories about the marvelous, hilarious, infuriating tantrums i used to throw), but when i was eight, i found my destiny and have yet to turn back. On my second day of school, i received a small pamphlet about extra-curricular activities that were offered before and after school. For my age group, there were fitness and dance classes and an art class, and a few other things, but my attention was drawn immediately to the back page where “DRAMA” was printed across the top. Miss Harriet Green offered a drama class before school on Thursdays, only for fifth graders. Not only was my passion for theatre born that day, but so was my stubborn impatience for the cosmos to just get on with it.

Three years later, when it was actually, finally, oh-my-god-i-can’t-believe-it TIME for me to be in the fifth grade, my mother, through pure PTA wizardry, fanagled me a spot in Miss Green’s regular class, as well as the first session of her before-school drama class. I realize as i write this that, aside from birthing me into this sweet and wacky world, this was possibly the greatest gift my mother ever gave me.

***My high school drama teacher was amazing. Susan LaBatt was her name, but we all called her Lady and no one ever really knew why. She was just Lady. My friends and i would scour the pages of every play we could get our hands on, to see if we could figure out the reference. We were all pretty sure it was a character from some play – my own theory was that it originated with the lead woman in Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana. i think they called her Lady. In the movie with Brando, the actress who played her looked exactly like my drama teacher.

***During my junior year in high school, i performed in two shows, Juvie and Addict, at a semi-professional local theatre that was desperately trying to appeal to a broader audience. They thought a “hard-hitting” series of badly written plays about juvenile crime was the perfect way to bring in the teenagers. The funny part was that we all knew how bad the plays were and how cheesy the dialogue was, but the director was heart-breakingly unaware. Elaine was extremely serious about the work and felt that these shows were very cutting edge. So, we camped it up like crazy with really fakey-sounding Brooklyn accents and pushed each other around and made hysterically dramatic gurgling sounds when we were pretending to shoot up or pop pills, and Elaine thought we were brilliant. Juvie was the first show i ever did that was not affiliated with a school or camp of some kind – it didn’t pay, but it was still my first real gig!

***Another theatrical gateway opened for me when i met Jay O’berski again for the first time in 1989. He was cousins with a childhood friend of mine and i had actually met him once or twice (with his brother Steve) when we were very young, probably ten or eleven years old. I met him again in college at MSU. He and some of his friends from high school were writing a new musical about William Howard Taft and he needed a costume designer. He called me and said that his cousin Karen had heard from her mom, who was still friends with my mom, that i was working in the MSU costume shop and did i want to get some design experience? Duh. Yeah, i‘ll take that cool job with the most interesting guy i’ve ever met, and work with his very groovy, obscenely talented friends, thank you very much. He riled us all up with his ideas of “the scene” – a group of all different kinds of artists (actors, musicians, painters, designers, singers, dancers, clowns of all kinds), who would live together, work together, play together and create together. Jay’s dream is still very much at the heart of the Somnambulist Project, although most of us have had trouble admitting that. His spirit to keep doing the art his own way; not letting anyone tell him no; knowing how to gather good people together and challenge them all to be more ; and knowing that he was meant to change things somehow – these are what make him the truly great performer and inspiring teacher he has always been. Thanks, Jay.

***i’ve always known about the power of theatre. The power to influence the emotions of a large group simultaneously is nothing to fool with. Emotions come from deep places and when a show is doing it’s job, the audience is right in there with the actors, living the moment. To feel the power of an entire forest full of people (or just a living room’s worth), their energy with me and me alone, is why i’ve always been an actor. It’s that simple for me; i love the rush.

Theatre, i’ve discovered, also has the power to heal the performer through ritual, emotional soul work, ecstatic experience, and release. Maybe every performer knows this (and they must at some level), but i believe that theatre is group therapy in a lot of ways. I really understood this when i did the Serpent with Suzy Radwan (who is an awesome director and one of the best booty-shakers i have ever known – tai bo jam forever!) Just before i was cast in that show, my parents’ marriage of twenty-seven years finally (HOORAY!) crumbled, as did a delicious, poetic and messy love affair. I had just about stopped believing in love, y’all (and i sure as hell didn’t believe in myself). Here comes Suzy Radwan to kick my ass and i loved every minute of it. We worked hard and harder in rehearsal for that show – i don’t remember the specifics of the time-frame, but i know it was a much longer, more involved rehearsal process than we had ever seen in the Project before. We talked a lot. We worked out at the beginning of each rehearsal for at least forty-five minutes (Kick-boxing and push-ups with the Red Hot Chili Peppers). We felt each other up a little and got really cozy with our own bodies and other bodies around us. We listened to music in the dark that made me cry. We screamed. We talked. We improvised fairy tales. We played a whole mess o’ games. We whispered. We worked the script. We talked some more. It was so intimate and lyrical and painful and beautiful. I think we all came out the other side as profoundly new people. The Serpent and Dr. Suzy cured my ailing heart.

***A few years later, I used theatre to constructively grieve for my best friend, Satchmo the Cat. Satchmo & Izzy was the project that helped me find my real confidence as a writer and a director. It was also the summer i was pregnant with Zella, and the summer that Jimmy and i got married. i was learning all kinds of lessons about myself and where my strengths and limitations were. There was such a sense of rightness for me when i discovered i was pregnant, it was too big to just keep at home and it carried over into this play. Rightness. I realized that, through my art, I have a weird knack for reaching the families, the tribes, the people of the new millenium. AND i got to have hundreds of dancing cockroaches at the Forest Theatre.

***After Zella was born (of course there was an audience at the birth!), i found religion in a bowl of rice and made my house a temple. With my daughter as my guru and my husband as companion, we make more art because we must. The three of us are looking forward to many summers spent outside, wooing the people once again to come closer, sing our songs, and hear our stories. Visit the Magoo Family Album.
 

Long ago i used to be -
Mardi Hurbis, Mardi Harrington
Mardi McCusker, too!
But now I’m my most favoritest name
Who me? – i’m  Mardi Magoo!