Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s revival of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” won three Tony Awards last Sunday, including
Best Actor for ensemble member Tracy Letts. This good news gives me an opportunity to excerpt a post I published here two years ago after seeing the play here in Chicago. Better put, when I felt and heard the play: Steppenwolf provided special programming for the blind, and that was the first time I ever participated in a  special touch tour. Here, from that 2011 post:

Touching Virginia Woolf

Two things convinced me to give this touch tour thing a try:

• We’d get to meet the actors and actresses before the play. I love meeting actors and actresses.
• Tickets for touch tour participants were half price.

Flo Finke didn’t raise no fool. I ordered two half-price tickets for the play, convinced my friend Brad to come along with me to the touch tour, and we settled into our seats two hours before the matinee started so we could hear the staff explain the set.

All of the action takes place in Martha and George’s living room, in a small college town somewhere in New England. The staff was familiar with the play, of course. They knew exactly which props were most vital to help us understand the action on stage. Doorbell chimes hanging by the entrance. A small photo of Martha’s father on the mantel. A toy gun with an umbrella that shoots out of the barrel. These explanations really helped. Example: Before the play, they pointed out an abstract 60s painting on the wall, towards the right, in George’s study. “It’s modern art,” they said. “Muddy blue swirls and brown tones. Not very interesting.” Later on in the play, when the actors are on the right side of the stage and someone asks about a painting, George says, “What it is, actually, is it’s a pictorial representation of the order of Martha’s mind.” Thanks to the presentation ahead of time, I understood how biting – and witty – George’s comment was. Which, in turn, helped me better understand the play.

The actors introduced themselves to us ahead of time, too.

Tracy Letts and Amy Morton as George and Martha in a scene from the play.

“My name is Tracy Letts, I’m 45 years old. That’s the same age as George, who I’ll be playing today.” Each actor described their physical characteristics — “I’m…well, a big guy. I’m six foot three inches tall, about 210 pounds. Stocky, I guess” – and what they’d be wearing on stage. When Amy Morton, who plays George’s wife Martha, told us she was five foot ten, I could picture her pairing up well with Tracy Letts’ George.

The actors were happy to answer any questions we had. We discovered this is the seventh time Tracy Letts and Amy Morton have played husband and wife on stage. They’ve known each other thirty years. Both won Tony awards for August: Osage County, and Tracy Letts won a Pulitzer Prize for writing that play. It was a thrill to have this private audience with them.

The Steppenwolf folks were happy to share fun facts from behind the scenes, too:

• They weren’t drinking liquor on stage. It was water. Or colored water. The ice was real, though!
• They had to learn to pace the way they sipped. That way their glass would be empty at the precise moment George asks if they want a refill.
• The glasses and bottles flung across the stage during arguments look real, but they’re special-ordered acrylic resin bottles designed to shatter realistically and safely – wouldn’t be cool to act on broken glass, or have shattered glass spray into the audience.
• Martha’s boobs weren’t entirely real, either. “Lots of cleavage,” Amy Morton said after being asked to describe her costuming. “Helped by padding.”
• The couch and comfy chair on stage were bought new, then sent to an upholsterer to cover them so they’d match, both in color and in the way they looked worn out.

These theatre–types had described the set so well that I really didn’t need to go up there and feel how books and journals had been strewn about on tables and bookshelves or fondle the glasses and bottles on the bar stand. But who could refuse a chance to stand on stage at the Steppenwolf? Harper and I stepped right up.

This was Harper’s first time attending a play, and Evan the front house manager thought my new dog would be most comfortable in the front row – plenty of room for him to stretch out. How. Cool. Steppenwolf offered headphones to wear — a narrator describes visual effects — but I don’t like those. I get a kick out of figuring it out for myself, and sitting so close made that easy to do. I felt like Harper and I were right there with George and Martha in their living room.

Congratulations on the Tony Awards, Steppenwolf. Lately you (and the Blackhawks!) are making us especially proud to live in Chicago.

Me, Harper and our gracious Steppenwolf hosts Hilary and Malcolm, on stage during the touch tour. Malcolm is holding one of the breakable prop bottles and a bouquet of the plastic snapdragons which figure prominently in the play.

I’ve met with my Monday and Thursday classes already, and will return to these Wednesday writers this week.

I assign a topic to the seniors in the three memoir-writing classes I lead each week, the writers go home to write about that topic, and when they return the next week, they read their essays out loud. Written copies don’t get passed around to fellow writers, which means that during class everyone has to, get this: listen. My teaching methods are so simple the classes could lead themselves. As if to prove that point, two of them did just that while I’ve been away the past couple of months: they met without me. I’m proud to have created a system that can work on it’s own, but when cardiologists finally gave me the okay to return to my writing classes this week, I had to wonder: do my classes really need me back?

The answer is no. My absence proved it. Classes don’t need me. The absolutely sensational (and very flattering) fabulous news, though? They seem to want me back. All week long I’ve been welcomed with open arms, big hugs, and some very well-written essays. One example: the homage to memoir-writing that Monna S. Ray read in Monday’s class. She credited Roger Ebert for inspiring her to write through her own challenges. “He said that when he was in the midst of typing a piece on his computer he became whole,” she wrote. “From one who had lost so much, this was a powerful statement about writing.” Monna said putting words on paper helps her reflect on her “life of eight decades,” and brings something new to her life now, too. From her essay:

I just learned that I can “reblog” any posts I read that I think you Safe & Sound blog readers might appreciate as much as I do. What better way to try this out than to reblog this post by my writer friend Jeffabout his randy Seeing Eye dog..

I started modeling nude for art students the year I turned 40. The unemployment rate of people who are blind was – and still is – around 70%, and back then the University of Illinois art department was the only place willing to hire me.

My Seeing Eye dog Dora posed with me, and, in the end, most of the drawings were just of her.

Taking my clothes off for college students wasn’t exactly a dream job, but it did have some benefits: standing still for 50-minute poses gave me lots of time to think about my writing, how to reformulate a lead, how to get across a certain idea. I composed my very first published essay in my head while standing naked on a tabletop, and once I got dressed again I rushed home to type the story into my talking computer. Nude Modeling: Goin’ In Blind was picked up by Alternet and published in alternative newspapers all over the country. The success of that essay led to my work on National Public Radio, my one-minute stint on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and, in many ways, the publication of my memoir Long Time, No See.

Last Saturday the New York Times published an essay by another writer who took a job modeling nude for art students. I found Rachel Howard’s essay difficult to read. Not that it was poorly written — I was just jealous I hadn’t thought of writing it myself. In the essay, Ms. Howard describes the short one or two-minute “gesture poses” art instructors ask models to use at the beginning of each class. Quick poses provide students some time to warm-up, and back when I was modeling that idea inspired me to make a habit of writing short email messages before getting into longer pieces of writing. I still do this today — checking the grammar and spelling on the short messages I send out early in the day warms me up for the book writing I do later.

Reading Rachel Howard’s New York Times essay showed me that gesture drawing affected her writing life a little differently:

I was, during those early days of art modeling, struggling to find the life in my stylistically choppy novel. At home alone, I heard the drawing instructors’ voices.
Find the gesture. Don’t worry about the details. What is the essence of that pose? I left my laptop at my desk and moved to the other side of the room to sit on the floor with my notebook.

Funny. The same short poses that inspired me to start my morning working out details (checking for spelling mistakes, watching my grammar) compelled Rachel Howard to do the opposite — to sit on the floor with a notebook and quit worrying about words and sentences. She concludes, “Because really, before we put a word or a mark on the page, both writers and artists must first step back and see. And seeing is not simple.”

Can’t say I agree with that step-back-before-you-write-a-word-on-the-page notion –I tend to write first, step back and listen to what I’ve written, and then work it out from there. As for her last line, “seeing is not simple,” though? I couldn’t agree more.

My friend Lynn LaPlante-Allaway is a professional musician, and earlier this month she sent this email with an offer I couldn’t refuse:

I will be downtown for a rehearsal, would you like me to come by and play my violin for you? I will sit quietly in the corner and play and all you do is lie there, listen and heal.

Lynn arrived two days after I returned from the hospital. Mike met her at the door. I didn’t even get up. She went right to work, setting up behind me so that I wouldn’t feel obligated to smile or react while she played. “I just want you to lie there on the couch, listen, and heal.”

Mike left during Lynn’s performance, and when he returned an hour-and-a-half later he said I looked like I’d just received a massage.

You might remember reading a post I wrote last year about Daniel Levitin, the author of This Is Your Brain on Music. Levitin’s research shows that dopamine (a “feel-good hormone”) is released every time you listen to music you like. Not only that, but listening to music with someone else can release prolactin, a hormone that bonds people together. I’ve never had much success when trying to meditate –I’m just too antsy. Within minutes, however, Lynn’s music had put every worry and pain right out of my mind. It was, in a word, sublime.

Lynn’s beloved mother Alice Gervace LaPlante is the one who inspired Lynn to use music to help friends heal after a trauma. Alice died last year from complications related to Alzheimer’s disease. Lynn had played for her mom her entire life, but she did so with a different intention after Alice got sick.

Alice Gervace LaPlante (left) and my friend Lynn LaPlante-Allaway, taken at one of Lynn’s concerts when Alice was still getting out and about.

“I’d say lots of prayers beforehand, call in all her angels and helpers and mine, too and all sorts of woo woo stuff that works for ME,” she told me. “And when I played for her, I swear to you, something happened: the whole room changed, and my music changed, too.”

The only word Lynn can think of to describe her healing performances is “channeling.” Her own heart rate slows down as she plays, and she says her brain waves slow down, too. She can feel the person she’s playing for slow down as well. “I had no idea I could do this until my Mom got sick.”

Friends have been marveling at how quickly I am recovering, and you blog readers have been leaving comments about how healthy I look in the photos Mike publishes here, too. Many, many good things have combined to help me heal, but I gotta say: that early hit of dopamine and prolactin sure gave my recovery one helluva jumpstart!

It’s been one month since my life-saving heart surgery, and to mark the occasion, Mike and I took a cardio-walk downtown to attend a concert last night. Lynn is the principal violist with the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, a 55-piece ensemble that combines a jazz band with a symphonic orchestra. “This is the most exciting musical group I’ve ever been a part of,” Lynn told me. “And it just keeps getting better.” Last night was the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic’s first-ever appearance at Orchestra Hall. The music was gorgeous, and knowing Lynn was up there on stage playing her heart out made it all the more special. It was, in a word, sublime.