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Authors: Alice Eve Cohen
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fluttery body language, and the way she repeatedly pushes wisps of white hair from her eyes. “I drove here from Philadelphia and they told me your class is full, but I have to take this class. My name is Bella. They said at registration that you might let me stay.” I invite her into the class. Sixteen students, ranging in age from twenty to seventy, look at me with great expectation. All these people desperate to create solo theater. Who knew? It was disorienting to sit upright, act like a normal person, interact with students, teach a class.
“All theater is storytelling,” I tell my class, “but solo theater is a more primal form—akin to the ancient teller of tales, the Homeric bard, the African griot, the trickster, and the shaman. In this course we’ll define ‘story’ and ‘storytelling’ very broadly. Other peoples’ stories, your own stories, fantastical stories, stories with or without words. My goal is for each of you to find the story you want to tell and the way you need to tell it. The story you are compelled to tell right now might be different from the story you will want to tell a year from now. The way you tell your story now—the lens through which you view the story, the medium with which you communicate that story, the audience you want to reach—might be different from the way you tell that same story at another time in your life.”
My students tell the class what brought them to a course in solo theater.
Jeremiah, a black poet from Alabama, handsome, with dread-locks and glasses, is a year out of the military, getting his college degree, seizing a new life.
Dani Athena, pale and thin, with black hair and eyes—a choreographer, my age, who teaches dance at a high school, wants to finish a solo piece she started a few years ago.
Kayla, a nineteen-year-old African American girl from the housing projects in Red Hook, Brooklyn, has harrowing, half-finished stories to tell.
Bella, a librarian from Philadelphia, tells incoherent fragments with great urgency.
Richard, the prosecutor, tells stories for a living—“When I try a case, I tell a story with witnesses. The adversary tells a different story of the same set of events. My stories have to be disciplined, terse, and to the point. I want to learn to tell stories in a more narrative form.”
Miriam wants to create a piece about her two dead grand-mothers, still feuding in heaven.
I tell them I’m expecting a baby at the end of the semester, that I’m on bed rest but my obstetrician has allowed me to teach because this class was so important to me.
The idea of a fragile life inside of me, the fact that I’m taking a risk by teaching, sets the tone. It’s a high-risk class. They treat the study of solo theater as if their lives depended on it, and as if my life depends on it, which it does.
For two hours a week, on Monday nights, teaching solo theater, cultivating this crop of storyteller-performers, I recognize myself again.
Scene 7
Adoption Option
I can give up the baby for adoption! Why didn’t I think of this before? The symmetry is redemptive. When Brad and I were unable to have a baby, we received the gift of a child from Julia’s birth mother, Zoe, who, like me, didn’t know she was pregnant for six months. I will reciprocate and give this baby to a childless couple. Unlike abortion, this solution is morally unassailable. I am adoption’s greatest advocate and happiest recipient. Julia is the poster child for adopted children. I’m adoption’s poster mom.
“The baby doesn’t need adoptive parents,” says Michael. “She already has parents!”
Undeterred, I call Spence-Chapin adoption agency. “This is very ironic,” I begin. “I adopted a baby through Spence-Chapin nine years ago. Now I’m pregnant and might want to give my baby up for adoption.”
Eleven years earlier, when Brad and I first walked into the century-old mansion on Fifth Avenue and Ninety-fourth Street, we were given the historical
“All theater is storytelling,” I tell my class, “but solo theater is a more primal form—akin to the ancient teller of tales, the Homeric bard, the African griot, the trickster, and the shaman. In this course we’ll define ‘story’ and ‘storytelling’ very broadly. Other peoples’ stories, your own stories, fantastical stories, stories with or without words. My goal is for each of you to find the story you want to tell and the way you need to tell it. The story you are compelled to tell right now might be different from the story you will want to tell a year from now. The way you tell your story now—the lens through which you view the story, the medium with which you communicate that story, the audience you want to reach—might be different from the way you tell that same story at another time in your life.”
My students tell the class what brought them to a course in solo theater.
Jeremiah, a black poet from Alabama, handsome, with dread-locks and glasses, is a year out of the military, getting his college degree, seizing a new life.
Dani Athena, pale and thin, with black hair and eyes—a choreographer, my age, who teaches dance at a high school, wants to finish a solo piece she started a few years ago.
Kayla, a nineteen-year-old African American girl from the housing projects in Red Hook, Brooklyn, has harrowing, half-finished stories to tell.
Bella, a librarian from Philadelphia, tells incoherent fragments with great urgency.
Richard, the prosecutor, tells stories for a living—“When I try a case, I tell a story with witnesses. The adversary tells a different story of the same set of events. My stories have to be disciplined, terse, and to the point. I want to learn to tell stories in a more narrative form.”
Miriam wants to create a piece about her two dead grand-mothers, still feuding in heaven.
I tell them I’m expecting a baby at the end of the semester, that I’m on bed rest but my obstetrician has allowed me to teach because this class was so important to me.
The idea of a fragile life inside of me, the fact that I’m taking a risk by teaching, sets the tone. It’s a high-risk class. They treat the study of solo theater as if their lives depended on it, and as if my life depends on it, which it does.
For two hours a week, on Monday nights, teaching solo theater, cultivating this crop of storyteller-performers, I recognize myself again.
Scene 7
Adoption Option
I can give up the baby for adoption! Why didn’t I think of this before? The symmetry is redemptive. When Brad and I were unable to have a baby, we received the gift of a child from Julia’s birth mother, Zoe, who, like me, didn’t know she was pregnant for six months. I will reciprocate and give this baby to a childless couple. Unlike abortion, this solution is morally unassailable. I am adoption’s greatest advocate and happiest recipient. Julia is the poster child for adopted children. I’m adoption’s poster mom.
“The baby doesn’t need adoptive parents,” says Michael. “She already has parents!”
Undeterred, I call Spence-Chapin adoption agency. “This is very ironic,” I begin. “I adopted a baby through Spence-Chapin nine years ago. Now I’m pregnant and might want to give my baby up for adoption.”
Eleven years earlier, when Brad and I first walked into the century-old mansion on Fifth Avenue and Ninety-fourth Street, we were given the historical
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