Coutnry of Origin

Writing my first memoir, Children of the Roojme, I accessed my characters first through their letters and diaries, then through interviews, photographs and documents. The pile of research helped me form the characters, on the level of their lives and the progessions, but no amount of studious research could create character. Each of my women, my mother, my grandmother and my aunt; and my men: my father and grandfather reached out to me in all their complexity and until i found a way to grab their hand, allow them to enter by body, I stayed in outline, drew mere sihouettes.

I started with writing diaries and letters in their language about days that were largely insignificant. I hoped that even by giving words to my illiterate grandmother, the animation of their expression would enter me. I had private dialogues with them, walked around the house in their bodies. My grandmother, always erect, but tight, held in, pushing pain from her skin to her heart. My grandfather, broken warrior, using dignity as a mask for failure and worry. I put the cup down with a thud, fingered rosaries, cut a pear with my father's stroke. For the book it worked. They had real lives that the reader accepted, joined them in their journeys, kissed the tops of their children's heads.

Now I'm preparing to do part of that story as Act I of my play Country of Origin at the Kennedy Center on Monday. With urging from a brilliant director, Dalia Basiouny, I have dropped the voices of the storyteller and am animating the play through the characters. I stand in the room at Ellis Island, waiting to be processed, I steal lemons from lemon trees when my girls are starving; I lie to a doctor to get health clearances for my daughters. I am studious about this, trying to get every detail with the emotion i had written them.

But it's all wrong. The writer is not an actor; the storyteller is not the character. Writing is fulfilling, Acting is humbling. As my director takes me through the lines, pushing for nuance and emphasis, I listen to her tell me about my subtext, to the life under the words. As I listen to Anthony suggest i change colors in a line two or three or four times, I have a defining moment. I am not an actor. As a writer I control the selection of detail, the voice, the tone, the level or revelation. Actors have no such control. They vacate their bodies and the characters move in. No amount of instruction, research or reflection can get me to this place.

I tell my director I wrote the text, she writes the subtext. But as an actor, the techniques that make the writing strong, are counterproductive...they are too sure of themselves. They are finished and the story is told. To act this story, I have to run back the tape and release the grasp I have on the story. And then open my body and my mind to the story as it is happening. This is the embodiement.

Not new information, don't act; BE, etc.

The revelation comes for me when I prepare. Acting books and interviews are full of this stuff, what the actor does to prepare, method and otherwise.

Leave the language, i tell myself. Walk in the world as your grandmother. I am not one of those actors who wears her character to the Safeway. I'm sure that works. But Sitti is with me in the car. We have these conversations of what it was like to stand in the strange place while a man misidentifies you and you know the fate of your life is in his hands. The questions turn into reflection and then to articulating and then to the shudder of the unknown. I converse with pictures, ghosts, shadows. I search for my girls when they are hiding from the guards. I release the door handle slowly when i must say goodbye to my house.

For a writer to give up control is a new kind of intention. Wears the ego in a different way, rather than polish, i am presenting myself in vulnerability.

Exhale.

Sitti spent two years getting her daughters from Lebanon to the US. Illiterate, unskilled, poor in life's experiences, she gave it up to God and pushed herself to the edge of the world on Ellis Island. I just have to push myself to the edge of the Millenium Stage at Kennedy Center. Wait not so. That's her, that's Sitti standing there. Help her.