Mark’s remarkable dream

Forgetting my script, I face my audience and become one of them

I seldom remember my dreams. They usually vanish the moment I awake. But late last night, about an hour before dawn, I awoke from the most vivid and astonishing dream I’ve had in years. In it I was an accomplished actor who one day made my way to the theater where I was scheduled to perform, only to realize on my arrival that I had forgotten every word of my role in my solo play. Mortified, I summoned whatever presence of mind remained in me to admit to the director and producers that I had drawn a blank and had nothing left to offer. Meanwhile the audience was sitting in their seats just on the other side of the curtain eagerly awaiting the evening’s performance. The director and producer stood stunned in silence, appalled by our predicament.

Beset by panic, I retreated to a dark corner backstage and sought to pull myself together to confront my utter loss of memory. As if it were a material embodiment of the hash I had suddenly made of my carefully cultivated professional life, I frantically struggled to make up something to present to the audience, seeking to salvage something edible from the hopeless mix of mashed potatoes and other vegetables I had thrown into a bowl. But the more I stirred it the bigger mess I made. The producer and director witnessed me in this state of utter confusion and realized to their dismay that there was nothing to be done. I pledged to them to pay the audience back the cost of their tickets out of my own savings and to bow out of the entire production for the rest of its run. My humiliation appeared complete, decades of arduous practice suddenly gone to ruin, my career erased.

Keenly aware of the audience’s expectant presence as they sat on the other side of a thin curtain primed for my performance, I felt paralyzed, unable to move in any direction. But then, without premeditation, my feet began to move forward, carrying me along a path I had never before taken and would never have thought possible. Without informing the director and producers of what I was about to do and without a conscious plan of any kind, I parted the curtain, stepped through the opening and stood before the audience, still and silent. All the eager faces of those who had long admired my acting skills now evinced a mix of anticipation and puzzlement to see me not about to begin the performance but about to make some kind of announcement.

What emerged from my mouth and heart surprised even me. As I stood there and the audience’s puzzlement turned from impatience to consternation, I began to speak spontaneously, without long-practiced lines, without a script, without even an excuse, plot or story to guide me. What I spoke unfurled before me like an untrodden path into the unknown. I suddenly found myself living rather than leading my performance. I spoke into what I had always imagined to be a void that I was compelled to fill with pre-practiced content. But suddenly I was freed from all constraints. I entered an unscripted state of wonder, every moment, every word and gesture a revelation to me as much as to my listeners.

My lifelong professional obligation to please audiences with performances they could rely upon from works they knew and loved was suddenly replaced by an opportunity to create works together in ways that both they and I were now free to make up as we went along. I spoke and moved across the stage with a spontaneity I had never before felt, unafraid of the audience’s judgments but instinctively in sync with their hearts’ desires. And their feelings, starting in puzzlement and consternation, gradually dawned into wonder and delight. They were suddenly no longer an audience at all but characters of their own making integral to the success of the performance.

Liberated at last of the limitations of our long-rehearsed roles, we were now free to speak our minds, express our hearts and stride across a broader stage. In fact, there was no longer any stage at all but a limitless universe of possibilities yet to be imagined and explored in the untrodden terrain within, between and beyond us all.

25 February 2021