School Plays

When I was in high school I acted in a few school plays. It wasn't that I had any ambition to become an actor. Actually, I was painfully shy and decided that being in school plays might help me overcome some of it. And to some degree it did. However one play I was in was 'The Pajama Game' and if I had known that we had to give a mini-performance at the local mall to help promote the show I might have passed on that one. As a very self-conscious, very skinny teenager, walking through the mall in my pajamas was WAY outside my comfort zone.

While it was a struggle I really enjoyed many parts of the experience. I always found the whole process fascinating. I enjoyed how, for a period of time, the cast would come together and create a unique mini-adventure, or as I thought of it at the time, a mini-universe (I was really into Star Trek and science fiction at the time), existing within yet completely separate from our normal experiences of high school.

During these mini-adventures we would all transform into completely new identities and totally accept whatever role everyone else was playing. There was never any consideration not to. The play couldn't exist otherwise. Our teacher would also encourage us to try out for roles that were outside our norm so that we could grow as actors.

During the weeks of rehearsals and performances I would enjoy passing other members of the cast in the halls between classes. We would oftentimes revert back into our play roles and toss a few lines back and forth or go about the tasks at hand as our character might in that situation. Back in class I might enjoy daydreaming how I just had an exchange with a friend of mine, who was playing his part of the play where he is a real creep, and yet it was great fun. Here he was being a creep and yet I knew he wasn't really a creep so I could enjoy him playing the creep. (I did a lot of daydreaming in high school, which might explain my less than stellar grades.)

My favorite time though was always the cast party at the end of the play. Here we would celebrate the play and laugh at the various roles we had played with each other; which scenes went according to script and which went hilariously wrong, even though during the play we usually felt a wave of panic when that happened. Surprising enough the audience never knew of the mishaps and the mishaps, usually without fail, seemed to actually add to the performance rather than detract from it.

In my current life path I sometimes compare my journey to those plays. Using that model I can imagine my life as just a part in my soul's play, which is a part in the WHOLE play. I am playing this role, now, because it best suits my soul's overall journey, but it is a part after all. It is not who I really am. And I see the people in my life as my fellow cast members, each playing their own roles in their soul's play and also a part of the whole play. They are, no doubt, playing their marvelous parts perfectly, especially those who might push my buttons. No doubt we will have played all the parts before we are finally done, so we could know what the roles feel like and so that we would have grown as souls.

This model also helps me when people do things that I don't understand or seem out of character with the way I perceive them. Or I feel pain or confusion over something I have said or done. It's not that I discount the importance of what happens in life. I walk my path as consciously as I am able in each moment. I am just cognizant of the fact that I do, after all, only have a very limited idea of my own script and have no idea why another's part was written the way it was.
No doubt we will all celebrate and laugh about it at the cast party.

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