by Rainn Wilson
And that’s one thing about this story that is so weird. On the TV, when there’s a medical emergency, everyone knows EXACTLY what they’re doing, or at least looks like they do. In this debacle, NO ONE seemed to have any clue what to do next. All of these “health professionals” seemed completely lost, confused, and in over their heads.
Now, ambulances in the middle of the night don’t just take you to the fancy hospital of your choice in Santa Monica. No. They take you to the nearest place, no matter what it’s like. So there we were at a hospital that shall not be named in one of the seediest parts of the San Fernando Valley at three in the morning. The emergency room was full apparently, so Holiday was wheeled upstairs somewhere and left in a hallway. I raced over to find my ashen wife barely conscious, on a gurney, uncovered, still bleeding.
I was shaking and sweating and had no idea what to do or how to act, whether to scream at someone or go hide in the corner. Everything completely breaks down when there’s blood and a baby involved. I was a basket case.
Thankfully, Holiday was incredibly brave through this living nightmare. She was tearful and terrified but never lost it or broke down. She maintained a steely, calm resolve and a trust that somehow it would all work out.
Even when the nurse brought over a portable ultrasound and couldn’t find our son’s heartbeat. Even when said pathetic excuse for a nurse then handed my wife the ultrasound paddle thingy and said in a loud, panicked voice (and I’m not making this up), “I CAN’T FIND THE HEARTBEAT, I CAN’T FIND THE HEARTBEAT! HERE. YOU LOOK FOR IT. YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR BABY IS!!!”
Holiday showed incredible fortitude when that same nurse later shouted over to us from her desk down the hall: “I’VE PAGED THE DOCTOR ON CALL OVER AND OVER AGAIN, BUT HE’S NOT CALLING BACK! HE’S NOT CALLING BACK!!!”
Staying as positive as she could, Holiday just kept praying and breathing slowly, even after we finally found the heartbeat, which was quite low and growing fainter by the minute. She remained serene and focused through her terror even when I went over to another gum-chewing nurse and screamed at her to please leave her damn paperwork at her desk and please come over and help clean up and tend to my wife WHO WAS BLEEDING TO DEATH FROM HER VAGINA IN YOUR FILTHY HALLWAY!!!
Finally, after what felt like hours, after many hushed prayers and an ever-deepening profound realization that we just have so, so little control of what happens to us as human beings, either outside or inside our fragile bodies, a doctor slammed through the hallway doors like Superman.
He took one look at the situation and started barking orders at the lame nurses like a champion. Finally, someone acting like a doctor on a TV show.
“WHY ISN’T THE OPERATING ROOM PREPPED?! WHEEL HER INTO THE O.R. WHERE’S THE ANESTHESIOLOGIST?! GET HER READY FOR A C-SECTION, STAT!”
(Note: I’m not sure if he actually said “stat,” but if he didn’t, he should have.)
It was like God sent us an angel in the form of a rumpled, bald, Iranian ob-gyn named Dr. Foroohar, who promptly saved Holiday’s life and delivered us (in record time) a beautiful, perfect baby boy.
Someone brought Walter out to me as I was deep in prayer in the hallway and it was there, having been through two hours of living hell, that I had my most sacred and memorable moment ever.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever held a fresh soul in your hands before, but if you ever get the chance, take it.
Walter was about three minutes old when I held him in my arms in that Van Nuys hallway not far from where his mother had been frantically, tearfully searching for his pulse with an ultrasound paddle not half an hour earlier.
I held him in his little blanket and looked into his gigantic blue eyes, and he looked right back into mine with a strong, quizzical expression that said, “What the HELL is going on here?! WHO ARE YOU?!” Tears rolled down my face as I peered into his eyes and through them. Down. Into and inside the essence of this tiny, wide-eyed, gorgeous boy.
I had the most profound experience of seeing his newly born, infinitely precious SOUL. His “beingness.” Not his personality. Not his consciousness. Something beyond both of those things. There was an entity there, wrapped in a blanket, and the two of us were connected for life.
Now, the only dead body I’ve really seen up close was that of Holiday’s wonderful grandmother Alice, who passed away the year after we were married. When you see a lifeless form, you realize so clearly that we are not our bodies. As I gazed down at her corpse I knew the “Alice-ness” of her had dissipated and gone somewhere else. Evaporated. There was just a pleasant, empty shell that remained in a coffin of wood, devoid of any life or soul or spirit or being. This body I was gazing at had carried the living essence known as Alice for almost ninety years, but that essence was gone now, and the husk had been discarded. Alice was not her body. None of us are.
With Walter, it was the opposite. Here was this soul that had been cooked for a good while in utero, which had now emerged and was inhabiting this brand-new tiny body. His eyes were little portholes into his being. Which was being held in my shaking, grateful hands, the two of us, eye to eye in that Van Nuys hallway at four a.m.
Little Walter was brought to Holiday, who was sweaty, grateful, and gray as a ghost, as she came out of anesthesia in the dank, cold “recovery basement” of the hospital. We were together as a family at last, and in classic Wilson fashion, he knew exactly where to find the milk.
She recovered just fine, although she stayed in the hospital for four more days with incredibly low blood pressure, having lost four pints in just a few hours. Her mom, Mary, and sister, Amy, flew into town, and the five of us camped out in that hospital room for all four days, grateful as any humans could be that Holiday and little Walter were alive.
My wife was a wonder of strength throughout this horrific ordeal. I was a total mess, and she dealt with the pain and chaos like a fighter and a saint.
In fact, this seems to be the story of our relationship as a whole. You’ll often find me panicked and acting like an idiot, while Holiday offers incredible perspective, shows strength in adversity, and, for some strange reason, puts up with my incessant assholery. But it is our willingness (with another tip of the hat to M. Scott Peck) to extend ourselves to support each other’s spiritual growth that has made this marriage not only survive so many ups and downs but prosper as well. And for that I am volcanically grateful.
ADVENTURES IN THEATER
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Throughout my life in acting, I have had some strange, outlandish, and wonderful experiences, both as an actor in training and as a professional. I have done countless plays and roles on TV shows over the years. I’ve done many movies and taken and taught many classes and workshops. Throughout this panoply of acting adventures there are some truly bizarre and memorable experiences that I want to set down in type before I keel over.
Let’s visit some of these, shall we?
EXPERIMENTAL THEATER EXPERIMENTS
Experimental theater is weird. Way weird. I like weird. Weird is cool. Especially when it involves masks, rolling around on the ground, making loud groaning noises, and gesticulating and prancing about like a possessed tweaker in sweatpants. The THEATER!!!
At Tufts, when I was in my misty cloud of depression, I stayed on campus for winter break instead of going home to my divorcing folks, who had just relocated from Chicago back to Seattle, separately. How did I spend this festive time of year when families come together to celebrate their gratitude and give loving gifts to one another? Simple. Locked in a church with a Polish “Theater of Cruelty” director who didn’t speak a word of English.
The Tufts theater department rented out a local church and brought over this woman, Rena Mirecka, from Jerzy Grotowski’s infamous theater company in Poland. The company was infamous for isolating themselves in a commune in the woods and rehearsing plays for years. They called it the Poor Theater. There were no orchestras or moving li
ghts and sets and costumes. It was the actors’ voices, faces, and bodies that were used to tell the story to an alienated (again!) audience. Myth, ritual, ceremony, dance, music, and raw emotion were the central elements, not props and effects and artifice.
There were about twelve of us. We would gather at nine a.m. and not leave until six p.m. What did we do? Well, nothing and everything. We just waited to see what would happen. There were some drums and bells and bowls of water and oranges and flowers. Some idiot in sweatpants would start banging a drum and then a dance would erupt somewhere. Or a game of tag. Or a song. Or a jumping contest. Or a person would start quietly sobbing in the corner.
This. Went. On. For. Hours. And. Days.
It was like an acid trip without the acid (in fact, she wanted us to not consume alcohol or caffeine during the entire week). There was something oddly magical about a series of physical events launching themselves from some random impulses of a group of people in a space. Ceremony, dance, ritual, spirituality, and group psychology all woven together.
Occasionally we would gather and start walking around in a circle. For an hour. No, I’m not kidding. The ensemble would walk around at a brisk pace in a circle for a full sixty minutes. Nothing gets you crazier en la cabeza than a forced circular march. They should consider using it at the rehabilitation camps in North Korea. Why did we do this? I honestly have no idea. To break us down to be more free? To get us out of our heads? To learn about shapes? I really don’t know. But ultimately, I just loved the experience.
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At the University of Washington, our chain-smoking Marxist, feminist theater professor had us do Bertolt Brecht scenes while wearing paper bags on our heads. We cut out eyeholes and a mouth hole and performed intense scenes about political injustice and class. This would alienate the audience and teach us, theoretically, to use our bodies, gestures, and movements to reveal character and tell the story. We became real-life political sack puppets!
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At NYU, one of the greatest experiences of those three years was taking an amazing clown workshop with Gates McFadden (the actress who played Dr. Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation). As part of this two-week adventure in red noses, pratfalls, and absurdity, we did an infamous exercise, appropriately called Ring of Fire.
In the Ring of Fire, you would come out onto the stage as your clown character and there were only two rules.
You had to try to make the audience laugh.
Once you made the audience laugh, and only then, could you leave the stage.
I remember my turn, the nervousness and terror of the moment as I walked out onstage under the bright lights. For some reason I decided to deeply pretend that my clown character was a prostitute at a truck stop and was flirting with various truckers as they walked and drove around. Apparently, my trying to be sexually seductive to truckers in a dress and clown nose was pretty funny; I made the audience laugh and got to sit down. Phew!
Some people were fairly effective and got laughs right away, with deftness and vulnerability. Others, not so much.
They would try some piece of shtick or physical comedy, which would immediately fall flat. Then they’d dive back in and try something similar, which also wouldn’t work. Then they’d try again. And again. It would be painful. “Trying to be funny” just doesn’t work, you see. They’d get stuck. Just stand there. Gigantic awkward pauses. Sometimes an excruciatingly long amount of time would go by, and in two people’s cases, they ended up onstage for almost an hour. It was brutal. You could tell they were pissed off and confused and resentful under their clown nose and ridiculous outfit. Sometimes people break down and cry under the strain and pressure. And, oddly enough, as soon as they do, the audience laughs and the teacher tells them to sit down.
It was an incredible lesson in acting.
You see, when the actor/guinea pig was attempting to “be funny” and “get laughs,” it was akin to watching dentistry.
As soon as the clown character was real, open, vulnerable, breathing, and feeling in the moment, they were hysterical and a joy to watch.
I attempted to apply these principles in the role of Dwight, sometimes effectively and sometimes not. You tell me.
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After graduating from NYU I worked with many great experimental theater artists and directors, including, briefly, Richard Schechner and a company he had formed called East Coast Artists. I was introduced to their work when I saw their production of Goethe’s Faust in which, at a certain point, Faust pulls down his pants and literally POOPS OUT HITLER. Out of Dr. Faust’s butthole comes an actress as a wet poo-Hitler, replete with tiny mustache and loud goose-stepping speeches. It was awesome.
Richard was known for his enormous belly, which looked like he had swallowed a yoga ball, as well as for standing on his head and crossing his legs. He would often watch the proceedings in this manner, on his head, giant stomach floating weightlessly, legs folded and crossed on top. Like an upside-down Buddha.
One exercise we did with Schechner was these emotion circles. This was inspired by Antonin Artaud’s quote that actors are “athletes of the heart.” (Artaud also once famously said: “I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.”) Across a gigantic floor were all these circles with different emotions written inside each one, like an enormous game of Twister with various emotional states. We would jump from one to another and seek to totally emotionally and physically embody the corresponding feeling. If you had captured the actors leaping circles from Grief to Ecstasy to Rage to Envy on a video camera, the viewer would have been positively assured that they were looking into the very worst possible insane asylum.
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Later on, I did a workshop with a personal hero of mine, the experimental theater director and actor Andre Gregory. He is an amazing man and artist, and his films My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street were HUGE inspirations to me (watch them!). For a few weeks he once gathered a group of lost actor souls in a loft in the Garment District, and we would do these strange body exercises called plastiques.
Here’s a link. It’s amazing.
We would take our shirts off for some reason (the guys at least) and do a crazy communal dance in which we would isolate various body parts and find movements and gestures that our knees or pelvis or elbows would make to one another. It was countless sweaty hours of contorting and undulating our various body parts, communicating like we were inhabited by demons and/or aliens.
Then we would do various Chekhov monologues and cry.
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Richard Foreman is an infamous downtown theater director. He’s a tiny, maniacal man who moves his actors around the stage like insane, jerky puppets. I did a production of Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Venus that he directed, and besides climbing around on a movable jungle gym in period Victorian clothes, I spent a good part of the play with a mask that featured an enormous penis on it. I was the “penis-faced man” in a sideshow of freaks. I dabbed at my “nose member” occasionally with my hanky, looking forlorn. Somewhere at the Public Theater there exists a photo of me with a big fat dick face. (Note to publisher: Replace existing bassoon cover with dick-faced-man cover immediately.)
TONIGHT I FEEL THE MAGIC OF THE THEATER
My very first theater job was in Twelfth Night for Shakespeare in the Park in 1989, where I got paid $210 a week. This particular production was noted for being incredibly star-studded and directed by an acting coach who had never directed a play before. I found myself on the first day of rehearsal surrounded by Michelle Pfeiffer (who had never acted in a play previously), Jeff Goldblum, Stephen Collins, Gregory Hines, Fisher Stevens (whom I understudied), and John Amos. A nervous twenty-three-year-old beanpole, I was terrified, giggly, and starstruck. The production was hacky and mediocre, although Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (The Abyss, The Color of Money) was great as Viola. It was an amazing first acting job and I was elated. I l
oved watching the rehearsals and joking around with the crazy stars.
The most incredible moment of the entire production (besides the gorgeous Michelle Pfeiffer beginning a three-year love affair with gawky, squawky Fisher Stevens!) was when the acting coach/director gave the cast a mind-bending speech right before opening night. He said, literally, “F&*^ Shakespeare. F%$* the text. Don’t worry about that s%9$. Just be yourselves! The audience is here to see you. Have a blast, do what you want, and forget about Shakespeare.”
For the young understudies and ensemble members, most of whom had just graduated from Juilliard and NYU and Yale, this was the EXACT OPPOSITE of what we had been taught for THREE LONG YEARS. Also, I don’t imagine that the casts of plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company often get “F*@# Shakespeare” speeches from their directors.
We were astonished and not surprised when the cast took him at his word and mugged up a storm, ignored the demands of the text, danced whenever possible, and even started doing “the wave” with the audience during the course of the show. Sure enough, the audience ate it up and the critics SAVAGED the production.
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I once did the worst production of the worst Shakespeare play ever written, The Two Noble Kinsmen. (Note: It’s one of those lame plays everyone’s pretty sure that Shakespeare may have had a hand in but didn’t really write.) The two leads were myself and the actor Peter Jacobson (Dr. Chris Taub from House). He is about five feet five and extremely (what’s the PC way of saying it these days?) “ethnic.” Side by side with me at six feet two and 165 pounds of pale geek meat, we were the most ridiculous set of warrior brothers you’ve ever seen onstage.
The absurdist, impractical, and stupid set we performed on had a door in the center of the back wall, which leaned in toward the audience. This door would never work right and occasionally, at the most inopportune times, would just swing wide-open with a thunderous crash in the middle of a scene. There was usually an actor waiting for their entrance behind it who would be fully exposed to our minuscule audience and would look up and dash away in their tights.