Your Catharsis Is Not My Theater

I was twenty years old and I thought I understood what this work was for. I was a student at the Schukin Theater School in Moscow, performing at the Vakhtangov Theatre alongside actors I considered legends, breathing in something I couldn’t yet name. Then a film role came my way. Small part. Conflicting dates. I asked for a substitute on a few shows. Seemed reasonable.

I was called to the office of Vladimir Etush who was a rector at the school. Movie star. Legendary Soviet actor. Everyone in the Soviet Union knew his face.

He looked at me and said: “Я служу театру больше пятидесяти лет.”

I have served the theater for more than fifty years. Not worked. Not performed. Served. He had never missed a day. Not for film. Not for sickness. Not for anything.

I walked out confused. Why служу? Why that word? He could have said I have worked in the theater. I have spent my life in the theater. Why serve?

The meaning didn’t land for years. It’s not about sacrifice or nobility or any of that. It’s about orientation. It’s about where you point yourself when you walk into the room. It’s about asking not what you want to express, but how you can be useful. To society. To the people who showed up. That is the greatest reward from the work. From any life. From mine.

Not long ago in a class I teach in New York, a student performed Nina’s monologue from The Seagull. She cried her eyes out. Genuinely. Deeply. An emotional experience that was, for her, completely real and completely overwhelming.

I class was untouched.

I sat there watching the students around me decide how to respond to what they had just witnessed. And here is the beautiful and painful thing about American theater culture: everyone wanted to support her. I find that instinct genuinely moving, the way this community holds each other. They said: how deep she went. How much she felt.

The problem wasn’t that she was telling a story. The problem is she wasn’t in the room at all.

That’s self-therapy with an audience present. The audience hears the narration of emotion, understands on some intellectual level that this person is hurting, and remains completely, safely separate from it. Separate from their own lives. Separate from anything that could shift something inside them. The performer is having her catharsis. The audience is watching someone have a catharsis. Those are not the same experience and they never will be.

Your catharsis is not my theater.

Nothing transforms when the work is not for the room.

When we began Our Class, I told the actors: we are not staging a play about what has happened. We are staging a play about what will happen.

That single reframe changes everything. The adrenaline changes. The urgency changes. If this is going to happen to me, to my children, to my grandchildren, I don’t walk onto that stage the same way. I don’t deliver lines. I don’t express myself. I do something else entirely. I serve the people sitting in the dark asking whether this could happen to them.

Once that becomes the DNA, the inner dialogue with the audience, the production starts growing beyond you. The development moves out of the director’s hands and into the audience’s. Actors and audiences build the play together because it is needed, in this room, on this night, by these specific people.

And then the play graduates.

Our Class doesn’t belong to me anymore. It graduated from me into something that belongs to itself, the way a child eventually does.

I think about the audiences after performances. Ushers cleaning the house, playbills scattered everywhere. A third of the audience stays sitting, looking at the empty stage. Not talking. One by one, slowly, people start to leave. An elderly woman stays the longest - her relatives had died in a pogrom. But it isn’t only about her specific connection. It’s about what everyone in that room is carrying together, in that silence. The understanding that we are not alone in this. That other people in the world are thinking about the same thing. Not a word is said. Some people stand outside, smoking, they won’t leave the building. The ushers have to ask people to go.

That is not a story about a successful production. That is a story about a production that stopped being about me.

I don’t think service is a soft word. I don’t think it means subordinating your artistic instinct or making work that is safe or pleasing or easy to receive. The most demanding thing I have ever asked of an audience, they stayed for it, sat in silence for it, stood outside in the cold because of it. Service is not compromise. Service is the decision that the work must land in another human being or it hasn’t done anything at all.

Strip away the building if you have to. Stage it anywhere. But whatever the space, whatever the material, point toward the people in the room. Not toward how deeply you feel. Not toward what you want to express. Toward what they need to experience, together, in a way they couldn’t have experienced alone.

We are not telling something. We are not demonstrating something. We are touching something, and the extraordinary thing, the thing that made me fall in love with this work, is that when it happens you can feel the whole room change. People who have never met each other and will never see each other again share something they cannot name, and they carry it out into the street, and something in them is different.

That is worth serving.

That is worth fifty years.

Our Class is touring to Z Space in San Francisco, March 27 - April 5.