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fraternity house where the meetings and workshops were held. It was a cold February and there was no way to get away from each other. In typical theater fashion, everyone was behaving in very self-important ways. Each day different companies gave workshop demonstrations, and each evening there were performances. To keep my novice actors from freaking out in the company of professional artists, we met daily and worked on creating a skit based on a short story by Trungpa, “Report from Outside the Closet,” 43 which had been included in the conference’s information packets.
I enjoyed being caught up in the whirl of the conference, away from home and baby for the first time, admiring everyone’s work and worrying about my own presentation, fascinated by the Tibetan gentleman with the limp who seemed to show up everywhere, disrupting events, creating chaos, causing everyone’s ego to inflate larger and larger, and yet not doing much of anything. At the same time as everyone seemed to be growing more and more crazy, it felt like quite a safe situation with someone at the helm deliberately allowing us to spin out of control within a loving, protective container. . . .
My company only felt comfortable with the people from the Mudra Theater Group, our hosts for the conference. They were Trungpa’s students who had been training with him in performance exercises. We visiting actors and directors eagerly awaited their presentation scheduled for the end of the week, but they seemed unenthusiastic, embarrassed, and apologetic. In fact, they didn’t seem to know exactly what they were going to do, or even why they had hosted the conference. One or another of them would mutter to me about the excruciatingly painful exercises that Rinpoche had them do. I got the feeling that it was devotion alone that kept them in the Mudra work.
The Mudra Group presented work on “sound cycles.” . . . These little poem-like things use Sanskrit and English words as well as breaking up words into individual syllables. 44 The emphasis is not on the content of the pieces but on using the whole body as the vocal chamber and on clear diction of the vowels and consonants, thereby letting the sound convey its own content.
Rinpoche was seated in front of the conference attendees. At his feet sat a disheveled young man with curly blond hair. During the course of the Mudra presentation on sound cycles he seemed to be crawling all over Rinpoche, singing off key, “Terrible person, I’m a terrible person.” Or perhaps it was “Terrible person, he’s a terrible person.” I was offended. He was either drunk, high, or crazy. I thought him inappropriate and disruptive. Why doesn’t someone remove him, I huffed. Rinpoche didn’t seem to mind.
During the question period someone asked what Rinpoche meant by the word neurosis . He replied that without neurosis there is nothing to work with. All art has both neurosis and its absence. This gives a lot of material and the possibility for relating to space. “It would be an extremely good and friendly gesture if tonight we would all agree that anybody involved with an acting situation or the public entertainment world is neurotic. Let us really believe in that. We are all somewhat fucked-up people. It’s an embarrassing thing to say, but it doesn’t seem to be my particular embarrassment.” I could feel tension heating up the room.
The drunken character continued to sing “terrible person.”
That afternoon the Iowa Theater Lab had demonstrated their work. I didn’t attend, but my actors reported that when the director cracked a whip and dictated commands, the actors meekly obeyed. As the evening’s discussion continued, this director started engaging Rinpoche in an argumentative dialogue. His point was that he thought of actors as the most sane people. “Some of us are greedy for life. Some of us grip it, some of us are deeply involved in grasping at life. We love life.” He became increasingly