BREAKING RULES OF ORDINARY REALITY
THE FIRST SESSION OF THE MAGIC THEATER IS SCHEDULED
SEPTEMBER 23, 2011. Rules of ordinary reality—rule one: what a person can imagine, he accepts; what he can’t imagine, he calls crazy.
You say to him, “Last night, I went and saw a play where the main character is a grasshopper who’s the head of the New York mafia.”
He’s likely to say: “That’s insane.”
But privately, later on, perhaps he chews on that a little. “You know, it might be funny to see a grasshopper playing a gangster.”
So he goes to the theater, secretly, a week later, and to his amazement—fear drenching his body—he hears his name. The director walks out on stage before the performance and says, “Mr. Jones, come up here. You’re playing the grasshopper tonight.”
Jones knows he’s going to die. In the next few seconds, he’s going to
fold up and collapse in the aisle and breathe his last breath.
And all because he can’t imagine playing a grasshopper.
That’s how tight ordinary reality can get for some people.
And they convince themselves that, even on the off-chance experience exists beyond their own imagination, it would do no one any good to think about it.
It would be irrelevant. It would be a meaningless waste of time. It would improve nothing.
In working Magic Theater dialogue with a private client, I asked him what he thought of the astral plane.
“I’ve heard about it and read about it,” he said. “But I don’t believe in it.”
So then I asked him whether he could pretend he believed in it, in order to play a role that was centered in an astral locale.
“Why should I want to do that?” he said. “What difference would it make?”
“It has to a be a real role to make any difference?”
“Of course,” he said.
After some conversation, he agreed to try to do the role, which was: The King of Astral Locale 1. The king was in charge of putting on celebrations—which in that place were continuous. (I made up the role.)
Well, after an hour or so of dialogue, in which I played the client and he played the King, the effect became explosive. His whole “affect,” as psychologists like to call it, changed. He became much more expressive. He looked like he had just escaped from a prison and was seeing sunlight for the first time in years.
A month later, he told me his life had changed during that hour of Magic Theater. He indicated he’d previously believed his existence was a straight line, and now he was seeing all manner of things he’d missed along the way. “For a little while, every day,” he said, “I’m happy. I haven’t felt really happy since I was thirteen.”
Yet, of course, he still didn’t believe in the astral plane. But who cares? That wasn’t the point. I didn’t need to believe in it, either. The point was to get him to play the role. To move him beyond the steel wall he’d put across his imagination.
This is something it’s hard to show some people. You can take on a role and speak from that role—and the role can be seemingly absurd. But when you speak from it, walls come down. Boundaries dissolve. Even though it’s all sheer invention and improvisation.
On the surface, it might seem the whole effect is achieved because the person “gets outside himself.” That’s just the beginning, though. There is much more to it than that. New energies are invented. New space is invented. New emotions or dormant emotions are tapped into. The ironclad conviction that reality consists of ABC and not DEF is snapped in half.
I had a client who was a working actor. We had sessions on the phone every week. When it came time to do Magic Theater, he assured me he’d played every conceivable role in small theater and in acting classes. He was already a pro at improvisation.
So I started him off with the role of “dissatisfied actor who talks to God in the afterlife,” and I played God. We did that dialogue, and then we switched parts. I was the dissatisfied actor and he was God. That opened up things.
In our next session, I asked him which parent of his he’d rather not see for lunch. His mother, he told me. The very prosiac role of mother. So that’s who I played, and he played himself. And then we switched. That opened up things more. He was feeling better.
The third week, I told him he was going to play “an actor who’s now 80 years old and has been through it all and seen it all, and is encased in a coat of shellac and pickled in years of booze.” And I would be “the freest man in the universe.” That dialogue went on for quite a while, during which he tried to dissuade me from my freedom. He tried every tactic he could think of. And when we switched, the role of “freest man in the universe” was his, and I was the 80-year-old cynical actor. He broke through. It took him a while. He cooked up one situation after another in which he was totally liberated from all earthly concerns. He became the god Mercury and Krishna and Buddha and a space trader in his own ship and all sorts of other personae. I can’t imagine he ever enjoyed playing a role as much as this one. He was quite fantastic.
At the end, he just said, “This was the one I’ve been waiting to play all my life, and I didn’t know it.”
And that was his launching pad into a new future.
It hadn’t been easy, but it was a hell of a lot easier than going downhill for years and years as a disillusioned actor.
It sit here and watch some of the clips from the UN, where the issue of Palestinian statehood is being argued, and I think about how these pathetic, conniving, sold-out, sad little tragicomic politicians are playing their parts—and what would happen if they could bring themselves to play EACH OTHER, to take on those roles and improvise them, hour after hour in the chamber. I think about how much laughter would eventually break out and how, against their better judgment, they would all eventually pass the point of no return and realize what a hoax they’d been perpetrating, how much life they’ve been hiding under wraps for the sake of attaining and keeping their precious positions. I think about what other far more adventurous parts they could then go on to play in the Magic Theater—and how desperately they really want to play those parts, underneath it all.
“Let me! Let me! Let me be the grasshopper who runs the mafia in New York! Let me be the King of Astral Locale 1. Let me be the freest man in the universe! Let me be God! Let me be that moron, the mayor of New York! Oh Yes! Let me be an 80-year-old actor who’s addled by booze! Let me be the sap rising through spring trees in Central Park! Let me be a beggar on a planet a billion light years from Earth! Let me be anything other than what I am!”
For all the world to see. Finally.
This was the dream and the agenda of JL Moreno, the genius of the 20th century, who invented Psychodrama; and the Magic Theater is the extension of that into Roles Unlimited, imagination unlimited, improvisation unlimited.
And you can think about this: What if the hard inflexible rules of the physical universe itself, as they are understood and worshiped, are as inflexible as they are BECAUSE they are locked together with the inflexible roles we play?
What if this giant room called universe and all the bottom-line objects in it seem to be so FINAL and unyielding, because the roles we stick to, in the stage play called life, also seem so final?
What if, eventually, we can discover—FROM EXPERIENCE in the Magic Theater—that universe is a product of mind and we can deal with it DIRECTLY on that basis?
The first workshop of the Magic Theater will take place in San Diego on December 10. If you are interested in coming, email me at qjrconsulting@gmail.com, and I will supply details.
Jon Rappoport