During the work on the 1980 film, I frequently did dishes with Stephen Concordia, a young student who was in the land program. Stephen was studying for his master’s degree in music at the New England Conservatory of Music, and when he got wind of our film he eagerly offered his services to compose a score based upon Gregorian chant for the finished documentary.
Chapter 53 of the Rule of Saint Benedict states, “Let all guests that come be received like Christ.” Thus, cordiality and generosity expand the Regina Laudis maxim of prayer and work to include the basic human act of hospitality.
I was alone in the guest house one evening when five priests arrived—four from New York and one from the Philippines. Mother Maria Immaculata, who has been in charge of Saint Joseph’s for a number of years, wasn’t available to meet them and later asked me how tall they were. I thought it was an odd question. Not so. She needed to know so that she could assign them to the right cells because some of the beds are longer than others. That is Benedictine hospitality.
—Maintaining all the diverse works here would never be possible without the participation of our guests and the assistance of many generous lay professionals. We do not give formal retreats, but guests are invited to reflect on the monastic experience and welcome to join us in manual work. Working together or meeting together provides a context for giving Saint Benedict’s spiritual principles a practical application, connecting the body with the soul and one person with another.
The night we finished the film, Mother Dolores got permission for us to share supper in the carpentry shop. Our table was a plywood sheet atop two sawhorses, but there were flowers and candles on it. We dined on the famous chicken pies from Phillips Diner in Woodbury—baked for us in the monastery kitchen—and we were able to toast the completion of our film with a decent red. It had been over twenty years since we had had dinner together.
The 1980 film spoke to me while it was being assembled, and it has continued to put me immediately and emotionally back into the time it was made. It visually writes Community life, and two sequences have special meaning for me: the first firing of our kiln and the building of the dovecot.
The outdoor kiln was fashioned after an ancient Italian design by master potter Alexander Giampietro, Mother Perpetua’s father. The first firing began at Matins, and Community members and guests took turns feeding wood into the furnace throughout the night and into the next day until the inside of the kiln reached the a temperature hot enough to bake clay.
The door to the kiln has the shape of a human form walking right into the oven, pot in hand, and the analogy to our development in monastic life made me gasp. Before it is fired, a pot can be remolded, but afterward the only way the clay can change shape is if it explodes. Consecration is the high fire of monastic life. We live the same process and in the same suspense.
The dovecot was the first big undertaking for the Closed Community. It was also an important moment in the life of our Community because it was the first structure on the hill that Lady Abbess had envisioned as the site for the future monastery.
The project represented years of commitment, from collecting the stones to building the archway. Completing the archway was exciting. We placed in the center of a wooden form the arch stone, which is the one that all the other stones press against to stay suspended. We interlocked the rest of the stones on either side of the arch stone. But the wooden form supporting the arch would have to be removed, and we didn’t know whether the stones would hold together or collapse.
The moment the form was taken away—and this is captured in the film—we heard a loud crack. We held our breath as the stones settled into place. The arch held! The nuns and the laypeople clasped hands and joyously danced back and forth through that proud arch.
For me, building the archway is a metaphor for much in monastic life, specifically the work of the Education Deanery. Just as the builders carefully placed stone upon stone over the wooden form, the deanery was fitting new sisters into the Community in relation to the needs they fulfilled. The builders didn’t know if their archway would stand, and neither did I know if the deanery would prevail.
Thirty-Four
At the time of my First Vows, I awakened to a new sensitivity. I not only recognized the need for change but might now be in a position to influence changes.
The reading at mealtimes, for example, had always disturbed me because it is a daily obedience—all of us have to read—and I couldn’t help but be aware that a lot of the women just didn’t know how to present a reading. I thought I should try to do something about that, and the best way could be through plays. It would give my sisters access to a kind of experience I believed they needed. As far as I could tell, no demands beyond skits to entertain the Community on feast days had ever been made of them.
The skits were a time-honored slice of monastic life—as a novice, I took part in a number of them—and, though the amateur level of performance was endearing, I found myself itching to improve the presentations.
Mother Placid was the first to encourage her: “The skits were the way we let off steam. It was all fun, but not a real vehicle to take the instinctual stuff and hook it up where it could be useful for a person to grow into another level. I felt from the beginning that, even as a novice, she pushed for that. She understood the dynamic. She was living it, coming to grips with it, moving with it in a way that could start a reform.”
The first collaborative venture was an allegorical playlet, Synergetic Myth, which Mother David wrote and I directed as a puppet show. We presented the show over and over in a series of very short performances in the art studio, which was the only space available and could accommodate an audience of just four persons at a time.
Other short exercises were presented until I found a little gem of a one-act play based on the Old Testament story of Sarah and Tobias. I thought this play offered us a challenge to begin to experience sacramental theater and hoped it might lift the women to a new self-awareness. Reverend Mother gave me permission to proceed, and Miss Jantzer volunteered to add choreography.
I began to appreciate any possibility that gave me a step up. Inspiration came from my Broadway days. I sent for a Samuel French catalog and searched for plays that contained good scenes for readings. I also expanded my theatrical boundaries and wrote and directed a one-act comedy I called Mousepiller, which would accommodate all of the novitiate in their annual presentation for the professed Community.
Interest among the Community in these amateur theatricals swelled and affected what we chose to present at our traditional Mardi Gras evenings. By the eighties we were regularly presenting more ambitious offerings—scenes from Shakespeare with the whole Community participating.
“I guess you could say Shakespeare brought us together”, recalled Mother Lucia Kuppens. In the mid-seventies, well before her entrance, she was Patricia Kuppens, a member of the Closed Community. “I was then doing my doctoral work on Shakespeare at Yale and some of us in the Closed Community had the idea to present a full production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was elected to speak to Mother Dolores about the project.
“I asked Mother Dolores if she would work with us on it. ‘Do you want me to answer you as a mother or as a professional?’ she asked.
“I bravely said, ‘As a professional, of course.’
“ ‘Well, then, there is no way you can do this as a conventional production. Why don’t you try it as a puppet show? I think that’s probably proportionate to what you’re capable of.’
“It was a good moment, a characteristic one as I came to know Mother Dolores. She’s always insisted, ‘Start with something that’s real.’
“You know, we did it—A Midsummer Night’s Dream with puppets. We spent the whole summer working on it, with Mother Placid making the puppets and Mother Dolores helping me direct it. We did it for kids but mainly it was for us. It was for the pure joy of it.”
The group got compliments and requests for more. Snow White and Beauty and the
Beast were presented, again for children, this time in a tent we called the Unicorn Theater. There was a natural, almost organic evolution from those little entertainments to presentations before adult audiences at our summer fairs. The fairs had started in August 1950 as a fundraiser organized by friends of Regina Laudis; we sold our jam and our cheese and took kids on hayrides. By the late seventies we were hosting thirty thousand people each summer.
In 1978 Lady Abbess had an inspiration to do Alfred de Musset’s play A Caprice. She remembered this comedy of manners from her student days in France and felt that it would have significance for a modern audience. I seized this moment to enlist the professional participation of my Paramount friend James Douglas and his wife, Dawn.
James and Dawn Douglas first visited the monastery in 1967. They visited again the following year. When James left the Hollywood TV series Peyton Place in the mid-seventies, he was offered a leading role in As the World Turns, produced in New York City. He packed up his family and moved to the East Coast. Jim and Dawn maintained a close relationship with Mother Dolores, becoming oblates when the transplanted Douglas family moved from Manhattan to Connecticut to be nearer to her.
“It was bound to be”, Jim said with a smile and a shrug. “When Dolores left Hollywood, we gave her a farewell dinner on her last evening. After dinner, when Dawn and I were doing dishes, Dolores wine glass and mine both fell to the floor. The stems of the broken glasses formed an unmistakable cross. Dawn looked at me and said, ‘Well, I guess we’re in for the long run.’ ”
—Dawn was right. The Douglases have been immensely important in our lives. Not only did they become oblates; they also were named, in 1971, our first monastic scholars.
A Caprice became the first full production performed at our fair. It was quite ambitious and was greeted with enthusiasm by a small but very supportive audience. With this acceptance, James and Dawn began thinking about forming a repertory company at Regina Laudis. It was just a germ of an idea, but over the next few summers we presented another comedy of manners, a medieval mystery play and three Shakespeare plays. Attendance steadily grew. There was no denying that the plays were becoming a centering force for the fairs.
Thirty-Five
Maria Cooper Janis confided she would like to introduce someone to Regina Laudis—the actress Patricia Neal.
I knew who Patricia Neal was, of course, but had never met her or even seen the film for which she won her Oscar because I was already inside the monastery when it was released. Hud has since been shown to the Community, and Patricia is perfection in it.
In 1963 Patricia, four months pregnant with her fifth child, suffered a series of massive strokes that left her incapacitated for several years. She gave birth to the beautiful Lucy, known in the press as the “miracle baby”, and over time recovered with the support and help of her husband, the writer Roald Dahl. She eventually returned to her career, which resulted in a second Oscar nomination.
Maria’s request to introduce Patricia came as a shock. Many years earlier, Patricia had been romantically involved with Maria’s father, and Maria once vented her anger at Patricia by spitting at her. Over the years, Maria never spoke of her.
But, while accompanying Byron on a European concert tour, she had literally bumped into Patricia. Patricia’s straightforward desire to connect and Maria’s intuitive sense that her former enemy was in deep emotional distress had fomented a close friendship. Maria was sincerely concerned about Patricia’s well-being and felt that she would gain much comfort by visiting the abbey. I wrote a letter to Patricia at her Great Missenden home in England, inviting her to visit when she was next in the States.
That spring, Patricia came to America to receive an honorary doctorate from Rockford College in Illinois and accepted my invitation.
“I thought I was looking forward to the visit,” Patricia remembered, “but on the drive up to the abbey from New York I suddenly panicked and wondered what the hell I was doing, going to a Catholic nunnery.
“Upon arrival, I was taken to meet the nun who had written to me. I remembered her face. I had gone to see Lonelyhearts because my good friend Maureen Stapleton was in it and was quite taken by the work of the young ingenue. Now, face-to-face, I looked into the most astonishing blue eyes I had ever seen.
“Over the next year, whenever I was back in America, I arranged the trip to have a few days at my nunnery. When my marriage to Roald ended, I was hit very hard. I left England for good and returned to the States. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the rest of my life. The only professional work offered me was in commercials, one for a coffee company and the other, fittingly, for headache tablets. I was a real basket case. I called Mother Dolores to say I desperately needed to come for a long visit.”
It wasn’t difficult to see that this woman was in deep pain over her personal life, but she was also an actress chomping at the bit to get back on stage. I sensed she had to return to her profession if only in something presented to the Community before she could be open to rebuilding her life. I asked Dick to suggest something and perhaps come back and work with her.
I had long admired Patricia Neal, and although the possibility of working with her was daunting, it was too tempting to turn down. I recommended a reading rather than a more demanding full play and suggested a scene from Anastasia—the “recognition scene” between the woman who claims to be the only surviving heir of Czar Nicholas II, who was murdered along with his family during the Russian Revolution, and the dowager empress, whose recognition Anastasia desperately needs. Wonderful scene—and only two characters, both women. Mother Dolores asked me—a little too innocently, I thought—who I would want to play Anastasia. As if she didn’t know.
With permission to break the Great Silence, the three of us met after Compline every evening for a week to rehearse in Cosmas and Damian, the small hut inside the enclosure used for chant classes. It would be a staged reading, Mother Dolores and Patricia carrying their scripts, but both memorized their lines quickly.
It was decided that the scene would be videotaped to show to the Community at a later date. To familiarize myself with the videotaping procedure, I had to begin taping our rehearsals. Since there was no tape-editing equipment at the abbey, I would have to edit the scene in the camera, stopping and starting to include close-ups within master shots as we went along. This is not a comfortable procedure for any actor, and it hobbled us all.
I was struck at how alike their techniques were—both instinctive actors through and through. It was fascinating to watch them playing with and against each other and yet somehow uncomfortably tense. The atmosphere became more like a Hollywood soundstage than a monastery hut. Patricia, for all her enthusiasm at the beginning, became aggressive and demanding, monopolizing my attention and all but snubbing her coplayer. Mother Dolores, reacting to Patricia’s antagonism, became impatient, distant. Arguments sprang up between them.
I seemed to be the target of Patricia’s discontent, and her edginess was rubbing off on me. Tension grew between us—really, to the boiling point. In rehearsal, Dick framed a close-up of Patricia, an over-the-shoulder shot, and although I would just be feeding lines and my face wouldn’t be in the frame, I had been trained to give the same performance I would give when the camera was on me. When the reverse angle was shot for my close-up, Patricia dismissively read her lines in a dry monotone while she looked out the window. That got my inner diva’s Irish up. I sharply reminded Patricia of her craft. She took exception to that, liberally sprinkling her remarks with one particular four-letter expletive. Over and over and over.
All of a sudden I heard Mother Dolores’ voice in a surprisingly curse-laden tirade that ended with “I am sick and tired of your miserable attitude. Why don’t you leave?” Patricia stomped out into the night. A few moments later, Mother Dolores also exited, leaving me frozen in the middle of the room.
I had the sickening feeling in my stomach that I had, in a stupid outburst, ruined further communication with
Patricia. I had no idea when she walked out after my flaying words that this confrontation between two actresses would be crucial to our ultimate connection.
I looked for Patricia, but she had obviously left the enclosure. An hour later, I was summoned to the abbey entrance. It was Patricia at our front door. “I am a dreadful woman”, she began. “Please forgive me. I don’ want to leave.”
How did this happen? How had she found the key to come back? The answer is one you would expect. It was a person of Christ, someone who loved me and loved the abbey, who had intercepted Patricia. It was Dawn Douglas. Dawn was just leaving the abbey property when Patricia shot out of the enclosure gate. She intercepted Pat and calmed her down, ultimately urging her back. A coincidence? No. But what a mystery of friendship and love.
“Dawn helped me put my behavior into perspective”, Patricia said. “Mother Dolores had welcomed me into their hospitality, and in exchange I brought anger and bitterness with me. I couldn’t get the thought of the woman who broke up my marriage out of my mind. Like a venom, it poisoned everything I did.”
Our rehearsals continued uninterrupted, and I became aware that I was witnessing not only a professional alliance of two actresses working in far less than ideal circumstances yet giving thoughtful—and generous—performances but also the birth of a remarkable relationship between two women. Over the thirty years since Anastasia, I’ve marveled at how loving their relationship is. It can get edgy at times, but the bantering is civil, firmly based in the respect of one formidable fighter for another. They are honest women who share one indispensable ingredient for enduring friendship: a sense of humor.
“It was Mother Dolores’ scheme, I’m sure,” Patricia continued, “but Lady Abbess invited me to spend an entire month at Regina Laudis, and not merely as a guest, she said. If I accepted, I would live in the monastery like a prepostulant.
“I traded my street clothes for the black dress of the postulant and moved into a bare cell. I followed a strict regimen of work and prayer, kept the Great Silence, helped bake bread and weed the garden, and every morning, after church, I met with Mother Dolores. There were times when I felt I never wanted to return to the outside world.
The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows Page 38