Conscious Choice: The Play’s the Thing

August 2005 | Body & Mind Health

The Play’s the Thing

By Julia Mossbridge

As a scientist, I like to think that I spend much of my time searching for the truth. In my more romantic moments I see myself as a sort of “truth warrior,” running after the reality of how the Universe works, with only a bow and arrow (representing the scientific method and laboratory tools) and the quickness of my feet (representing my desire and willingness to learn) to help me discover how the human mind perceives the world. Not to mention my other gig, writing books and articles about how people can find truth in themselves. Oh yeah — my friends are often annoyed by the level at which I am truthful with them and expect them to be honest with me. Maybe “warrior” is too weak — maybe I’m more of a truth vigilante.

Given this grandiose self-image, I was surprised when, a few months ago, I had an overpowering urge to take the opposite tack. A part of me made it known that it really wanted to play pretend. Perhaps because I felt it was taboo in my world, I felt a keen and growing desire to find out what it was like to seek untruth. Wondering how to proceed, I decided that the best way would be to take an acting and improvisation class at my community center.

I had never been involved in theater, and when I enrolled in an Acting 101 class at the Piven Theater Workshop, I attended the first class under the assumption that the point of the class would be to help us students learn how to convincingly act like someone else. Inwardly I imagined myself being embarrassingly horrible at this: after all, I had spent so much time chasing after the truth of who I am, how could I allow myself to be not me? Ah, but in these fantasies, I was always comforted by the realization that the very fact that I would probably suck at acting revealed my superiority as a truthful and honest person.

My truth vigilante pose lasted about 15 minutes on that first day of class. In one exercise, we were asked to break into pairs in which we would then improvise a scene in which one person would make an extraordinary proposal to the other person — a crazy idea to make money, a creatively risky venture, the suggestion of a romantic tryst. When it was my turn to do the scene with my partner, we had decided that we were two playwrights, and that I was proposing that we collaborate on an underwater opera. As the scene unfolded, our teacher kept stopping us. She told us, again and again: “It’s a silly idea, but find the truth in it!”

The truth? Uh oh. I thought that was what we weren’t supposed to be looking for!

After eight weeks of my teacher’s insistence on finding the truth in each scene, I experienced a complete shift in my experience of myself — from a hard-working truth vigilante to a player of truth games.

I found that the only way to be a convincing actor is to discover what part of me the character demanded that I integrate into myself. In a sense, if I couldn’t be convincing as a character, I wasn’t living into the part of myself that the character represented. I had trouble playing a psychotic old man, a whiny rich girl, and a high school dropout. Presented with these kinds of challenges, the only thing that worked for me was to dig deep and find my own psychotic, whiny, wealthy, high school dropout self and love this jumbled mess of truth.

My classmates, to greater and lesser extents, also felt this kind of transformation. The sheer thrill of learning how to accept, love and play with all my various truths made me wonder about acting as a kind of healing work. I asked my friend Linda Rosenberg, a comedy improviser and registered drama therapist in the Lake County area, about the benefits of drama therapy. “Drama therapy techniques offer us an opportunity to make abstract thoughts and feelings into something that can be seen and heard in the physical world. Joy and pain can often be better communicated through engaging the body in an expressive way than in volumes of words.” Linda has an interesting way of explaining what happens when her clients are able to embody their experiences. She calls it “putting feelings on their feet.”

She also finds that improvisation training especially helps people to feel empowered in their lives, noting that improvisation teaches us how to work from an internal sense of truth even as the external reality changes. When we practice improvising, we are practicing for life — training ourselves to recognize that although we don’t know what will happen next, we can make decisions based on our current truths and work from there.

As I close this column, I find myself wanting to make some grand statement about how truth is really the ability to love anything, any time, and how it is only absent when we can’t find it in ourselves. But that sounds too much like I’m trying to define it, truth-vigilante style. I have to keep reminding myself that truth is not the exclusive property of those who struggle to draw lines. Instead, I am starting to see that truth is more likely to emerge the more I practice my newfound freedom in playing with it.

Julia Mossbridge, a Chicago-based writer, is also a 34-year-old mother, cognitive neuroscientist, and author of Unfolding: The Perpetual Science of Your Soul’s Work (New World Library, www.unfolding.org).

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