Summer's End...Adaptation

Jim's Musings from Paris September 2022

Photo by Jairo Cuesta.

The laughter and screams from the park across the street are getting louder and louder. The sun’s track across the late afternoon sky changes its course daily and shines less and less directly through our apartment’s windows. The streets of Paris come alive again as the shops reopen, the tourists retreat, and the fragrances of the fromageries mix with the subtle smells of the boulangeries and the ever-present scent of street urine. I love Paris at the end of summer, no sizzle, no drizzle, only the city in a state of change—adaptation.

I’ve been thinking a lot about adaptation lately. Mostly, I’ve been noticing how much it is lacking in the behavior of so many people right now. What do I mean by adaptation? Well, I’m a theatre director, so from a theatre point of view, I understand adaptation as the essential part of acting. In Towards a Poor Theatre, Grotowski clearly states the “secret” to acting: Something happens—and you react. Adaptation is this reaction; it’s the physical and vocal changes that one makes in relation to what is happening around you. Your partner speaks. She asks for a drink of water. You notice that she is hot, sweaty, and winded. You quickly move towards the fridge as you ask her, with concern, if she is OK. This is basic acting stuff. This is basic human behavior stuff. This is about seeing, listening, adapting, and responding. But how many human interactions these days skip that third step or maybe they skip the first three steps? How many people that you meet each day just respond without seeing, without listening, without knowing to whom or to what they are responding? They just do what they want to do, what they’ve habitually done, without any inclusion of the other, of the partner.

I had a recent telephone conversation with someone in a doctor’s office. I had some very precise questions for the person on the phone. The phone call was a disaster. First of all, it should be very clear to anyone that I am not a native French speaker, nor do I have advanced French language skills. However, I can get by quite well if the person to whom I’m speaking, adapts. No matter how many times I asked this person on the phone to slow down or speak more clearly, she continued to rattle on in a manner that was incomprehensible to me. I was dumbfounded. How could anyone be so obtuse? No change of tone, no change of pace, no sense that she was speaking to a particular person, with particular language skills, and particular needs. Her manner was mechanical and robotic. I got angry.

Grotowski used to bristle when approached by someone in this mechanical way. To be asked monotonously by a restaurant server or store clerk, “How are you today?,” was, for him, a symptom of humanity’s sickness. When I was working with him, breaking those habits of greeting others mechanically became a part of my daily tasks and made me more aware of where I was and who I was meeting.

Recently, however, I see this sickness has spread beyond the worker with a mundane or boring job and now permeates all aspects of our daily lives. We see it in the continued shelling of the nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Even after several near-disasters have occurred, there is no adaptation. Why does no one pull back or just stop? Why does the shelling continue? We see it in the lack of compromise between right and left the world over and we see it in the awakening of fascism and totalitarianism in places where the scars from such regimes are still visible everywhere.

Look around you, Jim. Listen!

The cries of Jewish children forced from their homes and sent to concentration camps and of my friend’s Italian grandfather being dragged behind a Fascist truck mix with the cries of Ukrainian families hiding from the shells exploding above their heads and reverberate across the European continent. The howls of the Native American mother whose child is snatched from her arms and sent to the white man’s school, of the Black mother who sees her daughter sold like chattel to an abusive slave holder, of my own mother who lost her teen-age son in a senseless motorcycle accident 38 years ago on September 1 —their howls still echo through the hills and valleys of the American continent and mingle with the screams of men, women, and children shot down on city streets.

Look around you, Jim. See!

The blood that runs from the rubber trees of Brazil and the Congo, feeds the roots of the sugar cane in Cuba, colors the salt pans in India, or gushes from oil wells the world over—that blood is real. If I hear and see these sounds and images, past and present, how can I not adapt? How can I not make some changes in my relation to the world and those around me?

Summer is ending. The harvest is being gathered. The earth has once more given her bounty. But this year, especially, she has asked for some attention. She has asked us all to follow her example. She has asked us all—to adapt.