During the Passover Seder participants relate the liberation of Jews from Egypt to their own lives. The word for Egypt is Mitzrayyim. While used to refer to the Egypt of Jewish enslavement, Mitzrayyim translates into English as “a narrow or tight place.” During the Seder you examine your life and your own Mitzrayyim and how you have been liberated.
Over the past few weeks we have repeatedly heard the phrase “witness to history” with regards to events in present day Egypt. Since January 25th the common people gathered in Tahrir Square, itself a literal narrow place, in protest of their totalitarian government. This weekend they were delivered from that modern day Pharaoh. How appropriate then that Tahrir translated into English means “Liberation.”
The value of spirituality lies in the ability of metaphor to shed a light on aspects of our lives which are lacking or perhaps, more importantly, on aspects of our life where we lack gratitude. Far and away the situation of most Jews on the planet today is so far removed from the situation dealt with in Exodus as to bear a kinship in name alone. Yet even sixty years ago things did not look so good.
Times change.
The darkness of a tunnel can be foreboding when looking to the side at the imprisoning walls or backwards at the evidence of a long journey. Yet like that narrow place in Egypt it is only temporary. Up ahead shines a light. Outside the tunnel it is a clear and beautiful day.
In 2008 I watched as project after project I had been asked to light lost its funding and either cancelled entirely or reduced from an Off-Broadway to a Showcase contract. Projects fell apart and companies cut seasons. It was not a fun period. By the end of the year I felt brutalized by the economics of theater. Not one year before I was riding high on a fully booked schedule that had me darting back and forth across the country and across the Atlantic. I had no idea what was to come next.
At the end of 2008 I made a rather rash decision. The pretext I used was one of optimism, but the real cause was far from that. My career, it appeared from where I stood, had fallen apart. Time to put down the cards, round up the remaining chips, and go home. There was an air of defeat that I felt which was honestly a quite novel experience for me. Or at least it had been so long it felt new.
Needless to say, the proximate cause of my return to California dissolved in a blaze of glory in rather short order. Add to that a continuing downward trend in the economics of art and things looked bleak. Companies were scaling back on travel expenses. What had made my first year on the West Coast financially viable, the fact that I was for all intents and purposes not working on the West Coast, was now gone. 2010 was going to be rough.
2010, much to my surprise, was far more interesting than I would have first expected.
My friend Mark took over as Artistic Director of a small opera company in the area. We had met a few years before when I was the lighting assistant at SF Opera and he was an assistant director. We had done one show together since that time. As he took over the company he asked if I would light their season. The company was traveling through its own narrow place when Mark took over. The budgets were tightened to the breaking point and they had just lost their long time venue.
Mark found a new venue, twice the size of their last one, and took the reigns of the company directing a new production of Don Giovanni. The show was a hit selling out its brief run and, as if rounding that last corner in a dark tunnel, light began to shine in. I lit three more shows for Mark’s company that year.
The end of the year brought another interesting collaboration. Director Jon Tracy, who had seen my work several times through projects I had done with his fiancee, asked me to light his newest work. The sequel to his, then running, outdoor adaptation of The Iliad. This would be the second chapter, The Odyssey. It was a phenomenal project both on purely artistic merits and for the quality of the collaboration. Of The Earth finished out the year to raving critical success.
While not the best year by economic standards it was quite satisfying creatively.
Finding myself in a bit of a narrow place financially, my deliverance came through creativity. What saved me was, quite literally, the light at the end of the tunnel. A 2K Fresnel perhaps, gelled in L201.
While the financial trials of an American pale next to the struggles of the oppressed to speak freely, they are for each a Mitzrayyim. We can only observe our fellow humans in their tunnels lost in the darkness. It up to each of us, as individuals, to turn our heads away from the past and look up.
