All the World's a Stage

My Life as Human Theatre

Dear Reader;

At seventeen years of age I headed off to Trent University to study English Literature, but once there, fell in love with the theatre. Even though Trent did not have a theatre program, I spent all my free time in college and community theatre productions, obtaining no credit for those hours but gaining an amazing education.

Upon returning to the big city I jumped into the professional theatre world. Theatre to me was the ultimate art form, incorporating word, music, design, philosophical thought, all in a live format where the energy of the audience played as real a part as the actors on the stage. I was in heaven. That is, I was in theoretical heaven.

While I continued to love some of my roles and productions, others not so much. I discovered there was a gap between theory and the material implementation of it. No matter how much work went into the presentation of a group of trained professionals on a stage, underneath it all we were just human beings, full of foibles, egos and unconscious action.

To me, one of the great joys of the theatre was simply the act of taking on a role. As an introvert, to be given a character very different from my own was a fabulous exploration. I played a nurse, a madam, a suicidal actress, a mother of a disabled child, an old woman leading a Greek chorus, a Scottish headmistress, a ghost and, yes, the voice of an urn full of cremated ashes. Gotta love Samuel Beckett.

I witnessed incredible performances and I saw the heartbreak of individuals trying to find themselves beneath their costumes. I felt the joy of an appreciative audience whose hearts were with us as we played, and the cold judgement of audiences who sat back and wanted us to prove something. I was met at the stage door by fans bearing flowers and begging for autographs, and I was attacked by journalists given directions to interview and then smear me because their boss didn’t like uppity young blondes.

I pulled off three hours of monologue for a one woman show without an error, and then in another show completely missed my entrance for a scene. I watched actors rewrite their dialogue on the spot, saw door knobs fall off doors on set, table legs collapse, lights malfunction, and once watched as an actor who was supposed to appear as if he were being hung onstage, actually pass out when the noose tightened around his neck. Talk about living our patterns.

I saw actors perform when they were sick, angry, and heartbroken. I saw actors fall in love on stage, and others who hated each other tell hurtful stories backstage. In one production I was one of only two women in the cast, and every single one of the men made a pass at me at some point during the span of rehearsal and the run of the show. One of them even took the opportunity of a stage kiss to put his tongue into my mouth. He was newly married at the time.

I had big name producers and directors offer me roles if I would sleep with them. I had older actresses insult me loudly in the dressing room because they were jealous of my youth. I coped with many onstage mishaps, including one memorable night of my one woman show.

When the lights came up on Act III, wherein much of the script involved me talking on the phone, I looked around to see that the stage manager had forgotten to place the phone onstage. I had to do the entire act as a disembodied socratic dialogue into the air, while the stage crew madly whispered and scurried around behind the flats, trying to find a way to slide the phone onstage. They eventually gave up. I was proud of that performance because I pulled it off so well that a friend in the audience that night had no idea what had happened, and I earned the respect of our very experienced, responsible and capable stage manager. She was astonished that I wasn’t angry with her, but it was an amazing moment. I had a chance to embody the experience of the character in complete presence, beyond the accoutrements of time, space, and prop telephones. 

My work was mostly in the theatre, but I did have a taste of television and film. Are you old enough to remember Marge, the Palmolive lady who gave manicures while her clients soaked their hands in dish soap? I was one of her girls, and my oh my, she was the Queen of her set. I smiled sweetly on a grapefruit juice commercial until my face hurt. I played an abusive mother in a CBC series, and my heart ached as the baby in the scene cried for take after take, while the mother watched.  I wouldn't have done that with my child, and I was the abuser.

I went to parties with producers who would analyze my body out loud while standing with a group of people having drinks. I went to Hollywood and met creepy agents. I had a scene in a film with Orson Welles who shouted at me because he was hard of hearing. On the same film I was romanced by Michael Murphy who wanted to show me around Hollywood, i.e. wanted to sleep with me, just as he did every other woman on the set.

And then one day I was standing in the wings of the gorgeous Grand Theatre in London, Ontario, waiting for my cue to go onstage, and it hit me. I was done. My days onstage were complete. I was going to quit the theatre. I knew it was time because I had reached a point that when I went onstage I felt nothing. No anxiety, no nervousness, nothing. I could have been standing in my own living room, so neutral was my body. The dynamic pull to express in this way had left me, and I knew in that moment it was time to transform my love of the stage.

I shared this realization with a fellow cast member in the wings, and when I told him I didn’t belong there he said, you would never know it, to see you perform.

But that was just the point. I was good at filtering my own powerful emotional body through the lens of a character, but I wanted to know my own soul. And so by necessity, I had to turn my gaze a different way. At that time I had no idea that in time I would give my life over to the study of what I now call Human Theatre. That I would go on to become a writer, a wife, a mother, and that one day I would experience an awakening that would change my life. That I would be shown, through countless transmissions, that everything I learned onstage was a parallel experience to Human embodiment. That when we incarnate we choose the character we are going to play, our personalities. We choose our costumes, our bodies. And we choose the script, the set, the props and the other actors, that in fact, we are the playwrights, the performers and the audience, all at the same time, upon our own three-dimensional stage.

I learned that the experience I gained in my exploration of characters foreign to me, granted me a certain willingness to surrender attachment to the ways in which I needed to perceive myself. Of course I still work on detachment every day. I am still confronted by my own personality, my desire to be seen by my audience, my critics who sit in the front row planning how to write a review that will ruin it all and close the show. But now I am guided by the simple acceptance of the conceptual understanding that every act, every relationship, every experience is intentionally creative in order to deepen our understanding of our own story. It is a vision, an awareness which once witnessed, may never be undone.

For many years a large part of my work has been to receive, as an intuitive, the past life stories of others. A Kore Reading Is an opportunity to witness the choices our soul has made to purposefully manifest the catalysts of karmic expansion. These readings are accompanied by a powerful energetic attunement, and are extremely in depth and nuanced. They act as a user's guide, a template which can be laid over top of the story of our current life.

I like to say, when we hear our story, it's as if we have found the cover to the box of the puzzle of our lives, the one which has the picture of the finished puzzle. Instead of a collection of random shapes and colours, with the picture in front of us, we now see the vision which represents the purposeful nature of our birth. In this purpose we find meaning, and as every great actor, great storyteller, great director or Creator will tell you, purpose and meaning are everything.

If you are curious to know your Kore story, to understand the role you have chosen on your stage, and the players of your life, please write to me and we will meet. We will discuss the nature of this work in more depth to give us an opportunity to see if this is the time for you to step off the stage and into a deeper truth.

My sense is, there will come a day when my time in this particular role will be complete, but for now, I am at your service.

Time is Now.

much love,
Adi