The Source of All Things by Tracy Ross

Author:Tracy Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

My parents drove Andrew and me to Interlochen. They used up all of their vacation time to do it. I remember singing as we pulled up to the bucolic campus. Sun-dappled cabins peeked through columns of giant pines. The entire school was tucked in the woods between two shimmering lakes. Loons called through the mist, accompanied by the sounds of violin, flute, and bass.

My classmates poured out of cars with license plates from New York, California, and Rhode Island. Most of them, I’d later find out, started at Interlochen when they were freshmen but had practiced their disciplines since before they could write their own names. I had done approximately two community theater shows when I arrived there in late August of 1988. But despite my lack of professional experience, Jude and David made me a part of the theater company. During the first week of school, I auditioned for and was cast as the understudy for Ruth Hunsdorfer in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. Ruth was the perfect first role for me; she, too, was the product of abuse.

Overnight, my life not merely changed but vaulted upward at Interlochen. The place seemed designed specifically to crack me out of my shell of shame. I knew that I had escaped something dangerous, potentially lethal, in Twin Falls. I sensed how close my reckless behavior had brought me to killing myself, which made me all the more thankful that I’d found Interlochen’s artistic Eden.

On the musty stage of Grunow Theater, Jude led us through improvisation and visualization exercises meant to free us of our inhibitions. We lay on the floor and imagined ourselves as another person, in another life. I had been doing this for most of my existence, so transporting myself was effortless. Over the course of the year, I scored the roles of Tiresias, the blind seer in Antigone who is punished by the gods when he reveals their secrets; and Hattie, a scrappy, single mother of four who shuns the abusive men in her life in James McClure’s Laundry and Bourbon. Over and over, Jude and David praised me for my ability to “inhabit” a character, while also pushing me to do it better. And each time they pushed, I felt myself expand into a braver version of myself, a person who had talent and worth. For the first time, I was good at something that was all my own; for the first time, I felt connected to the girl I might have been if the abuse had never happened. As we rehearsed our scenes from various plays, Jude would yell from the back of the theater, “That sucked! Do it again!” But while the other students cringed at her crassness, I reveled in it. I became free to reconstruct the girl I knew myself to be, and Jude gave me the tools to expedite the process.

It helped that the campus was surrounded by thick, dark woods. Most kids went there to do illicit things like drink and smoke pot, but I remember retreating to them to fill up.

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