A burning Crash Life has no intermission BY CAITLIN SHETTERLY

A few years ago, when I was still in the New York rat race, working a million jobs but never able to pay any one bill on time (that hasn’t changed), I was lucky enough to come into free tickets for plays often enough that I was seeing theater with a regularity that most actors in New York can only dream of. My experiences in dark womb-like theaters, watching some of America’s greatest, changed my life. If I could somehow transport myself right now back into those plush seats, sitting forward, my whole world encapsulated and focused through what was happening on that stage like that woman in Edward Hopper’s "Intermission," I would in an instant. This is what I miss most living outside of New York — the life-changing force of watching someone experience in real time the private drama that is blow-your-mind theatre.

Tony Kushner once called it the "icky reality" that makes theater so appealing and also hard for people to accept.

I watched Kathleen Chalfant take off all of her clothes as a white light beamed down and conveyed her from the stage — and her real world — of Wit to whatever lies beyond our deaths. I sat, my hands around my head as if to shield myself from what became physically painful to watch. Later, watching the first production of the Laramie Project, I decided that documentary theatre was the most revolutionary thing I could imagine. It takes real people, real lives, and a real incident (in this case, the death of Matthew Shepard), and brings those stories to audiences everywhere.

A year after 9/11, I saw Burn This, where Ed Norton crashed onto stage in the best entrance I’ve ever seen: He wakes up a woman he does not know at four in the morning, kicking her to life and yelling "Goddamn this fucking place, how can anybody live in this shit city?" It was there, watching her life transformed by this stranger, that I decided to get out of New York and, more importantly, leave my relationship. I went three times (twice ushering) to see Pamela Gien’s one-woman show The Syringa Tree, where she played an outrageous number of characters — of different ages, races, and dialects from her South African childhood during Apartheid. I went twice to Top Dog Underdog, the story of two black brothers named Lincoln and Booth, first with Jeffrey Wright and Don Cheadle, and then with Wright and Mos Def.

The first Top Dog, it must have been a preview — I walked out late with my friend, a tall, waspy, leggy blond who wore tiny glasses and strange ensembles that became even stranger after she joined the Landmark Forum and tried to get me to join. Somehow we were walking out with Wright and Cheadle. Wright hung back and chatted with George Wolfe and someone else important (come to think of it, I think it might have been Mr. Big from Sex and the City), and for some reason Cheadle and my friend and I began talking and leaving the theater together. He’s a smallish guy — about my height (though note when I say this that I apparently told my father when I was in high school that the 6’1" captain of the basketball team was about my height, so I may have a little issue as far as my own physical presence is concerned) — and was wearing sweats and some kind of football jersey with sneakers. We stood around chatting while he stuck his arm out to hail a cab. Finally, after none stopped (something I had not really even noticed), he turned to me and said, "Hey Caitlin, what would it take to get a white girl like you to get me a cab?"

Of course, I did it. But only after a momentary embarrassment that I was even white, and a quick look over my shoulder to make sure there wasn’t some other Caitlin he actually knew, and then this weird discomfort that I could get a cab and he couldn’t. This celebrity couldn’t get a cab and I could. Because I was white.

I thought of this moment again the other night when Cowboy and I ferreted away a late-night date and ducked in to see Crash, starring Cheadle who since I saw him on stage has erupted into a major force in American Cinema. Crash, like some of my best experiences in theater, was one of those shows where I sat at the edge of my seat blown away by every second, which seemed even more flawless than the one that preceded it. Los Angeles stories literally collide and pivot on baseline race issues and a deep-seated American unrest with who we now are in the world. At the end, it snows, in LA, and somehow the movie seems to be saying that it would take a miracle for anyone to stop and think about what they are doing, how they are treating each other, how doomed we are.

When Cowboy and I left the theatre, neither of us could speak. We were so stunned by the power of what we had seen; we both felt our own lives changing. Now, north of New York, and running my own theater company, I aspire to something I remember and almost taste from those evenings where the world of what was on stage became my only reality.

I hunger to make something that crashes into someone’s mind, sears it and alters it, if only for a night.

Bramhall Square appears in the Portland Phoenix every other week, and Caitlin Shetterly can be reached at bramhallsquare@yahoo.com