blueprints

The Word Becomes You | 37
spoken in America, individual by individual, to take a close temperature of
how my country has been changing.
what do the ways people speak
tell us about the world in which they live?
The work that I do started from many vantage points. In part, I was
seeking to answer a set of technical questions—without any credentials as
linguist or psychologist—about how language, as a phenomenon of sounds
being made, works. What do the ways people speak tell us about the world
in which they live? What does the manner in which a person speaks tell us
about how he or she is organized intellectually, creatively, and psychologically?
By “manner” I mean the actual rhythmic and syntactical patterns.
These questions, in all honesty, started humbly, out of my quest to build
my toolbox of acting techniques. Yet the original set of questions ended up
leading me down a path that became immediately sociological and political.
My question became this: if I were to extend my fascination with speech by
looking at how individuals express themselves, could I cause the theater
itself to look and function differently? By “look,” I mean both how it looks
and what those who run, work in, and go to the theater actually look at.
I studied acting in San Francisco, California. In the 1970s, San Francisco
and the larger metropolitan area occupying the beautiful landmasses
around the stunning bodies of water in the Bay Area were moving, calmly,
it seemed, out of the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. It was almost as if
those many bits of land were settling back peacefully after what had been
an enormous quake. I left college, like many of my friends, exhilarated on
the one hand by possibilities I never would have imagined as a youngster,
but reeling on the other hand as if I’d been hit in the face with a two-byfour.
I had no choice but to design another way of being. I was at a crossroads,
a crossroads that I would later call a “crossroads of ambiguity.” Everything
I seemed to have been working toward was up for grabs. Yes, we were
on our way out of the Vietnam War; yes, there was the sense that there
would be a lot more equity for people of color than my parents had experienced;
yes, there were possibilities for women; and yes, the way people
would partner and live together was wide open, at least in San Francisco.