Emerald Coast Theatre Consultant

Many years ago, while I was working on my Masters at the Pasadena Playhouse, Lenore Shanewise was assigned as my mentor.  She was the woman who, in many ways, changed my life.    

Lenore was a mature, lovely woman who was a Christian Scientist.  I had had a brief encounter with another of that denomination a year earlier when I was preparing the “nose speech” from Cyrano for my acting audition at the Playhouse.   

Now, I do not consider myself an actor, never have and never will .   I never wanted to be one and have never labored under an illusion that I was one for even a second of my life, but I did try several times to find out what acting was and how it worked.    

Anyhow, I was preparing that long, long, long jumble of words and working so diligently that it killed the spirit of the piece. It was just then that my coach, a woman not connected with the university, said to me:   “Let the character flow through you, Gordon, through you, not from you.”   

Now… hold that thought.   

After auditioning at the playhouse and playing God (over my strenuous objections, believe it or not) in an impossible and implausible production of Lilliom, it was decided that maybe I should try directing.  That was when I found out that the artistic management of the playhouse had decided that Lenore Shanewise was going to direct The Children’s Hour and Gordon Goede was going to direct Tea and Sympathy.   I did not know the reason that the entire playhouse almost exploded with the news.   Eventually it filtered back to me that Gilmore Brown, the founder of the playhouse, had banned all plays the dealt with male or female homosexuality since the start of the playhouse, but he was gone now and someone decided that Lenore and Gordon were the directors that were going to break the rule. 

Lenore was confident, I was not.   It was my first attempt at handling student actors and I knew that the school was watching. 

Lenore knew I was having misgivings about the play, which was at that time, one of the hits on Broadway. She invited me to dinner at her home where she said we could talk.   

It was more that she talked and I listened.   I did not realize until years later the incredible wealth of information she gave me that evening and how what she said would still, to this day, echo in my ear when something is not right on the stage.   

As I mentioned before, she was a Christian Scientist.   During “her talk and my listen” she said “not of me the through me.”  My head came upright, my eyes opened wide, my jaw dropped, and I said to her:   “I’ve heard that before!   Just a few months ago in Jacksonville!”   She laughed and said:  “We’re everywhere, Gordon!”   

I asked her the source of the quote and she told me it was from the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.  I asked if she had a spare tome I could borrow.   She did.   And I read it until I found the  exact quote:  “Not of me but through me, O Lord!”   

Now I believe there is a source for all that surrounds us, having been brought up a protestant and through many of the divisions of it from Methodist to Episcopalian to whatever  And I can accept another persons religion as well as the next, because it is theirs.   But “how does this quote work in acting” I asked Lenore.    

Fast forward to the two of us directing, she in a theatre directly above mine at the playhouse.    Both of us were having problems with an actor and we met over coffee one night to discuss.   

Hers was playing the boyfriend of one of the girls who was accused of having an improper relationship with another female teacher and mine was playing the husband of the woman who befriends and “initiates” the accused young male into manhood (it is supposed to happen after the lights go out).  

Both actors were extremely talented, sensitive men and at that time, this subject was not one bandied about with aplomb, but rather played with a hush-hush attitude at best.  The problem was that both actors were pushing and trying to manufacture something of theirs from the text rather than letting the words of the author come through them. 

How to solve the problem was easy for Lenore, not so easy for me.  I watched her direct her guy into exactly the place that the author demanded of him.   Not by pushing, not by showing off, but by slowing down and not trying to make the play and impress people, but making the moment and feeding off of the multitude of sources supplied by the script.    

One thing she said to her performer:   “Think about the situation, and when you have fully done that with the subject, then run the feelings “through” you and just “let them come out, slowly and without pushing” to show off or be seen.   The results were mind blowing.   What he did not say was more evident and more affecting than what he did say.

Following her lead was easy with my actor.   I only had to slow him down once and he fell into line absorbing what the author had given him. What an epiphany for me! 

“Not of me but through me!”