Kelly C. George, Ph.D.: 0:00
l'm reading a book of essays by the playwright Sarah Ruhl. And it's about the theater, but it's also about motherhood. It's called 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write. And obviously, even in the title, she's hinting at the fact that many have agreed that the demands of motherhood are not exactly compatible with the demands of writing. And she writes it while she's caring for her three small Children. While she's sort of in that most intense period of motherhood where kids just need and need and need and it's all you can do to be three steps behind all of their needs. When I picked up the book, I remember I was reading in bed and my two young children, you know, rolled up into my room, hopped up onto the bed and, you know, asked "Mom, what are you reading?" They always, um, think grown-up books are magical in some way, and so they asked me to read from the book to them, and I did. And the first essay is "On Interruptions" and Ruhl does this genius thing where she stages her essay to be interrupted by her two-year-old son. And so she's writing along a thought and then a piece of dialogue interrupts the essay, and she says, you know, "I'm sorry, as I was writing that sentence, my two-year-old son came into my office." And at one point, much to my children's delight as I read it to them, her son comes in and asks, "Mom, can I poop here?" [laughter] And, um, that just really cracked my kids up. And they also, I think, thought it was so great that a child came in to kind of disrupt this adult text. So my question is, how can this book that is about theatre and motherhood help us in a pandemic? And I think the reason why I am finding it so helpful right now is that for one, the body has always been the great interrupter. The body has needs. The body breaks down, the body must be fed. The body asks "Mom, can I poop here?" And of course, a pandemic is about nothing else other than our bodily vulnerabilities and our need to confront them or their demand to confront us. And it's also about the getting together of bodies. That theatre is about bodies on stage and bodies together in audiences and that that's exactly the thing we can't do right now. And then, the last thing is that this interruption, this thing we didn't expect, demands improvisation, that the body demands improvisation, its needs require us to think on our feet and that in this way, this book on theater and motherhood has just exactly what I feel like I need right now. In one essay titled "On Fire Alarms," Ruhl describes a performance where she was in the audience and a fire alarm went off. I mean, like, what better example of what interruption looks like and feels like? And so the actors and the audience file out of the theatre and they gather on the steps of this church. And it's a cold, windy night, and some of the actors are dressed kind of scantily for their costumes... [child screaming in the background] In the background, I can hear right now, my daughter yelling. Don't worry, my husband is watching her. [pause.] And on the steps of this church, despite the windy conditions and despite that, everyone probably is concerned about the actors well being , silently, the actors proceed with the show. They just go on. And importantly, rule shows us that they don't go on as if nothing has happened. They have to go on in completely new ways. She describes a stage manager using a flashlight for a lighting cue that was meant to be a car. And in another instance, a sound cue is somehow found and conjured from a computer somewhere. And in the play, when a set piece looking like a boat is supposed to go across the stage, at that moment there on the steps of the church the actors become the boat. These guys know something about what to do when life gets interrupted. [child screaming in the background] And it makes me think that interruptions. I mean, I know they can be terrible, but sometimes if we're lucky, if we're privileged, we could make something of them. In another essay called "Is One Person an Audience," Ruhl reflects on... [louder child screaming] ...you can hear how angry my daughter is. [pause] We get angry when we get interrupted. You know, anger is just the emotion that comes from the thought "this shouldn't be happening." Doesn't it feel like that's the thought so many of us are having right now.? "This shouldn't be happening." That's where anger comes from.