patrick hello

Station Eleven 1.03 “Hurricane”

To me, this line— one I didn’t think about a lot— is one of the most powerful and true statements of the show, w/r/t performance, art, and the instances of what I call “the consensual lie” that occur between two people, throughout the series. These are the imaginative acts of grace and generosity, lies designed to create safety, that happen both spontaneously, but also with years of planning. Art is a thing we do when solving a problem requires a tool that doesn’t exist; the first and most important consensual lie— another way to think of it as a shared lie— is when Jeevan makes up the story about Kirsten’s parents knowing Frank. Of course she knows that’s bullshit. But it allows her to play at something she needs. This saves her life, this Jeevan moment, and makes what’s unethical ethical, temporarily, in the way it allows Kirsten to go with Jeevan. Art is not a glazed addition to the delicious thing that’s life, IMO. Art is an artisanal skill called empathy.

While he may be annoyed by “artists”, Jeevan is one. I think. He summons fictions for Kirsten, himself, and others to survive; Frank never does. Kirsten does something even more radical, a withholding of information about the troupe, in 110, when she decides to not tell anyone The Conductor is dead before the play. And her brutal honesty with Tyler in 110, “Stabbing you didn’t work,” is the opposite of what Jeevan does. Radical empathy and radical honesty: to me, this is how we survive. It takes Kirsten her whole life to untangle her instincts. It’s a miss with Gil, I think, when she tried to get him to hit the road again. That’s because Kirsten’s try at radical honesty (when she encourages Gil to leave because The Wheel is more stable and authentic) is coming from a self-serving place. Jeevan TAKING ON a burden to bring Kirsten.

“They blame you if you stay” was another new line, and honestly, this came from somewhere personal. I had left the Station Eleven set for the first time, on May 17th, needing to get home with my family for a minute, but also feeling the toll of leadership, and what it was like having me as the leader for this show. We need Jeevan’s “yo-yo”; we need breaks from everyone. My presence on set had been so crucial, for so long, for real reasons, but the show was so deeply horizontal, creatively, in terms of power, that it was beginning to crush me to assume “boss man” role, especially with the actors. They had its; no one needed me anymore to know what a scene was trying to be. Led by Mackenzie, and her incredibly deep understanding of her character, I felt the company needed me to not stay, for a few weeks, and drive the bus alone.

It’s impossibly painful to go away, after something like this. But I did come back. And I was reminded of some deep and neverending cycle when I was at the door, heading back to Canada two months later for wrap, and my middle son fell apart at the door, with my car waiting. He did not believe I would come back when I said. He was right to: I was supposed to go to Canada for four weeks, Jan 7-Feb 7, and instead I called my wife and told her I needed her to move to Toronto with the kids so I could survive the production. And she did, all three of them in tow.

Sometimes you gotta stay and sometimes you gotta go. Every time, it hurts.