Photo via Payomet.org
“I sort of think of it as my theater problem,” says Jonathan Mirin, “If I didn’t have a theater problem I could get a regular job.” The Massachusetts-born playwright, actor, and educator assures me that this is a joke, but the quip illustrates something beautifully all-consuming about his love for performance — the driving force behind his work in the Piti Theatre Company alongside Swiss choreographer, dancer and visual artist Godeliève Richard (who he also happens to be married to).
Piti (pronounced “Pea-tea” as their website helpfully indicates) is a word from the ancient Indian Pali language that means “joy” or “rapture”. Mirin says that the touring ensemble’s mission is to “plant seeds of joy, sustainability, and justice” by presenting original work often centered around environmental or local history themes, with a major focus on young people. The group has toured extensively around New England, but also throughout the country and the globe presenting their unique work.
Longtime visitors of Payomet Performing Arts Center in North Truro, Mirin and Richard are excited to be presenting one of these original shows at the venue this summer. Entitled To Bee or Not to Bee, this award-winning play explores the causes and consequences of environmental destabilization through a fable about a money-hungry farmer who turns to monoculture and pesticides, and soon pays a horrible price. Mirin says the company was inspired by the 2009 documentary film Vanishing of the Bees and the work of food writer and journalist Michael Pollan, both of which foreground serious concerns about the state of contemporary large-scale agriculture.
“It’s not new that we’re facing a major environmental crisis,” the playwright says, but the focus on protecting pollinators is unique in its potential for action. “Pollinators need help. And the cool thing about pollinators is that there’s actually a lot kids can do , as opposed to [with] some other problems or issues that seem less tangible.” It’s incredibly easy for children and schools everywhere to plant a pollinator garden to combat loss of habitat, and while one garden won’t solve the crisis, Mirin says those small steps do add up. He hopes this play will inspire that kind of work.
Unsurprisingly, the playwright says his work is always motivated by a desire to help and serve others, a principle he says he has clarified greatly through years of meditation. Mirin practices Vipassana, an ancient meditation technique that emphasizes careful observation of the breath, the body, and eventually the mind itself. This practice is central to his work as an actor, he says. “When you meditate long enough, everything comes up from anger, to happiness, to sadness,” Mirin explains, “So it kind of greases the wheels for me to [know] where those states are located in the body.” By meditating on these different emotions and the respective experiences of feeling them, Mirin is able to draw those different experiences up more easily in the process of acting. Funny enough, Mirin and Richard actually met at a Vipassana meditation center in Switzerland, where they eventually embarked on a complex journey to India (and the rest, I suppose, is history).
Piti Theatre Company will also be holding its Inclusion Improv workshop in North Truro this August as well. This engaging morning of improv games and more is open to ages 8 and up (including parents and adults!) and focuses on using improv as a powerful tool for social emotional learning. “I think inclusion is a word that people hear a lot, and I think it’s not always clear what it means.” Mirin says “[But] one of the rules of improv is learning how to say yes to your partner, and another way to think of [that] is including their ideas with your ideas… [Inclusion] could be as simple as working with someone in the group who you might not usually work with or might not know… expanding our scope of who we think of as creative teammates.”
Breaking down barriers and letting participants “let loose” is key to these workshops. “Younger kids are doing that anyways,” Mirin says, “Like, kindergartners are just in the world of play all day long anyways, but then what happens is when you get to fourth, fifth, [or] sixth grade you start kind of shutting down little by little to fit in or be cool or whatever the social imperative is. But I find that… a significant portion of kids are really hungry for that kind of freedom and license to create.”
In addition to their touring work, the Piti Theater Company has recently secured funding for a project to turn an old barn on their property in rural Shelburne Falls, MA into a center for arts and ecology in order to further environmentally focused arts education for young people within the unique natural landscape of the Berkshire Foothills.
It seems almost like fate that the company will find themselves at Payomet this summer, a place where the environment and the arts frequently intersect in beautiful ways that are central to our mission. This unique intersection is rarely touched upon (or at least not nearly enough), and we are so tremendously excited to welcome the Piti Theatre Company to our tent this summer.
Get your tickets now and remember that Cape Cod kids get in FREE to all our family programming! More info at payomet.org.