by Rainn Wilson
Sounds awesome, right? All of a sudden, I had a window into the concept of God and He started to make sense to me. The immature God-view of the unapproachable old man scowling down on me faded away as I started to ponder Wakan Tanka and feel His/Her/Its presence all around me. It was the idea that the Creator could be felt in nature and time, that He was a force for healing and connection and love that moved through the wind and the sun and art and our cells, that opened my cynical young heart to the possibility of a more evolved vision of God.
I was speaking to my poet friend Phil, an unrepentant atheist/agnostic (whom we had visited in El Salvador), about my new infatuation and fascination with Wakan Tanka while we were watching a Yankees game. They were down in the bottom of the ninth when Darryl Strawberry stepped up to the plate. He swung and missed. Phil said, “Why don’t we put this Wakan Tanka theory to a test? Pray to Him and ask Him to let the Yanks win the game.”
Sounded reasonable to me. So I stopped leaning against the doorjamb and stood up, hands in the air, shaman style. I said, “Oh, Wakan Tanka,” in some ridiculous, formal voice that sounded vaguely like a character from Dances with Wolves. “Oh, Wakan Tanka, Great Mystery. Oh, Father spirit of the seven directions, of nature and our grandfathers, thank you for the air we breathe and the sunlight that gives us life.” (Or something to that effect. I can’t really remember what I said.) “If it is your will, please allow our team to win! Show us that you exist by helping Darryl Strawberry to hit a home run. Um, thank you, oh Wakan Tanka. Sir. Peace out.”
I have no idea why I was so stilted and vaguely racist during my heartfelt prayer, but as I came out of it I heard a thwack! Darryl Strawberry had just hit a two-run walk-off home run that won the game in the ninth inning.
We were stunned. Our jaws dropped like oven doors.
We looked at each other curiously. Hmmmm.
Okay, it most certainly could have been a coincidence. But it sure got my mind spinning. Even skeptical Phil was a bit agog.
Maybe I was onto something.
I dove even deeper into my spiritual quest. I mean, what else was I going to do in my long unemployed months in between acting gigs? Be productive? That would defy the principles of lazy, shiftless actors since the days of Shake-a-spear-a!
I went to several church services. I attended Buddhist meetings and meditation workshops. I continued to read and read and read. I even started to fitfully, anxiously, confusedly “pray.” To surrender. The concepts of Wakan Tanka and God merged and fused in my mind’s eye. I started to ask for help on my journey from a power greater than myself, something infinite and unknowable. (Baha’u’llah, the founder of the Baha’i Faith, calls God “the Unknowable Essence,” “the most manifest of the manifest, and the most hidden of the hidden.”)
Then an event happened that forced me to greatly deepen and broaden my path to a Higher Power. I had a nervous breakdown on Broadway.
Joe Dowling, the great Irish director whom I had worked with for both the Acting Company and at the Guthrie Theater, called me and told me he wanted me as the goofy romantic lead character in an old English Restoration (post-Shakespearean) comedy called London Assurance. It was going to be performed on the main stage of the Roundabout Theatre in Times Square.
I had a lead role in a Broadway show! I was ecstatic. Up to that point I had done a bunch of regional-theater plays, Off-Off-Broadway stuff, and various tours but nothing close to something of this caliber.
In the months and weeks leading up to the rehearsals, I grew increasingly nervous. The pressure was building inside. I felt an intimidating stress mounting within me about how I would need to really shine in this role. A stressful voice in my head began prodding: “This play could get me a better agent! This role could land me a Tony nomination!! This is my chance to get an amazing New York Times review!!!” The pressure continued to increase and build through rehearsals and eventual performances until, you guessed it, I totally sucked in the role.
I bombed on Broadway. But—and isn’t it funny how life works?—it turned out to be one of the best experiences of my life.
In rehearsals I was stiff and disconnected. I had, for some weird reason, decided exactly how to play the role in my head. All my choices were pre-decided. They were also broad, fakey, and strangely puppetlike. I could feel myself throwing out all of my training and rehearsed the play by doing strained line reading after strained line reading.
I knew I was sucking and I didn’t know what to do. I could tell internally and also from the quizzical, almost sad looks I was getting from the rest of the cast. Joe pulled me aside after a couple of weeks and spoke to me quite seriously about his concerns with me in the role. He urged me to relax and just explore the play and have fun in the rehearsal process, but try as I might, I just couldn’t. I was in a gigantic, pressurized acting rut that I couldn’t escape.
All of a sudden we were getting close to having an audience. I freaked. I began waking up in the middle of the night shaking and sweating. I was terrified. I knew that I was about to suck in my first big show. Holiday was in Iowa at the time, and I spent many tearful hours in the middle of the night (me, again, panicked) with her on the phone as she consoled and counseled me (her, again, offering incredible perspective).
That’s when the prayers started. When all else fails, sometimes you just get on your knees and ask for help. And I did. Over and over again. I reached out for assistance from Wakan Tanka/God/Creator/Whatever. I was stuck. I was lost and terrified. I literally didn’t know what else to do. The prayers didn’t make me a brilliant actor all of a sudden, but I do believe they were a factor in a transformation I made as an artist and person at this pivotal juncture.
I started to understand that I had been doing the role for all the wrong reasons: to impress people, to gain accolades, to gain fame. I was looking outside of myself. Trying to be something that I wasn’t. For others.
In fact, this was the story of my life as an actor in New York up until that point. I was always seeking to impress others with my work and control how I was perceived by people in the industry. I had wanted to be some external drama school ideal of an actor-man. This was often giving me a stiff, kind of formal demeanor in my acting and presentation and would lead to much nervousness and self-consciousness.
London Assurance broke me open like an egg. I didn’t want to be that kind of fakey artist anymore, performing out of obligation, neediness, and a desperate need to be liked. I knew that ultimately I needed to be myself, and screw whatever other people thought of me. I felt this newfound commitment to freedom in my bones and it was a revelation. After this Broadway fiasco, I learned how to relax and breathe and play. I embraced the natural nerdy oddness that was me. I was never going to be some formal idea of a “classical actor-man,” beloved by casting directors and the New York Times and rocking an ascot.
I gotta be me, Wakan Tanka–damn it!
As the previews went along, I did see some eventual improvement. I was able to relax a bit here and there and get a few occasional laughs in the role. Was I good? No. But at least I wasn’t completely horrible. I got mostly poor to middling reviews, but at least I didn’t get raked over the coals.
But, more important, after the show closed I was filled with much greater purpose and inspiration in my life and work.
I fired my lousy New York agents, who hadn’t even bothered to see me in the play, and strode out onto Forty-Fifth Street, manifesting a newfound sense of myself as an actor: unemployed but inspired.
What I hoped would be the greatest triumph of my career ended up being an excruciating nightmare. But it was through that artistic trial that I came to find my voice. I felt the energy of God and prayer behind this entire adventure on Broadway, and it pushed me to continue and deepen my search.
Ultimately that yearning magnet inside of me came to know, to believe in, to have faith in, a Creator. I just couldn’t wrap my mind around an empt
y universe, filled with scientific laws but no meaning. It just didn’t make sense to my bones that once upon a time (fourteen billion years ago) there was this teeny tiny dot of something and then a big bang and all of a sudden there was space and time and unlimited matter and energy all exploding with unimaginable force as the universe as we know it was ripped into being for no real reason. Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine all this “stuff” around us and the incredible majesty and mystery of the push and pull of scientific rules that spin all the galaxies like plates and adhere us to our mud-ball home with this inexplicable (and, as of yet, unidentified) force called “gravity,” existing simply on its own by chance and accident. The idea that my little blip of incredible consciousness and the miraculous consciousness of seven billion of us on our celestial/terrestrial home in the Milky Way was arrived at by the random confluence of molecules evolving for no purposeful reason from oceans to beaches to condominium complexes just didn’t add up. A Creator-less creation didn’t make any sense, try as I might to understand it. My spidey senses felt the presence of a mighty Love-Being behind and inside the curtain of the stuff and energy and beauty of the universe. And that Love-Being . . . get this . . . was the ancient Roman snake god, Glycon. (Joking! Just wanted to flip out anyone who’s still shaking their head at all this God stuff. But seriously, Google Glycon sometime. An entire Macedonian cult was devoted to this snake deity, who turned out to be . . . a hand puppet. You can’t make this stuff up!)
I then dipped back into the faith of my childhood. I read most of the Baha’i books that I had skipped or neglected as a young’n. I started with The Dawn-Breakers, the history of the earliest Baha’is (called Bábis at the time), who had been slaughtered by the thousands in countless grotesque ways by the Persian government and the Muslim authorities in mid-nineteenth-century Iran. My heart was drawn in by the tales of the heroic sacrifices of those early believers. It gave me a context for the historic rise of the young religion. I read the principal works of Baha’u’llah, the prophet founder of the Faith: The Book of Certitude, the Gleanings, the Hidden Words, the Seven Valleys, the Epistle to the Son of the Wolf. I read his son ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s writings and talks contained in Some Answered Questions and Paris Talks. The four-part biography The Revelation of Baha’u’llah by Adib Taherzadeh was instrumental in my gaining a deeper understanding of both his teachings and struggles. The list goes on. Suffice it to say I eventually quit the booze and came to RE-believe in the faith of my family and my childhood. It made the most sense to me. It seemed like the most advanced, evolved, and applicable of the world religions. Baha’u’llah’s plan, both mystical and practical, for the spiritual healing of humanity, for increasing the bonds of love and unity on our planet, resonated deeply within me and I felt newly inspired. I was finally ready. As Kahlil Gibran famously wrote, “Faith is a knowledge within the heart, beyond the reach of proof.” My heart had the knowledge it needed to make the leap into the mysterious ocean of faith.
You get the idea. I won’t go any further because I know you want to get to the part about what Kevin from The Office ordered for lunch, but I do want to discuss a couple of things that struck me as I came back to faith.
In reexploring the beliefs of my childhood I came upon a central tenet that I had not explored before. One of the principal teachings of the Baha’i Faith is THE INDIVIDUAL INVESTIGATION OF TRUTH. That is to say, it is the OBLIGATION of every human being to find the truth for themselves. This is not a suggestion; it’s mandatory on our life’s journey. But so liberating! We not only should not simply take on the truth from our parents or our families, but we should also not inherit the truth from our surrounding culture and media. This teaching was absolutely incendiary and revolutionary when it was revealed in the mid-1800s in Persia (perhaps the place on earth where the LEAST amount of self-searching goes on, both now and a hundred and fifty years ago). We get inundated with so many messages about belief, about what is true and what is not, from both our families and our culture, and it’s crucial that every single one of us come to our own well-excavated understanding. That’s not to say we might not eventually share the same beliefs as our parents or the prevailing culture, but as Thoreau and Socrates (and all the great spiritual teachers) implore: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Looking back on those years I realized that the individual investigation of truth is exactly what I had undertaken in my own way. By discarding the faith of my parents and diving into the religion of art and the theater, I was finding my own peculiar path. By getting lost in “self” and unhappiness and then going on a spiritual search, I had been fulfilling my personal obligation to find the truth for myself.
(Fortunately for me, I came out of my misadventures with drugs and alcohol with my life, health, and soul pretty much intact. I know many who didn’t. It’s not harmless. I’ve lost many friends to that way of life. Some have died. Some have simply fried their hard drives for the rest of time or live in a perpetual chemical fog. I’m betting not one of them would say, “It was worth it.”)
The other thing about my faith that I discovered is that the dichotomy I was experiencing around art and faith wasn’t a dichotomy at all. In the Baha’i Faith there were many writings I uncovered that connected the arts with the divine or spiritual. As I explored, I unearthed a quote that blew my mind.
‘Abdu’l-Baha, the son of Baha’u’llah and the leader of the Faith from 1892 until his death in 1921, once said in a letter to a believer, a young artist:
I rejoice to hear that thou takest pains with thine art, for in this wonderful new age, art is worship. The more thou strivest to perfect it, the closer wilt thou come to God. What bestowal could be greater than this, that one’s art should be even as the act of worshipping the Lord? That is to say, when thy fingers grasp the paint brush, it is as if thou wert at prayer in the Temple.
Remarkable. For the head of a religion with tens or hundreds of thousands of adherents at the turn of the century to say, in essence, that art is the same as worship was, again, truly revolutionary. And to me, in my search, the most inspiring thing I could hear.
The way I see it, when you create something you are emulating THE CREATOR. God has many titles in the many faith traditions, and one of them is “the Fashioner.” There used to be nothing and then there was the universe. God made it in his spare time, I suppose. Like Minecraft.
There was a blank piece of paper and then there was a poem or a story or a screenplay or a beautiful picture created by an artist. What greater testament can an artist make than to emulate the Great Artist upstairs? And when you add the altruistic component to art, that you’re making something true and beautiful and relevant as a SERVICE to others, that’s when the spiritual aspect of art truly soars. We seek to transcend, we monkey people, through love, service, art, prayer, and faith in something outside of ourselves.
Art and worship are two sides of that profound human coin that separate us from the orangutan, chimpanzee, 49ers fan, or any other creature known for flinging its feces. That longing to connect with something beautiful outside of ourselves from our hearts. To uplift, entertain, beautify, and express the profound is a mysterious spiritual act.
Perhaps that was what I was striving for in my various experimental artistic exploits—my zeal and fervor for opening people’s minds and hearts through doing weird little plays in tiny theaters for dozens of viewers.
And then, having had these profound, heart-opening revelations, I went and did something spiritually questionable and maybe even flat-out ludicrous. I became a celebrity.
Chapter 13
WELCOME TO LOS ANGELES
—
Clowns at home. A slacker vaudeville.”
With those few words a remarkable and demented theater piece was born. An event that would bring me to Los Angeles, launch my career in television and film, and change the entire course of my life.
Some younger friends at NYU, David Costabile,
Kevin Isola, and Michael Dahlen, had approached me to direct them during their “Free Play,” a three-week session of one’s third-year training where you could do whatever the hell you wanted. People would do improv, stage a preexisting play, write something new, or do performance art using the facilities and resources of the school.
The guys wanted to do something involving clowning. I had always loved the art form and had studied it with several other teachers after graduating from NYU.*
We got together for dinner at a Ukrainian restaurant (the borscht was excellent but the pierogies a bit doughy), and I pitched them the idea: “A day in the life of a trio of clowns. Clowns at home. A slacker vaudeville.” Whatever the hell that meant. I didn’t really have a clue, just an instinct about the way some scenes could build and intertwine to create the most basic of story arcs.
“What should we call this thing, whatever it is we’re doing?” one of the would-be clowns asked.
Our Ukrainian waitress dropped off our check. Her name tag read BOZENA.
“Excuse me,” another clown asked the waitress. “Bo-zeena? Is that your name?”
The waitress huffed disdainfully. “It’s pronounced ‘Bo-shjenah.’”
And with that, The New Bozena was born. (We still insisted on pronouncing it “Bozeena.”)
We worked in a little rehearsal room creating the New Bozena characters using many devices and exercises that I had learned from Gates McFadden, Jim Calder, and other clown teachers. David became Ramón, the innocent, sweet-faced tuxedoed clown with an indeterminate accent and a brain of flan. Kevin transformed himself into Revhanavaan Sahaanahanadaan, a horned creature in a unitard who always carried a suitcase with a ham in it. And Michael was Spiv Westenberg, a slack-jawed hipster in a vintage suit with drumsticks and an Afro (a description that applies to about half of the graduates of the Tisch School of the Arts).