Pilgrimage Play Theatre

On Paths toward Awakening

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Seed Period, the Transformative 1970s

  After the last year in The Pilgrimage Play in summer 1950 (now produced with an Actors Equity Broadway contract), New York beckoned many of us, so fade out religious/spiritual matters and activities. It was not until 1970 in New York that the direction of “spiritual” or other-worldly matters veered me into paths untrodden. Links which would carry me to the Buddha’s teachings seem disparate at first glance, but it is not so:

  To have been living in New York at all was occasioned by a season in “The Pilgrimage Play” in Hollywood in 1961, meeting Frank Dunand through a member of that cast, resulting in a return to New York in April, 1963 and a quite astounding series of adventures and jobs, deciding in October, 1969, to enroll in the Lee Strassberg Theatre Institute, and try my hand at theatre once again. So it was that I would in January 1970, meet Robert LuPone in an acting class with Ed Kovens. Bob became a close friend; hanging out with him—meeting his family and friends, auditioning with him at Playwrights Unit and for soap operas. We were to see each other often during the next few years. By June, 1976 (after a couple of years living in Los Angeles and San Francisco), I had lost touch with him, and returning to New York once more decided to look him up.

  Was I out of touch! soon learning from his then partner, Katherine Duke, that he was starring as Zach in “A Chorus Line,” nominated for a Tony Award for best supporting actor in a musical; that he now was in San Francisco on tour with “A Chorus Line” with the original Broadway cast—and I had just left San Francisco! Kathy’s voice was hoarse; she’d been participating in a grand march down Sixth Avenue, and chanting in a big rally in Shea Stadium. A small meditation center was tucked into a wall in the small apartment Bob had been living in since the time we met in 1970, a scroll at its center. Kathy had little to say beyond that, except that she and Bob had been “chanting” for a year by themselves, deciding they should join the “community” and do some proselytizing for new members. Unknown to me at the time, several members of “A Chorus Line” cast, and the co-writer, Nicholas Dante, had become members of N.S.A.

  A word about method acting and Tai-chi. One easily could condense the “Strassberg method of acting” based on Stanislavski’s “Lessons in Acting” as “living each moment with a completely relaxed state of mind; getting in touch with one’s emotional memories, sensory perceptions. Of course the process and its application are much more intense. At the same time, I was studying Tai-chi with Sophia Delza—and soon realized the discipline was in synch with Strassberg’s teaching—total concentration on a series of body movements, moment to moment.

New York, 1973: Another link which was to enhance the introduction to the Buddha’s teachings quite remarkably: living with Tony Doknovitch on West 79^th Street, searching for some means of livelihood; thought it might be fun to take up astrology, and after reading many books, decided it might be a good idea to go directly to the source of the frequently quoted Dane Rudhyar who obviously had revolutionary ideas about astrology, viewing human experience in terms of cycles and transformations, rather than event-centered predictions, and who in 1968 had originated person-centered “Humanistic -Transpersonal Astrology.”

  In a book store on lower Broadway in New York, discovering all of Rudhyar’s writings, a dozen or so titles dating back many years: “The Pulse of Life” (Sun Signs), “The Lunation Cycle.” “The Astrological Houses, the Spectrum of Human Experience.”

  Today on the breakfast table lies an old, dilapidated copy of the first edition of Dane Rudhyar’s “An Astrological Mandala–The Cycle of Transformations and Its 360 Symbolic Phases” published by Random House, copyrighted by Rudhyar in 1973; its hard covers detached from note-filled tattered pages often consulted, attesting to its extraordinary content, mind-blowing on many occasions in its synchronicity with certain transformative life moments during the journey on the path, commencing in October, 1976. (I found this first edition in 1975 at a book store on Hollywood Boulevard.)