A truly personal search begins when one realizes that to make the process real, one has no choice but to enter into its rediscovery, step by step, accepting nothing as true until it has become true in one’s own experience. One must start from zero, clear an empty space in oneself, and walk the entire journey of the very first searcher who paved the way.
— Peter Brook, Threads of Time
I first met English director Peter Brook at his Le Bouffe du Nord Theatre in Paris where he invited me for lunch and to sit in on a rehearsal of Carmen. He wanted to discuss India where I had lived for some years studying Hindu philosophy, for his next theatre project was to be an adaptation of the great Hindu epic, Mahabharata. Here was a man touched by a quest, who had courageously broken away from traditional theatre when he was already at the top of his field in England. Brook studied the teachings of Gurdjieff, the Russian- Armenian mystic philosopher (1866-1949), becoming more and more dissatisfied with the emptiness of commercial theatre. He procured an abandoned warehouse in an unfashionable section of Paris and literally created the empty space for a new theatre. So when he produced the well-known story of Carmen, he made it his own by investing in it his vision, values, and feelings. Later on, he did the same with the Mahabharata.
Whether you create an original story or re-create a known one, you still must make it your own. And this requires a personal journey, both inner and outer. The outer journey of research and craft is merely the starting point. The best adaptations are never literal. Find the vision of your story from within, and it will guide you to the end. Invisible helpers will appear to light the way.
Sometimes a story might appear in a dream, as did the Disney family film that I wrote for Dolly Parton, Unlikely Angel. The theme of unconditional love necessary for spiritual growth, told in a simple way, combined a specific, personal value with a universal truth which found a response in the collective. Often the best ideas arise from our own unconscious minds, either waking or in sleep.
One idea for a play came about in the following way. I was walking down Park Avenue in New York when I saw the New York Post headline at a newsstand: “Mother Hurls Baby and Self from Twelfth Story Brownstone.” In a flash, I knew my next play. I didn’t even bother to read the news story but just adopted the premise. I had wanted to write about something I felt strongly about, that is, the superwoman of the eighties who is pushed over the edge. I had not yet found my story, only what I wanted to say.
Women, like myself, who married young, had children, careers — and wanted to do everything perfectly — often faced an inevitable crisis of overwhelm. This tragic news story headline gave me the starting point for a fictional story that could happen to anyone, when pushed to the extreme. What would happen if a superwoman of the eighties, driven to be perfect as wife, mother, and careerist, was pushed over the edge and did something tragic?
Sometimes to make a story work, you must go to extremes. This is why many successful stories involve a murder or catastrophe. Please understand that I am not referring to gratuitous violence here. Just follow the integrity of your story and go to the end of it. The Swedish screenwriter-director, Ingmar Bergman, is a master of pushing a story to its edge. Where most writers would end their story at a certain point, a genius like Bergman begins with the extreme, then pushes the dramatic action even further. This pushing can result in stories of substance and depth, but demands of the writer to write from his heart and guts as well as his mind. The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Scenes from a Marriage, and Saraband are four examples of Bergman’s masterpieces.
The challenge is to discover the meaning for your self in the story you have chosen, and then adopt the necessary form that can be meaningful to others. One might say, first, the passion, and only second is craft necessary to birth an authentic and great story. It is passion in a relationship or marriage that will sustain it for years through thick and thin. Similarly, it is passion in a story that will sustain the writing process through the weeks, months, and sometimes years of completing the work.
How to choose your story then? Simple. Choose the one you feel emotionally connected with.
What does the brain matter compared with the heart?
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs.Dalloway
Never underestimate the power of a great story. Bill Moyers once interviewed producer David Putnam on NPR Radio. Putnam produced Oscar winner Chariots of Fire and The Mission, among other fine films. Putnam remarked that “If movies were what they might be, there’d be no need to go to church.” Such is the mighty impact of story.
My early play, Somewhere-in-Between, produced off-Broadway in New York City in the early seventies, is set in a mental institution. One of the six main characters, Sam, is really sane but keeps finding a way to return to the institution. That is, he feigns insanity in order to escape the outer world. Sam confides to the inmates that the outer world is more insane than the mental ward. Sam becomes a bridge “somewhere-in-between” the two worlds.
Jungian analyst Linda Leonard is aware of how we have forgotten to honor our visionaries:
In our culture we have lost our awareness of the importance of oracular knowledge, and we fail to honor or even listen to the Visionaries who mediate visions. We have forgotten to revere the ancient mysteries; we have discarded the rituals that allows the mysteries to unfold and be revealed. In ancient times, the role of priestess (or shaman) was central to human life.
In the film Wolfbride, written for the Finnish Film Foundation in the early nineties, I tell the story of Aalo, a Finnish woman living in the seventeenth century who is a healer. She is marked from birth as a wolfbride and called by the Big One, the great wolf. Aalo, too, is a shape changer, that is, both wolf and human. When Valber, Aalo’s woman servant, draws symbols in the ashes, Aalo asks her what they mean. Valber replies, “It is the divine couple. It represents the divided soul. Dark and light.” Later, here is how Aalo is carried away by the calling of the Big One:
The wolf couple face each other. Aalo looks at the Big One’s eyes and loses herself. She realizes he is more than a mere wolf and is the Dark One himself. His form seems to grow large and shimmer in the moonlight and his eyes shine like two red piercing embers. They approach each other, sniffing.
SOUND of wind through the branches as they leap toward each other and roll upon the ground.
CLOSE on their paws as they transform into human hands.
CAMERA widens to see a naked Aalo with a naked STRANGER rolling on the ground in fierce passion. CLOSE on golden resin slowly oozing from the trunk of a tall pine tree. One drop becomes merged into a second drop. Two naked bodies lie intertwined.
He rises and leaves. Aalo awakes and sits up, watching the Stranger, now in wolf form, gallop away.
Aalo has surrendered to her instinctive self, yet returns to her mortal husband in the village. The villagers, driven by fear and superstition, form an angry mob, then burn her to death. Between 1575 and 1700 in Europe, with the blessings of the Church, over one million women were victims of witch hunts. The cost of splitting ourselves between spirit and matter is costly indeed.
The film story of Wolfbride describes the danger of this split between matter and spirit. Spirit here does not refer to organized religion, often more invested in the power of the institution than the transformational role of spirit. In her remarkable book, Shaman, Joan Halifax writes, “Through creative expression, the human condition is elevated, mythologized, and at last, collectively understood.”
How can you write in such a way as to become a bridge between earth and spirit? How can you heal the split in today’s fractured society? The healing transformation of good writing depends on making it one’s own from