On Process
Inspired by PROCESS by Samora Pinderhughes
We live in cracking times. Splintering too. I write this in October 2020, a year that will surely live in infamy, if historians survive at all. In the beginning of this year, the pandemic hit and the world began it’s strange inversions. The first and major thing to hit me was, of course, the shutdown of the theater world. I am a man of the theater, after all. For the last 21 years in New York City I’ve based my entire life around it’s ebbs and flows, learning the rivers, the streams, the mountain lakes and gushes into the ocean. So of course that was where I first felt the hit. Overnight all theater productions, techs, rehearsals were brought to a startling close. And as the world twisted and turned, trying to understand what it was face, the knowledge slowly dawned on us that this was more than a close, this was a crumbling. This wasn’t clear at all at first. I’m a fairly practical man, and I was certain we were looking at a two week delay, I’d be back in the storymaking business in no time. But I terribly nieve. The theater would go on to be closed for 9 months to date, and surely much longer into the future. And this crumbling I speak of, well at this point it only feels 45% of the way done. There is much reckoning to be done, and more falling apart for sure. The streets are bleeding and the country aches and moans at the weight. And the choices look terribly bleak. What way, what way? The night is do dark.
So what to do in crumbling times? Shattering too? How are we to work? When the world works against us? How are we to plan? These plans are all meaningless with such uncertainty flying around like a mad wind knocking over the houses of spiders! How are we to help others when getting out of the bed is such a chore? How do we create art? Today? Tomorrow? And why? But mostly, how?
It will be a process. So buckle in.
These are the times for breakdowns and breakthroughs and breakups. Everyone I know is doing mushrooms and weed edibles, and this should tell us something. I haven’t touched a hallucianagen during these times, cause I know me and I am just not well enough to go spelunking into my psyci. Beware beware, here there be dragons. I broke up with my boyfriend and I’ve never been more lonely in my entire life. But I have midafternoon wine with directors in their backyard. I meet with actors on wide green fields in prospect park and we laugh in the face of survivial. I only see the designers at protests, marching and looking completely flawless. The stage managers wink and smile at me when I’m getting tacos – which by the way, is like 4 times a week these days. The guy who works there has a mohawk and he remembers my name and I tip him like a maniac. But the playwrights, well it should come to no ones surprise that they are my most precious in these troubled times. On a stoop in clinton hill, on a tree linned suberban block on cortelyou road, we walk aimlessly. For hours. Or sometimes in Greenwood Cemetary, that’s a favorite writer spot. There we cry and despair, for everything is lost, and everything is found in it’s place – and both things are worth crying over. Completely overwelming these times, god bless you, I hope you’re taking care. And in the space of all that was lost – all our stories, all our productions, all our energy for putting pen to paper, we find a space, an opening. A little doorway, covered in dust. And through that doorway, we find a great wide, empty room. We find ourselves there. There we are.