Go see the tiny Ninjas

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." – Albert Einstein

We both felt a little ill, slightly nauseous, with grumbling, roiling tummies and headaches that make you pay attention and not move too quickly or too far. We both felt that helpless anticipation of unknown food poisoned doom.

Perhaps it was the heat, or the Mexican food, or the Indian food, or the Thai food, or the unidentified lunch objects from the conference I had spoken at that day at the Ritz Carlton where hotel rooms cost $649 a night and where we did not stay. It certainly was not – and I repeat was not – the empanadas from Julia’s Empanadas, my first stop when we had gotten to town.

A few days in our Nation’s Capital – once my home for over 20 years and now not – and Emma and I were exhausted, spent, queasy, though after an afternoon at my old stomping ground, the Andre Chreky Salon, our fingernails and toenails looked smashing and I was sporting new, slightly Groucho-reminiscent eyebrows. So we might have been sick, but stylishly so, adorned in OPI’s I Love This Color and, in Emma’s case, a lovely oil slick color of dark blue.

We had fallen onto our hotel beds at the end of the day, sweaty. “How’re you doing?” I asked a little while later, the drone of the air conditioner creating a freezer that held me in some fine molecular stasis. “Harph…” I heard her groan. “It’s time to go if we’re going to get to the Kennedy Center on time," I offered weakly.

“We’ve got to catch a cab now if you want to go.” It was one of Those Moments When You Know What You Really Want To Do Is Sleep Or Be Put Into A Medically Induced Coma until the sick wears off, but then again, too much of life is sleeping already and it’s not every day you can go see “Macbeth” at the Kennedy Center, and for free.

Our options at this Very Moment In Time were narrow and narrowing the longer we lay prone. It was clear that eating dinner was out of the question. We both felt too ill and knew that the next morning our 4:00am wake-up call for our 6:00am flight would come awfully early. Best not to tempt the gods of further food poisoning, given how we felt. “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I don’t feel so good.” “Me neither.” “I don’t know, what do you want to do?” “I don’t know, you?” we softly lobbed the decision back and forth, eyeing each other with our one good eye to see who would give us the out to stay in our meat locker until morning.

We each suffered in our own silence for a few more moments, the cool sheets feeling good, like a cold bathroom floor feels good when you’re spending some significant amount of time in there, well, you know.

It was 5:25pm. If we had any hope of making the 6pm show, we’d have to leave now.  There’s little I hate more than being late. “I really want to see it,” we both said, and stumbled to our feet.

Once outside, the hot air felt like an assault. “I need a ginger ale and some saltines,” I said. Instead, we got slowly into a cab, one with air conditioning, blessedly, and made our way through rush hour traffic to the Kennedy Center, each lurch of the cab sending us into deeper concentrated effort. “Look at the horizon,” I whispered frantically to Emma. “Just look at the horizon.” If it works on ships in typhoons, surely it would work in a D.C. cab in rush hour.

Before we had left home for D.C., I had checked the Kennedy Center website to see what was playing. Perhaps we could see an interesting show while in D.C.– we used to take Emma to the Kennedy Center all the time for shows when she was little, followed by taking photos of low-flying helicopters over the Potomac out back on the Center’s wide, low terrace. She loved it until she got bored with it: “Aw, no, not the Kennedy Center again,” she would wail sometimes. Our protests that most kids never even see the Kennedy Center fell on deaf ears. Irrelevant to a six-year-old.

The Millennium Stage was completely empty when we got there. “How can that be?” I asked, peering at the chairs cordoned off, struck dumb by their emptiness. “I couldn’t have made a mistake—I know it starts at 6pm.” I stood looking at the stage as if staring was a change agent and suddenly Macbeth would appear. In my weakened state, I was completely befuddled.

“Mom,” I finally heard Emma say behind me. “Mo-om!” I slowly turned to look at her, not willing to risk sudden movements. “There’s where everybody is going,” she said, pointing. I turned further to peer at the other end of the long overly red hall in The Kennedy Center, past the gigantic gnarly head of John F. Kennedy to another Millennium Stage, the one with large hordes of people around it. We were too late. There were no more seats, and the crowd kept growing, pinning us against the crowd barrier, the red rope keeping the seatless masses in line. “I need a ginger ale,” I said again, buying us two ginger-ale-like Sprites which we both held, reflexively, against our temples and our necks.

The efficient red-coated ushers looked nervously at the ballooning crowd of us miscreant latecomers. One in particular seemed agitated by the size of our army and moved from side to side peering into the crowd. As the show started, the action mercifully projected onto a large screen for the masses, the Efficient and Troubled Usher moved to our side. “I can take six people,” she said, looking our way. Suddenly, a huge swell of people swallowed us up and pushed me, Emma, and our chilly, mercifully bubbly Sprites aside. The lucky six with the strongest arm muscles were numbered and chosen, like those small children in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it seemed to me, pushing their way into the chocolate river and turning into purple bubblegum. Emma, in this moment of insight, was – of course – dear sweet Charlie, quietly standing aside, I her simple quiet precious Uncle.

The show was a production of “Macbeth” by the Tiny Ninja Theatre Company, founded in 1999 by director Dov Weinstein. "I had noticed that there were these tiny plastic ninjas in vending machines all across the city," says Weinstein, "but no one was using them to perform classical theater. Something had to be done." Once I read that statement on the Kennedy Center website, I knew I wanted to go.

What could be better? As one reviewer wrote, “Toward the end of Tiny Ninja Theater Presents Macbeth, the title character muses, ‘There’s nothing serious in mortality. All is but toys.’ And thank goodness. While an audience of 10 or so scopes the briefcase-size stage through cheapo opera glasses, Dov Weinstein puts a troupe of inch-high molded plastic ninjas through the motions of the Scottish play. Performed briskly and with limitless confidence, the show delights with surprising stagings and hilarious bits of literalism. When Macbeth intones, ‘Stars hold your fires!’ Weinstein turns the light out; when a ninja proclaims, ‘But I am faint,’ Weinstein knocks him over.” [If you are Ninja-friendly or a Billy Shakespeare fan, on June 13-14 at 6pm EDT, you can watch a live Internet broadcast of the Tiny Ninja Theatre’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Only available live at 6pm on those dates; these performances will not be archived.]

Ever since I saw Rich Hall do skits with tiny plastic people and trees that he set up inside stereo speakers on the short-lived David Letterman morning show in 1980 (turn the speaker on – instant earthquake), I’ve been a sucker for quirky and small plastic figures. Add Shakespeare and I have to be there. Perhaps it is the juxtaposition of high and low culture, serious and funny, like the amazing comic book, Mom’s Cancer, pitting a comic form with a deadly topic.

We prepared to stand, Sprite-ready, for the duration. Emma looked particularly Scottish that evening, her dark curls against pale, pale skin and blue, blue eyes. Feverish? Nauseous? Scottish?

Suddenly, the Very Serious Red-Jacketed Usher appeared just before Emma, locking onto her eyes. “Come, sit,” she said, then raising her gaze from Emma to include me. “Come.” She opened the red threshold, pushing back those who surged forward, picking me and Emma out as the chosen ones, shepherding us. “Follow me,” she said, and she was gone, lost in a billowing curtain on the far right. We followed, emerging in the very front of the hall. “You can sit here,” she whispered, pointing to the ground in front of the front row of seats.

In front of us was the large projection screen on which we could watch the play unfold, and to the left was the performer himself, a man dressed completely in black, with shoulder-length black gloves like a puppeteer wears, playing every part in “Macbeth” himself while maneuvering small plastic characters around a small black surface.

We watched Macbeth don a wee plaid strip before he goes into battle, marveled at lighting effects operated by the director’s toes, and laughed at his imaginative props. When poor, beleaguered Macbeth cries out, ‘Is this a dagger I see before me?’, here comes a ninja-sized dagger, hanging by a thread off a long stick. Group scenes are pre-glued; when they need to disappear, Weinstein simply picks them up and throws them offstage.

We laughed from our perch on the floor, looking at each other from time to time in surprise and amusement, watching the young red-jacketed usher standing nearest to the stage as he struggled with his own disbelief that grown people play like this, forgetting our stomachs and Sprites. It was delicious, the delight that small plastic smiley-faced figurines can bring, even more so surrounded by the auspiciousness of the miles of red carpet and curtains of the Kennedy Center.

And for a bright shining moment, this little tribe of Ninjas made all the world a stage. (Sound effect: Patti laughing Nerdy English Major Snort.)

Sometimes, it occurred to me as Macbeth received a standing ovation there in the Great Hall, life just comes down to showing up, from sitting upright, or at the very least flinging one leg at a time off the bed.

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

The motto of the Tiny Ninja Theatre is “No small parts. Only small actors.” Sounds like life.

Get yourself there. It’s too easy to stay in a darkened hotel room with the air conditioner on high and a Friends marathon on low—pretty soon you wake up and have missed the Tiny Ninja Theatre altogether.

So get yourself there, even those places you dread. Get to the gym, to the hospital to visit a dying friend when you don’t know what to say or do, to the Kennedy Center to see a grown man play with tiny plastic characters attached to pieces of cardboard with duct tape while quoting Shakespeare. Get yourself to your life. Go see the tiny ninja theatre. Rise above the aches and pains, the nausea, exhaustion, general malaise. The show won’t run forever. Go now or you’ll miss it.  And sometimes, tiny Ninjas are just the miracle we need.