Your Upbringing Always Affects Your Principles

August 20, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Chris Arnade may have returned to the roots of what has always been most important to him.

He grew up hardscrabble middle-class, where the choices were between new clothes and car repairs on the one hand, and a good education, on the other. He went on to become a successful Wall Street trader, but in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash left that career behind to try and capture the stories of downtrodden but hopeful men and women across America.

I’m not saying that this was courageous or that his life today is exemplary. (You can draw your own conclusions about that.) But there may be ties between where he came from, how he climbed so far up the ladder, what he realized once he got there, and how he’s chosen to live and work ever since. The moral arc we’ve taken since childhood is worth considering—particularly its pull on us to return.

When I came upon Arnade’s story recently, the facts of his past seemed to make powerful suggestions about the ways he’s decided to set his priorities today. Of course, it’s always perilous to select and then connect up the historical dots to your current realities, because hindsight can prove almost anything when it tries hard enough. But the values that you acted on as a child are always in dialogue with your current priorities, and it seems to me that Arnade’s story demonstrates the gravitational forces that are always at play in this kind of correspondence.

Arnade’s family stuck out in its corner of the rural South because of its well-known views on civil rights. His father was a Jewish academic who had fled Nazi Germany, while his mom was a socialist activist. Arnade played sports in high school and learned how to handle a gun, but recalls being ridiculed as a n—lover. Unlike the world of his family, is hometown of San Antonio, Florida was conservative, Catholic and a bit more down-on-its-luck.

Arnade photo of pawn shop in San Antonio Florida

His parents raised him along with six other siblings. While neither big families nor limited possessions were unusual in San Antonio, the Arnades used their limited resources to take their kids on far-flung research trips that opened them up to the wider world and ultimately to send all seven to college—opportunities that were almost unheard of in their community.

Beyond his family’s politics and commitment to education, Arnade’s upbringing made him something of an outsider in another way. He was neither his family’s youngest nor its oldest child. As he said later:

“Being caught in the middle you end up something of a watcher. You never fit in entirely.”

Another Arnade photo, of a Quik Mart in San Antonio

It was almost like being an immigrant, caught between his old country and his new one.

Arnade went to college at Johns Hopkins and ended up getting a doctorate in particle physics. He parleyed his comfort with numbers into a Wall Street job, selling emerging market bonds. Arnade made a lot of money and for the first time had a comfortable life, but several disruptions were soon to follow.

In the years between 2008 and 2012, the stock market crashed, the banks that lost billions for regular people were bailed out by the federal government, his mom (who had her own views about his career) died of cancer, his proprietary trading desk was closed under new regulations, and his fellow traders were complaining that Obamacare had raised their taxes.

It rankled Arnade, and during this time, he seemed torn to his co-workers. One reported that he’d leave work to take half-day walks, reporting back later that he’d taken pictures of poor people and those who had recently arrived in America. This is how Arnade describes that transitional time in a piece he wrote for Quartz:

“I had a very good life. So did the people around me. . .

We were the front-row kids, and we felt we had done everything right. We had studied hard and gone to good schools. Most of us had parents who supported us. Our schooling got us good jobs that allowed us to live in nice neighborhoods.

Many of us were geeks, educated in the sciences, and steeped in clever rational arguments. With a PhD in physics, I was part of the wave of rocket scientists that changed Wall Street.

Buttressed by our math, our spreadsheets, our data, and our obsession with the rational, we had a confidence that grew into hubris as we entered and changed more and more industries, from baseball to finance, politics and journalism.

That hubris should have dissolved following the financial crisis in 2008. Our unchecked faith in numbers, and in ourselves, had proved disastrous. We should have admitted guilt and rethought the things we were certain about. Instead we focused on bailing ourselves out and moved along as if little had happened.

It was during this time that I started photographing New York City. I would go on long walks to escape the stress of my job in the aftermath of the crisis. I started letting my decisions be guided by unquantifiable things like empathy and curiosity rather than probability.”

When I confronted a similar career pivot, I had a refuge in the Coast Guard that was as far away for me as Arnade’s poor and immigrant sidewalks were from Wall Street. I thought about everything that was wrong with where I’d been, but never trusted enough to let my empathy or curiosity play much of a role.

With “big firm lawyer” behind me, I tried to plan my way to the future. (How much does my next job have to pay so I can cover my expenses? What values are most important to me? What do I want to be when I grow up?) My sense is that Arnade never analyzed the particles in his physics like I tried to do; his was more of a backward drift in the direction of his heart.

The job that gradually emerged for him was documenting the stories of poverty, addiction and finally, wherever there was a forgotten corner of America struggling for dignity. To find these stories Arnade travels the back roads, sleeping in his van or cheap motels. His wife was alarmed at first by his change of focus and loss of income, but she became his collaborator as he posts his visual chronicles on his Flikr account, in essays created for The Atlantic, or in videos about the aspirations of Trump voters.

Arnade seemed to be looking for the truths that had been masked by his upscale life.

In a 2013 interview on NPR, he recounts how one homeless junkie told him that do-gooders often “offer to buy me lunch. But very rarely does anybody ever ask me who I am.” So Arnade started asking.

After one conversation, he asked the call girl how she wanted him to describe her in the picture he had taken. “As who I am,” she said. “A prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of God.” Encounters like this challenged his outlook. “I naively thought that I would see the same cynicism towards faith that I had, and I saw the exact opposite,” he said. Since their optimism seemed revelatory, he thought that it might say something to others too.

Arnade picture of Jose Villa in La Villita, New Mexico after Villa shared his American Dream: “To live a successful life on your terms, to be accepted by others on your terms, and to accept others on their terms.”

According to The Wall Street Journal story where I first learned about him, Arnade’s new career “is an attempt to reconcile his multiple identities.” Maybe. But it certainly includes a return to what he thought was most important to him as a kid. In that NPR interview about his new job, Arnade says: “This is more comfortable to me. This is what I grew up with.” And in what was described as a view from the back row interview, he had this to say:

“I often use my favorite example, which is McDonald’s. I grew up in a white working-class town, so for me, it’s kind of rediscovering what I already knew. But McDonald’s, which is viewed with contempt [by the front row], is actually a center of community, it’s where people gather. McDonald’s is not a joke.”

Of course, his kind of route is never a full circle. Everyone changes along the way, and the back row isn’t known for writing in The Atlantic, The Guardian, or being interviewed and profiled as often as he is. But Arnade has become a kind of megaphone for the values of his heartland, where residuals of respect, reverence, and outrage over injustice remain. It’s not only what he knew and felt was important back then, but his processing of it by that outsider’s perspective in all the years since.

Moral foundations are first established in childhood. They don’t determine what follows, but are always a part of the continuing conversation that conscience plays inside our heads.

Most people find it hard to look at themselves from a critical distance, decide what they should or should not do, and go on to act accordingly. What does my basic decency require me to do here, they wonder. One way to liberate the conversation from the confusion that surrounds it is to ask: what would the child in me do?

—just like Chris Arnade might be asking.

Rewind and Get It Right This Time

August 6, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Whenever my face hits the mud of a first mistake, I’m usually surprised by how many people seem to be watching and wondering: What will he do next? What’ll he say? What does he really mean? Has he accepted responsibility for what’s happened? Said he’s sorry?

Assume that your mistakes will always attract a crowd, especially at work. When you’re busy (or overwhelmed) it’s surprisingly easy for one knee-jerk reaction to compound your next one, until you’re doubling-down while everyone else is wondering why you’re so intent on making a bad situation even worse.

An audience that expects little from you

Work mistakes are rarely private moments. And that’s actually the interesting part, because a mistake that’s out in the open gives you a chance (sometimes repeated chances) to say something courageous and totally unexpected about yourself, to start-over in front of a surprisingly large audience that’s close to writing you off.

There were two news stories this week with just this kind of ending.

Everything about them speaks to a crowd that’s even larger than those who were already following because we don’t get to see anyone rewind and start over very often, and secretly hope (at least I think we do) that when the moment arrives, each of us will have the character to do the same.

I got into writing about values because I’m convinced that most people want to act morally but few actually know how. There are several reasons for this today, including:

a decline in institutions that once saw themselves as custodians of our social values, such as churches;
the reluctance of other institutions (like schools and parents) to pass their own values on to new generations; and
a preference for lazy cynicism (in politics, in the media, and in our interactions with one another) instead of forging deeper commitments.

As a result, even when you want to act morally, you are increasingly “on your own” to figure out how.

Even when you want your work to mean more than a paycheck, you have to figure out how to find and do work that can engage your mind and heart like that.

And outside of traditional religion, almost no one is offering help to those who are groping for these answers today—which is another reason why these stories seem so compelling.

The first is about a message T-shirt that Frank Ocean wore at a recent concert, and the second is about a twist in the admissions policy at the University of California at Irvine. So in case you missed them. . . .

I was already a Frank Ocean fan. (If you don’t know his music, you can get a taste of it here.) He has also been a hiatus from touring, so when Ocean reappeared recently in New York City his fans were already watching. But it was his T-shirt that caused a sensation.

The T-shirt featured a tweet from an 18-year old named Brandon Male that asked: “Why be racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic when you could just be quiet?” Both the sentiment and the bid to “just be quiet” are very Frank Ocean, but Mr. Male had a different reaction when he found out about it. His tweet was suddenly selling even more T-shirts, and the sellers still hadn’t bothered to reach out and say: “Thanks man.” This time, Mr. Male couldn’t let it go.

Kayla Robinson, also 18, runs the on-line company which sells the T-shirt. It calls itself the Green Box Shop. Mr. Male had already contacted the company last January, after somebody known as @lustdad posted an image of himself on Twitter wearing the same T-shirt and saw his post retweeted 87,000 times and liked by 191,000 people. (To put this in context, the most retweets or likes my posts have ever gotten is around 5.)

Anyway, Mr. Male thought this was valuable promotion too, but when he contacted the Green Box Shop, someone who was not Ms. Robinson pretty much blew him off. “They told me I needed to calm down and said they credited me on Instagram one time,” he said. He was prepared to let it slide, but then Frank Ocean out the T-shirt on.

Following the concert, Mr. Male took his complaints to Twitter directly and received an outpouring of support (“give him his coin!”), some of which finally got Ms. Robinson’s attention. Apparently, she doesn’t handle the social media side of things, but realized that something was happening, that is, something beyond her company receiving 5400 more T-shirt orders than it received on a typical weekend. Ms. Robinson sent Mr. Male $100 and added a link to his tweet on her product page, but if she thought this would put the matter to rest. . . . As Mr. Male told the New York Times: “They threw me $100 and told me to go away.” By his calculation, $100 was less than 1 percent of the new revenue the Green Box Shop pulled in over those two days alone.

Of course, this is where it gets interesting.

While great legal minds were speculating on whether the use of someone else’s tweet can result in monetary damages (It’s yet to be decided), Ms. Robinson admitted that hers was “an impulsive decision. I hadn’t looked at the number of sales [and] it does look like I was just throwing money at him to keep him quiet.”

She also said something else that’s far more noteworthy. “It would be pretty irresponsible of me to just take [his words]. Being a creator myself, people have copied my shirts before, I totally understand Brandon.” Then she reportedly called him to apologize and to set up a time to talk numbers. Where Ms. Robinson could have re-trenched, instead she rewound while the skeptical were watching.

The second story follows a similar arc.

When the University of California at Irvine admitted its new freshman class, 800 more applicants than it could “feed and house” said: “Yes!” Irvine has long been a popular destination for first generation college applications, and it was no different this year. This is what a recent applicant pool there looked like:

Accurately forecasting an incoming class is often a problem because calculating the “yield” on admissions is little better than guesswork. (When I was a college sophomore, so-called “overflow freshman” were put up in a local motor inn where, among other things, they were rumored to enjoy much better food.) Anyway, because Irvine’s lawyers informed them that an admission letter is only a “conditional offer” (based on satisfactory completion of high school, submitting paperwork on time, etc.), the university eventually withdrew 500 of its acceptances as applicants failed to meet one or another of its requirements like: “No deposit check by May 1 and you’re out.”

You can read a newspaper account of the gnashing of teeth that ensued, reactions that prompted the university’s next misstep. Even though it had never once rescinded admissions because of late checks, Irvine insisted that it was just “following policy” when it acted as it did. (Who knows what its lawyers were advising at this stage.)

Once again, the seemingly most clueless point is where things get interesting. Was it press involvement? Still other lawyers threatening to sue? We don’t know. But from a public letter shortly thereafter, it’s clear that Irvine’s chancellor, Howard Gillman, had a change of heart.

“We are a university recognized for advancing the American Dream, not impeding it. This situation is rocking us to our core because it is fundamentally misaligned with our values. The students and their families have my personal, sincerest apology. We should not have treated you this way over a missed deadline.”

Just like we don’t know how much Ms. Robinson agreed to pay Mr. Male, there’s still some uncertainty at Irvine as this goes to press. 300 applicants who simply missed a paperwork deadline have been re-admitted, but another 200 are still in limbo because of other conditions on their admission. What is clear is that prior mistakes were acknowledged, a more generous spirit was expressed, and two people declared to everybody who was listening that doubling down on a bad idea doesn’t have to be the last word.

It is always better to think through the ramifications of work decisions beforehand and act accordingly, but in the real world, it sometimes doesn’t happen that way—particularly when a seemingly “bigger” opportunity or problem is confronting you.

That’s when the “ramifications” of one bad decision compound, just like they did here. But what really matters comes next. These stories have a moral that says: even when you’ve doubled-down, it’s never too late..

One Way That Conviction Works

July 1, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

As a kid, I loved Otis Redding’s songs, especially “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember” and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” I still can’t say too much about that voice, those arrangements. Listen for yourself. Silk degrees.

After his groundbreaking performance at the 1967 Monterrey Pop Festival (“resplendent in a teal-green silk suit”), Redding hosted a bash at his Big O Ranch in Georgia. The local newspapers crowed: “Otis is having a royal barbeque.” He was all of 25.

But it was less upbeat for some in his guests. The Black Power movement was on the rise and many of Redding’s inner music circle were white, like R&B producer Jerry Wexler. “People were talking a lot of trash,” Wexler recalled. “What is whitey doing here?” For his part, Redding wanted everyone he loved to be around him as he moved from his mostly African American fan base and into pop’s mainstream. Redding did what he could to un-ruffle feathers across the divide he was straddling, but his guests could still recall the tensions decades later (from a new book about Redding by Jonathan Gould).

I grew up at a time when you could hear what people were calling “soul music” on the same radio station (WAVZ) as the Beatles and Glen Campbell. (Today, it’s hard to imagine that kind of musical or audience diversity at any point “on the dial.”) But back then it was possible to think that the venues where you could see these performers would have the radio’s audience. That wasn’t even close to being true.

As the Sixties wound down and the Seventies got started, I went with a friend to see the Temptations at the Oakdale Theater. It had gently elevated seating-in-the-round, with a tent overhead and open to the summer breezes down below. Sitting almost anywhere gave you an immediate 360, so it took no time at all to discover that we were the only white boys in the house. As the Temps got going—“Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” “I Wish It Would Rain”—maybe the audience was just as surprised to see us, but before long it seemed that everyone had switched to pretending that we just weren’t there. I’d never been a minority before, and it almost felt like I was crashing somebody else’s party. But the next couple of times, there was no doubt about that at all.

Five or so years later, a college friend went with me to see Patti Labelle (and her group Labelle) at Assumption College. I was thinking a good-girls-from-parochial-schools kind of environment. Moreover, Labelle had Top 40 hits with lyrics like “Gichie, Gichie, ya ya dada/Gichie, Gichie, ya ya here…” that they sang in costumes straight out of “Star Trek.” It would be fun, but hardly high-risk entertainment. Still as I settled in, it gradually dawned that once again I was one of only two white boys in the house.

But who cared? Patti was on fire as the set got going, and my second memory of the night was her telling us that fans always brought her drugs after a performance (figuring she had to be “on something” to deliver like that), but what she wished they’d bring her was a good hamburger, “because working this hard makes you so damn hungry.”

Everyone laughed, and the girls slid into a Gil Scott-Heron number called “The Revolution Will Not be Televised.” It’s an angry song, with some spoken word delivery that foreshadows rap. It’s also long, building in momentum and rage as it goes along. A minute or so in, Patti had the room in her hand. But just then, people starting turning around and looking our way, talking loud, leaning over—what are you doing here?—as we clutched our armrests in the middle of a long row. This’ll be just like shooting fish in a barrel, I thought.

And Patti thought so too because she put “Everybody settle down” into the song’s narrative a couple of times, and when no one did, she stopped the music altogether, which left some of the outcries hanging in the air above us. I don’t remember what she said next—maybe “we’re all in this fight together”—and tempers began to cool as the house lights came up. With all eyes looking from Patti to us she said: “Everyone is welcome here,” and that was the heartpounding end of it.

More than a decade later and this time in Philly, I either hadn’t learned or didn’t want to because I was making a beeline for The Rib Crib, a take-out joint one neighborhood away. It was a Friday night, the middle of summer, there’d be a big crowd on a main street, the place was practically “an institution,” and Fran would be with me: what could go wrong?

This time it was Charlie Gray who came to our rescue. Once inside, we were packed like sardines, the only “out-of-towners,” and the crowd in front of and behind us started getting rowdy about whether we belonged. “What are you doing here?” “Go back where you came from.” It was already loud in The Crib but our being there took everything up a notch and Charlie noticed.

Technically, we weren’t the only white people this time. Our shoulders were touching autographed pictures on the wall: Charlie with Al Martino, Charlie with Frank Rizzo, Charlie with Sylvester Stallone, so we recognized Charlie as he tried to break through the crowd towards us. A booming voice preceded his big heart, telling everybody just how welcome we were, how honored he was to have us, what could he do to make us more comfortable, maybe some sweet potato pie on the house, and just like that everyone went back to looking forward to their ribs.

Otis, Patti and Charlie tapped into their power and declared what they stood for when something important to them was at stake. They already knew what to say and how to act because surely they also knew already what it was like to be “different” in a suddenly hostile place.

Your experiences clarify what you value most; how you’ve lived and worked determines your priorities. And it’s with both in mind that you’re able to care for yourself and others the next time around. That’s why Patti and Charlie never hesitated when it came to standing up for me.

I loved great food and music enough to put my pride (and maybe my safety) in the hands of strangers. But it was always about more than the risk. By stepping outside my lines, maybe, hopefully, I would gain enough clarity and power to find my generosity too.

Grace Note

July 11, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse in the Middle East, a mother’s voice cuts through the terrible din. The words belonged to Rachel Fraenkel, whose son Naftali had recently been kidnapped and murdered in the West Bank along with two other Jewish Israeli teens. In apparent revenge for these three deaths, Mohammed Abu Khdier, a Palestinian teenager, was kidnapped in Jerusalem and allegedly burned alive.

Fraenkel statement came after the traditional week of mourning for her son, and just hours after Mohammed’s funeral.

Even in the abyss of mourning for Gilad, Eyal and Nafali, it is difficult for me to describe how distressed we are by the outrage committed in Jerusalem—the shedding of innocent blood in defiance of all morality, of the Torah, of the foundation of the lives of our boys and of all of us in this country. . . No mother or father should ever have to go through what we are going through, and we share the pain of Mohammed’s parents.

You had to be listening to hear Fraenkel’s words over the bloodlust, the recrimination, the political exclamations, and the missile volleys between Israel’s cities and Gaza. It was a voice crying in the wilderness.

L’Chaim.

Samuel and Pearl Oliner began their book about rescuers of Jews and other victims during World War II with the following observation:

That people act in the service of their own self-interest is a maxim we are quite likely to accept. We are not even startled when they behave demonically. What we find difficult to accept or explain are behaviors that appear self-transcendent. (Preface at xviii)

Some of what is difficult “to accept or explain” comes from our reluctance to imagine the painful place that Fraenkel spoke from—to inhabit that sense of loss with her as she crossed a seething divide to grieve for another child who is tied by the cruelest of circumstances to her own. Because we hope it will never happen to us, that we’ll never have to find out what this kind of pain is like, we don’t take the five or ten minutes to envision for ourselves the possibilities that might exist beyond the pain. If we could be better at imagining “all the way through,” self-transcendence might be less of a puzzlement.

Sadly and far more often, graceful words and actions don’t break though the 24/7 overload to register with us at all. It’s the daily static of boredom, casual neglect, being hungry, bus exhaust, general shabbiness, deadlines, rudeness, fallen trees, gossip, bike riders yelling at cabdrivers, humidity, horniness, office chatter, cell phones, somebody complaining, body odor, feeling insecure, TV. The transcendent rarely breaks through it all, which means that on those occasions when it does, its break-through probably deserves its own place and time.

Prayer is partly the contemplation of exemplary stories, like Rachel Fraenkel’s: maybe on Sundays, or Friday nights after sundown, or at the end of the day before you go to sleep. Prayer never required a religion or specific words, but always calls for believing in something bigger than yourself, something that pulls you into a broader web of connectedness, and helps you to transcend the regular stuff of life.

Being quiet with your own ruminations is also required for prayer to happen, which reminds me of Tony Robbins tweet yesterday, that “Men prefer an electric shock to being alone with their thoughts.” (Silence is never as easy as it sounds.) Finally, it helps if you can recognize the intervals of grace that flutter like butterflies across everything else that clamors for your awareness.

They are often the places where hope can be found.

Characters Find a Theme

June 27, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

In 1921, Luigi Pirandello wrote the play “Six Characters in Search of an Author.” A half-dozen actors show up in the theater as incomplete characters looking for someone to finish their stories. In this absurdist masterpiece, the completion they find is disavowal, suicide, an accidental drowning, a great deal of confusion, and the playwright’s wondering why he ever agreed to get involved in the first place. Who would have thought that unfinished characters showing up today could find a more meaningful sense of completion in the most mundane of life’s details, but the characters in a pair of one act plays called “Sweating” and “Sleeping” (staged as part of Philadelphia’s on-going Solofest) did just that.

Steve Gravelle has hyperhidrosis, a condition characterized by excessive perspiration. We learn that one in 20 individuals is a chronic sweater, but Gravelle didn’t find anyone else who would admit to the condition until well into adulthood, so he mostly bore the stigmata of near-constant wetness alone. That kind of humidity can do something to you.

Standing in a basement under a cluster of blazing stage lights, he told us just what it was like in a series of funny, sad, profane, and revelatory vignettes, each concluding with his changing his shirt. As our own moisture gradually merged with his, it became like a crowded sauna down there, brilliantly setting the stage for Gravelle’s description of his time in a sweat lodge with a group of Quakers who had taken the ancient Indian ritual for their own. Gasping from breathing in and being nearly consumed by the intense heat, the experience ultimately produces a calm euphoria—a visceral arc that each of us got to travel with this very physical actor.

The sweat lodge story may have been the first time that sweating was good for Gravelle, but in a further advance towards acceptance, his marriage ceremony became another. In Philadelphia, the end of July better come with air-conditioning if you’re going to host a wedding reception here. But in a laugh from the gods that was aimed directly at him, electrical transformers exploded, turning the reception hall into its own kind of sweat lodge.

Instead of resignation to the absurdity, Gravelle had wrestled with his flowing pores for so long that (in this most sacred of life-moments) he ended up accepting his fate in an abandon of joyous dancing. My only regret was that he didn’t do more to show us his abandon in a rhythmic whirl of cast-off droplets, like a congregation’s blessing during Asperges.

Sara Nye is Gravelle’s wife, and the angle she claimed to illustrate her life was the tendency to fall asleep at the most inopportune, embarrassing and occasionally appropriate times. These one act plays were staged in a South Philadelphia brownstone, and for “Sleeping” the audience repaired from cellar to upstairs bedroom with chairs arrayed in similarly claustrophobic manner, this time around an ample bed. Nye is a dancer and collaborator in the creation of spoken soundscapes that envelope a dancer’s movements. The recording of her soft-spoken narration here was underscored by lilting, almost hypnotic music, dotted (at least in the beginning) with strange exclamations and cries, presumably from somewhere in her unconscious.

Nye used the bed the way painter Francis Bacon locates his figures—as a stage for tremendous physicality. She gyrated, tented herself beneath the sheets, draped her torso over a corner, cosseted herself like a queen in the comforter, thrust her legs into the air, and caressed the sleeping pillow of her husband: all to illustrate how whatever she’s doing can be so easily overtaken by the oblivion of sleep.

While Nye’s precision was always supported by her gorgeously mesmerizing soundtrack, her reach was particularly assured when she read passages from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, only to have his beautiful cadences repeatedly broken off in mid-sentence by the doze that everyone who has taken freshman English knows only too well. In a nearly sublime conclusion that echoed the recent wedding epiphany below, the last time that Nye falls asleep, Gravelle tiptoes in to (quietly & tenderly) escort everyone but his sleeping wife out of the darkening room.

We’d all like a theme to make better sense of our lives. What did these unexpected viewpoints tell us about living, or tell the performers about themselves?

Sweating and sleeping in these ways set the players apart from the social norm, left them no choice but to see themselves as singular and slightly askew, and the places where they are supposed to belong differently. In tribal cultures, it is a common rite of passage to go out into the wilderness alone for a time, to think about your new role (as adult or wife, a recent hire or holy man) and what it will be like for you when you return. Each of these plays was a similar act of meditation. A deeply personal way to go out, so you can come back in and have it all make a little more sense.