Paul Sills
I was writing a grant a week ago looking for a brilliant, pithy way to describe the power of story. How it speaks to us. How it feeds us. Why we need it. I googled the name of a man who I think is a master of story, creator of Story Theater, and one of the dearest and most influential people in my life, my teacher Paul Sills. That’s when I saw his obituary.
I cried and cried, but, as any mother of a two-year old understands, deep sadness is not a luxury I could dip into long. And now, a week later, sans funeral, sans ceremony, sans gathering of all the people who loved him to trade stories -- which all must have happened in June when he passed, I write my own story, my own eulogy of Paul Sills, who taught people to fly on the wings of intuition.
Intuition? Of what insubstantial stuff does she speak? Ah, listen closely, and I will try to describe this illusive and most powerful gift he would cultivate in what must have been many thousands of students during his long and incredible life.
The key to intuition is focus. That's it. I just taught you the secret to penetrating the heart of the Universe. But, of course, focus is not something learned and comprehended through the mind. It is an experience practiced over a thousand hours and then, maybe, just maybe, the feeling of effortless flight, the feeling of riding with ease a most magnificent wave takes over. This is the exhilaration of surrender to the intuition through focus.
Paul Sills taught people how to focus through the playing of theatre games. Improvisational theatre games. Sounds easy, huh? Sounds like fun? It was also painfully difficult. Sometimes excruciatingly so. The actor doesn’t have the opportunity of practicing his craft alone-unobserved. They are in front of thirty or so people day after day stumbling, bumbling while Paul sat in the corner chewing on a toothpick coaching, “focus,” or a slew of other phrases like “feel your feet”, “follow the follower” etc. which all were variations on the same instruction…focus.
Paul also invented an art form called Story Theatre which played on and off Broadway. Clive Barnes, writing about it in The New York Times, said it brought back “magic and innocence to Broadway.” Studying the Story Theatre form with Paul at The New Actors Workshop started my love affair of adapting stories for the stage. And now, almost twenty years later, his influence, continues. The reason why Circle of Stones is performing Gilgamesh this year (the oldest written story in the history of civilization) can be traced back to Paul and the influence of his ground-breaking work on Story Theater.
All there is to say now is thank you, Paul, wherever you are. Thank you and I love you. I loved how you called me dear. Like a father or a grandfather. I loved how the world felt magical and mysterious and awesome when you were in the room. Thank you for being who you were-it has shaped so much of who I am and what I do.
Love, Pana
