Creating Space for the Unexpected

By

Carson Wright

Many years ago, I visited the Theatre Department of Pace University for a weekend of events designed to appeal to high school seniors making their final college decisions. Something of a taste test — a sampler for newly admitted undergraduates eager to see if Pace would dole out whatever it was they thought they were searching for. We audited classes and attended workshops before sneaking off to one of the few bars in lower Manhattan that didn’t card.

In the early evening of a sunny Saturday on which it felt as though all things were still possible, I found myself in a movement studio next to fellow prospectives and current students alike. A stocky, gray-bearded professor by the name of Adrian guided our practice. One of the exercises he led us through — Suzuki or viewpoints or something, I can’t remember — was as follows: we were to start with our backs to the walls of the Marley-floored room, each person distributed evenly around its perimeter. Then we were to walk slowly towards one another, meeting in the middle of the space to form a small, shoulder-to-shoulder circle. Upon reaching that climax, we were to run away, back the way we came, returning to our starting positions before turning around to face each other. A study in contrasting speeds.

Our first pass at this arc was a shaky, unremarkable test drive scored by hushed, self-conscious laughter. After the professor entreated our focus, our second pass saw this:
All of us black-clad young people slowly advancing towards one another, moving with the utmost precision; quiet, measured breathing the only sound in the room; a shrinking circle of apprehensive bodies listening to each other, each monitoring the progression of their neighbors so as to better synchronize their pacing; our intimate convergence, and then our sudden break, all of us running away and hitting the walls with our hands. We whipped around to face each other again and saw, in the very center we had just vacated, the inexplicable and striking image of a white feather, floating gently down from midair to the studio floor.
Where had that feather come from? Someone’s pocket? An open vent in the ceiling? The room was sparse — surely, if it had been there before, we would have seen it. But instead it seemed almost as if we had created it out of thin air through the very act of doing the exercise. The simple sight of it was so unexpected that people gasped. It delighted the room.

The professor, who will forgive my paraphrasing him, seized on a teachable moment and said, “see? In order for that to have happened, all of the proper conditions had to be in place. We had to execute each leg of that arc with utter commitment, all while remaining present. If we hadn’t done as we just did, we would have never been able to experience that.”

No one designed, predicted, or worked toward the outcome of a white feather appearing, ghostlike, out of nowhere and drifting to the ground. But by fully investing ourselves in the action we undertook, we created the space we needed to be fully receptive to the wonder of that moment.

What the original purpose or logic behind that exercise was, I couldn’t tell you. But I remember doing it, and I remember the feather.

The best acting feels similar. In a truly compelling performance, the actor’s behavior feels spontaneous and genuine. They appear to be in conversation with the moment, rather than attempting to force the moment into the mold of their image. Some of the plainest speech about this quality of work comes from Lee Strasberg, who said, “acting isn’t something you do. Instead of doing it, it occurs. If you’re going to start with logic, you might as well give up. You can have conscious preparation, but you have unconscious results.” This conscious preparation Strasberg mentions demands skill and discipline. Those things are valuable, but only in that they’re a means to an end; it’s the unconscious results that we’re after. We do the work to create the space for a sound we could never expect, or for a gesture that shocks us, or for a feather to drop.

These beautiful and surprising moments come to us in many forms, human and inhuman. Unwelcome emotion contorting an actor’s face into an animalistic expression neither they or you could have imagined: human. The falling of a previously unseen white feather: inhuman. But whatever form they take, we can only hope to find and fully appreciate them by investing ourselves in the present moment, ready and willing to accept whatever happens.

Of course, we know that some things — barring theatrical malpractice — are certain to happen. Willy Loman will kill himself. Gloucester’s eyes will come out. Hamlet will talk a bunch. Collaborating with director, designers and scene partners, the actors charged with performing these roles will construct a repeatable path that they will reliably trod every night. But there are many different ways to walk a path, and a river is different every time you cross it. While attempting to walk the path crafted in rehearsal, it’s still more than possible that these minute differences will cause something to rise up from outside the realm of the expected and affect you in a way you can’t predict.

  In Theatre Three’s recent production of The Lion in Winter by James Goldman, the sons of King Henry and Queen Eleanor vie for the English crown. The company’s final show of 2025 featured Artistic Director Jeffrey Schmidt as the aging, succession-focused Henry and Associate Artistic Director Christie Vela as Eleanor of Aquitaine. I was so privileged as to play Geoffrey, the middle son, born between Richard the Lionheart (Drew Wall) and John (Dustin Parsons). Also navigating the cutthroat power struggle is King Philip of France (Ben Stegmair) and his sister, Princess Alais (Kristen Lazarchick).

The script is insanely smart. Goldman’s writing is surprisingly funny and meticulously structured, with setups and punchlines as precise as mathematical equations littering the decidedly dark material. Directed by Matthew Gray, the play clocked in at two hours long, yet during Theatre Three’s run, I heard audience member after audience member claim it felt like it flew by.

I’d offer a spoiler warning here, but the play is closed and the movie came out fifty-eight years ago.

The final scene of Lion sees King Henry’s sons conspiring to betray him, assassinate him, after he locked them in the castle dungeon. Having earlier jockeyed for their father’s preference, the would-be heirs are now united in their apparent willingness to take him down. Henry enters, discovers their plot, and readies his sword to execute his own children for the crime of treason, raising it over Richard’s head. However, he falters at the last moment, and brings his weapon crashing down onto stone instead, spent and heartbroken.

On the night of our penultimate performance, Jeffrey raised his sword over the head of Mason Bowling, the wonderful swing who stepped in to play Richard that evening, and sent it down beside him, falling with it in a heap to the floor — walking the path of David Saldivar’s sharp, clean fight choreo flawlessly. One small detail, however, differentiated that night from all the others. When Jeff sank to the floor, the dull edge of his heavy prop blade struck a copper wine goblet left on a nearby platform by another actor. It made the sound of a handbell’s chime. Something holy. A sound you’d hear in church, if you’re into that sort of thing. It filled the theater with a vibrant ringing, creating an audible punctuation mark between the terrifying moment of near-violence that preceded it and the dejection, the resignation that followed it. It happened only that once.

A broken man facing his traitorous sons crumpled to the ground, and up from that misery rose a beautiful, resonant chime that reverberated through the hall of the Norma Young Arena Stage. Standing there in that rich, full moment and hearing that sound — the sound of pure chance, surprising, unpredictable and splendid — all I could think of was a white feather.

Nobody could have planned the placement of that sound. No designer programmed it, no director envisioned it, and no actor tried to look cool by pulling it off. But if the many artists involved in The Lion in Winter hadn’t come together and earnestly invested themselves in the effort to nightly trod the path crafted in rehearsal, it would have never happened, and we would have been deprived of it.

The experience of these surprises in the myriad forms they take is a major reason I continue to act. Indeed, it’s why I think we should keep making theatre at all. Not to find whatever it is we think we’re searching for — but to experience what new and unexpected things, human and inhuman, horrible, beautiful, and strange, will rise up to meet us as we do the searching.