The Human Experience: “The Fourth Messenger” and Me
My journey with The Fourth Messenger began in the year 2000, on a nine-day silent meditation retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California.
It was my first retreat, and to me it felt hardcore. Meditating all day, alternating fifty-minute periods of sitting and walking, stopping only for food, kitchen duties, sleep, and to listen to a dharma talk each afternoon. Every couple of days we had a one-on-one meeting with a teacher. We weren’t supposed to bring reading or writing materials, but I secretly bucked that rule, feeling both sheepish and defiant. In the evenings I sometimes hiked instead of sitting. Once an owl swooped close to my head, beneath a half-moon so clear I could see every contour. Oh, it was beautiful. Oh, how the silence entered me.
But oh, how hard it was for me to sit so long. One of the hardest things I’d ever done. I was perpetually restless. When the retreat ended, a woman told me she’d made working with the frustration she felt about my fidgeting part of her practice.
Still, I learned things on that retreat I’ve never forgotten. I’d been meditating for several years already at that point, but the retreat helped me understand in a new way the purpose of meditation. I experienced viscerally what one of the teachers spoke about: that by sitting quietly in the face of everything our minds throw at us, we’re building a container of awareness large enough to hold everything in our lives, so no matter what we’re dealing with, there’s always a part of us that’s larger. That which is aware of the sadness isn’t sad. That which is aware of the fear isn’t afraid. It remains one of the most important teachings of my life, a teaching I would later incorporate into the song The Human Experience.
I saw too how challenging it was to inhabit the moment as I lived it, how my mind kept rabbiting away from my breath into the past or the future. How I became so absorbed in memory or imagination that for long stretches I completely forgot where I was.
In one such period, the idea for the musical arose. I was sitting in the meditation hall, thinking about the moment of the Buddha’s enlightenment. As legend has it, after years of pursuing one spiritual path after another, the Buddha sat down under a fig tree and vowed not to get up until he’d attained enlightenment. While he sat, the forces of Mara—illusion—came to him in an array of disguises—some seductive, some terrifying—trying to divert him from his quest. He resisted, and after 49 days and nights, he touched the earth and said, “As the earth bears witness to the work I’ve done over 100,000 lifetimes, I have the right to be free,” and—BOOM!—he was enlightened.
Nancy Anderson and Jacob Hoffman in The Fourth Messenger at NYMF. Photo by Karen Shih.
To this day, that story gives me chills.
Sitting in meditation, I suddenly saw the Buddha’s enlightenment playing out in the language of musical theatre. Temptations came to the seated Buddha as a shimmying loaf of bread, a crooning glass of water, a tango-dancing ex-lover, and more.
It occurred to me that the Buddha’s whole story was profoundly theatrical. Here was this prince, Siddhartha Gautama. At the time of his birth, a seer predicted that if he encountered Four Messengers—earthly manifestations of sickness, aging, death, and enlightenment—he would forsake wealth and position and wander the earth, spreading teachings of spiritual liberation. If he didn’t see those messengers, he’d stay and rule the kingdom. Obviously, his father the king didn’t want him seeing them. The king built walls around the palace and sequestered the old and sick. But when Prince Siddhartha was 29 years old, he stepped outside those walls for the first time. Immediately, one by one, the messengers appeared. His fate sealed, the prince set off to pursue enlightenment.
It’s epic, I thought. It has drama, pathos, wisdom and heart. It MUST be a musical.
My mind galloped. My heart raced. I completely forgot my breath. I saw myself in the audience on opening night while all around me, people laughed, gasped, and cried. I saw myself accepting my Tony Award, using my platform to spread the message of interconnectedness and compassion. I saw myself—
Oh yeah. Breath. In, out, in, out.
Five years later I started writing.
The view from Kapilvastu.
Why so long?, you might ask. Well, I was stumped. I didn’t know how to tell the story. I knew I wouldn’t write a historical drama set 2500 years ago in the Shakya Kingdom, now Nepal. I had to find my own way in, and I sensed that way would be contemporary.
Even so, in 2001, I traveled to Nepal and India to visit the sites of the Buddha’s life and legend. I walked through the ruins of Kapilvastu, the palace where Prince Siddhartha grew up, and I stood on the very spot where he first stepped outside the palace grounds. Gazing at the flat, dry fields and skeletal cows, I imagined it looking similar 2500 years ago. I pictured the Buddha taking his first steps away from the luxurious life he’d known into a completely unfamiliar world.
Lesley Fera and Sam Younis in Baby Taj at TheatreWorks, Mountain View, California.
But when I got back home, I wasn’t yet ready to write that story. I had tremendous emotion around it; I had indelible images. But I still didn’t know how to tell it. Instead, I wrote Baby Taj, a romantic comedy about an American travel writer who travels to India while pondering whether to become a single mother by choice.
I got engaged, had a child, got married (yes, in that order). Beneath the rapidly moving surface of everyday life, the Buddha story continued to tug at me. What could I bring to it, I wondered, that hadn’t been brought before?
One day, reflecting on the Buddha’s biography, it struck me that some elements of his life and choices would be viewed very differently if he were a woman. That thought opened a door, and Mama Sid was born. Her choices and their unintended consequences became my way into the story.*
It’s hard to write dialogue for an enlightened being when you’re not one yourself (sorry to disappoint!). To get my hand moving, I had to release any notion of getting it “right.” I couldn’t know how Mama Sid would behave; I could only imagine it. Obvious, perhaps, but it took me a while to get there. The stories about the Buddha show only his wisdom, but I wanted to show Mama Sid’s humanity, to explore whether and how it was possible to be both enlightened and flawed.
Cathleen Riddley as Mama Sid in a workshop of The Fourth Messenger.
A year later, I had a draft. The first public reading took place in 2006. directed by Playwrights Foundation Artistic Director Amy Mueller, who helped me whip it into shape. I’d written lyrics, but I didn’t have a composer yet, so the actors read them as text. The enlightenment scene was epic. A piece of cheese purred seductively, “Havarti with dill/isn’t it swell?” Dinosaurs growled, “I will haul you back to cretaceous times/drown you in primordial brine.” Mara tried with all his might to lure Mama Sid into getting up from where she sat in meditation beneath a freeway overpass, without success.
The reading was three hours long. People loved it, but I needed a composer. Those fabulous lyrics were meant to be sung.
I flirted briefly with a few potential collaborators. Nothing quite gelled. I put out the word that I was looking.
“How about Vienna Teng?” asked Noel, an actor friend who’d been roommates with her then-boyfriend.
I loved Vienna Teng. I’d used one of her songs in my wedding.
“Set us up,” I said.
We met at a café in San Francisco. Vienna was humble and, in that first meeting, slightly shy.
“What makes you think I can do this?” she asked with genuine curiosity.
I told her I felt she had a storytelling instinct. Her songs had theatrical shapes. She was flexible and adept in her command of genre and style. Besides all that, her music was flat-out gorgeous. And my friend Noel, who knew her, said she was brilliant and could do anything. She laughed.
If you’ve ever met Vienna, you know it’s more or less impossible not to like her. She’s one of the nicest people on the planet.
We did a weeklong residency at TheatreWorks, a major regional theatre in Silicon Valley, along with several other musical theatre-writing teams. They gave us resources—piano, rehearsal room, copying, even a stipend, and at the end of the week actor-singers for a showcase. We wrote our first songs together that week. One of them—What About Me?—remains at the heart of the show today.
As many songs as there are in the show—and there are a lot—we wrote twice as many. Throwing out good material is brutal for all writers, but I think it was particularly hard on Vienna, coming as she did from the singer-songwriter world. In that world, if a song works on its own terms, it goes into the repertoire, unlike in theater, where chucking a perfectly good scene because it no longer serves the dramatic arc is an everyday occurrence.
I was living in Berkeley then. Vienna had moved to New York and was often on tour, so we worked in bursts when she was in town. Our writing process looked something like this: I’d give her my draft of the lyrics, and we’d discuss what we wanted the song to convey in terms of meaning and feel. Then she’d go in the other room and return a while later with a piece of melody, having changed several lyrics in the process.
I struggled with this at first. Why was she changing my lyrics? I sometimes changed them back, which she good-naturedly accepted. She was just playing around with things, trying to make them work. Her ego was completely unattached. I was ashamed of my own egocentric responses—not that that meant I could control them.
The truth is, Vienna knew a lot more about songwriting than I did. For her to move a song forward, a structure had to emerge organically from the wisps of melody arising in her head. Sometimes my lyrics didn’t fit that structure, so she changed them. Gradually my attachment to the words I’d written loosened, and we settled into a give and take. This benefitted both us and the work.
Over the next six years, while my first child started school and I gave birth to my second, Vienna and I had several more readings, plus a two-week workshop. I was a resident playwright at Playwrights Foundation in San Francisco at the time, and they provided developmental support. While other resident playwrights produced several scripts during our four-year residencies, I continued to develop this one. I worked internally not to envy how prolific they were and to embrace my own path. Many wonderful directors and actors contributed to the process. After each reading or workshop, audience members asked Vienna and me what came next.
“More rewrites,” we’d say and dive back into the piece, cutting and changing, filling holes and trimming excess.
About five years after we started working together, I started to shop the script around to theatres.
Over the years, some of my plays have found their way swiftly and organically to their first production. There have been times when I sent a play to a single theater that knew my work, and they gave it a home. This was not one of those times.
For better or worse, I don’t have a lot of patience for the long-haul submission process. Maybe it’s because I first produced a musical when I was twelve. With my dad’s help, my best friend and I obtained production rights to Harnick, Bock and Coopersmith’s The Apple Tree, went door-to-door asking local businesses for sponsorships, and rented out the Lawrence Arts Center in my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, for a performance we directed and acted in, alongside a handful of our peers.
That early demystification of the process means I know how to do it myself, and that knowledge means I’m not willing to wait around forever for someone else’s seal of approval. I don’t write plays to look pretty on the page. Once I feel a piece is ready, I’m anxious to see it brought to life by a team of artists.
I gave myself a deadline, maybe six months out. I vowed that if I hadn’t found a producer by that date, I’d start the process of producing it myself. I hadn’t, so I did.
Most of my producing up to that point had been done on a shoestring. I wanted this to be different. I wanted to pay actors decently and give union members their health insurance weeks.** I also wanted to bring my friend Matt August from Los Angeles to direct. Matt had Broadway credits and was steeped in musicals. He’d directed my play Baby Taj at TheatreWorks, and I knew that he would demand the best of me. He’d push me for rewrites until the script was the strongest version of itself.
All this meant fundraising. My target was $110k. Vienna and I launched an Indiegogo campaign that ultimately raised $40k. It was profoundly affirming to feel the support of so many flooding toward us from across the globe. We followed that up with two fundraising events and several grants.
I zeroed in on the Ashby Stage, home of the Shotgun Players, as the ideal venue. At just over 200 seats, it was big enough to draw a crowd and small enough to still feel intimate. And as the home of a very popular theatre company, it had a built-in audience. Plus they had a marquee! I couldn’t wait to see our show’s name in lights.
Shotgun Players’ Artistic Director, Patrick Dooley, was an old friend, who I knew would be both righteous and supportive. They had very few windows for rentals, but Patrick agreed to give us one of those precious spots for our premiere.
To say the process of producing the premiere was hard for me is an understatement. Between managing logistics and humans, I felt like I’d implode. With over thirty people involved in the production, that $110k we’d raised suddenly didn’t feel like much at all. Not to mention the fact that we were still doing rewrites. We wrote Mama Sid’s tour de force anthem, “Force of Nature,” about a week into the rehearsal process.
Anna Ishida as Raina and Annemaria Rajala as Mama Sid in The Fourth Messenger, Berkeley, CA. Photo by Mike Padua.
I had trouble sleeping and often felt short of breath. But in the spaces between crises, joy occasionally slipped in. Joy that this long-held dream was becoming a reality. Gratitude when the actors gave the words depth and nuance beyond what I could’ve imagined. Joy in seeing the production elements come together—choreography, set, costumes and lighting making the piece richer and more complete.
We had a phenomenal run. We sold out all of our twenty-five scheduled performances, plus two extension shows. I would have extended further, but the space wasn’t available. Perhaps another producer could’ve moved the show, but I was too burned out by then to wrap my head around finding a new space and replacing cast members who had other commitments. We closed.
“Where will it go next?” people asked. I’d come to dread the question. I told them I didn’t know.
Over the next few years, there were concert performances in various places, including Spirit Rock Meditation Center— where the idea was born—the San Francisco Zen Center, and others. A planned production in LA was already cast when the building it was to take place in was sold, and it was canceled. Meanwhile, we recorded an album, with Vienna singing the role of Sid.
In 2016, James Radant, a professor at Yunlin University of Science and Technology in Yunlin Province, Taiwan, produced The Fourth Messenger with his English language students. He was a Vienna fan who’d heard about the show through her emails. They performed one musical every year, and it was a Big Deal. Since there were many students who wanted to participate, the leads were double-cast.
Vienna and I were invited to attend. By this point she was in grad school, studying sustainable business, so I went on my own. The production was heartfelt and imaginative, with a large dance chorus performing the group numbers. They rehearsed for six months, and each cast got a single performance in a 500-seat theater. Both shows sold out. The experience was a lifetime highlight. (Read more about my experiences in Taiwan here.) No one asked me where it would go next.
In 2017, The Fourth Messenger was selected to be part of the New York Musical Theatre Festival. It was a “Next Link” selection, which meant we got extra support from festival staff.
I asked a few people who’d taken shows to the festival what their experiences were like. They said they’d worked their asses off and poured their hearts and souls into their productions but ultimately couldn’t get enough producers in to see the shows to make it worth their while.
Nancy Anderson as Mama Sid with the cast of The Fourth Messenger at New York Musical Festival. Photo by Karen Shih.
I heard them, and I didn’t. I thought we’d be different. Kind of like when you’re smitten with someone, and a friend warns you the person’s a player. That was before I came along, you tell yourself, sure you’re gonna be the Annette Bening to their Warren Beatty. I decided to do the festival.
I raised the money from a handful of angel investors. We put together a great cast. We drew full houses who jumped to their feet at the end of each performance. I got one of the most affirming reviews of my career from Suzanna Bowling of the Times Square Chronicles, who wrote, “This show helped heal a piece of me … We need more shows like this to heal our world.” I try not to put too much stock in reviews, but when despair threatens to overwhelm me, I take solace from her words.
Hard as I tried, we couldn’t get producers in to see it. I was so anxious I couldn’t sit still. The irony of being unable to meditate while producing a musical about the Buddha was not lost on me. I got a prescription for Xanax.
After every performance, at least one person asked where the show was going next. I told them, with a polite smile, that I didn’t know.
A year later, a playwright who was considering doing the festival called and asked me what our experience was like. I told her we’d worked our asses off, poured our hearts and souls into the production, and we were proud of it, but we couldn’t get enough producers into the house for it to gain traction. She decided to do it anyway, just as I had. Apparently there are some things in life you just have to try out for yourself, and for us theatre folk, taking your show to New York is one of them.
A month after the New York Musical Theatre Festival ended, my family and I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan. Shortly after I arrived, my old friend Rick Sperling, a highly respected director who lives in Ann Arbor, told me he wanted to work with me on The Fourth Messenger. He had some ideas for rewrites.
I told him no. I’d given my life’s blood to this musical for the past ten years. I needed a break.
Life went on. I worked on other projects. Started teaching. Started a blog.
In 2019 I reached out to Rick, finally ready to hear his ideas. I liked them, and I did some rewrites. We gathered a cast and planned a concert performance at The Ark for March 14, 2020.
March 14, 2020. I’ll give you three guesses what happened, and the first two don’t count.
In 2022, we regrouped and set a new date for our concert: March 18, 2023—three years and four days after it was originally planned. At this point, Rick was playing a leadership role in many other projects. He no longer had the bandwidth to direct and co-produce this event.
Given the crushing anxiety producing always causes me, I considered dropping the idea. I decided to go forward for two reasons: to show my work in the place I live and to not let anxiety win. I gave myself a spiritual challenge: to produce the concert and enjoy the process.
Last weekend, we met at my house for our first rehearsals. Vienna, now a mom herself and living in DC, Zoomed in to meet the cast and wish them well. I went upstairs while Rebecca Biber, the music director, started teaching the songs. The voices of our twelve-person company floated up through the ceiling. They sounded like a chorus of angels.
The concert takes place in three weeks. My dear friend Anna Ishida, who’s been involved with the show since 2008, is coming from the Bay Area to play Mama Sid. She’ll stay in my house, as will another close friend, Giovanni Rodriguez, who’s producing a four-camera livestream. I’ll direct the performers—my first time stepping into that role for this piece—and he’ll direct the camera crew. It’s going to be Camp Fourth Messenger around here. I can’t wait.
I’ve been in relationship with this project for 23 years and counting. Longer than my relationship with my children or any romantic partner I’ve ever had. Like any relationship, it continues to evolve.
After the concert, people will inevitably ask what’s next for the show. I know the question is born of their enthusiasm. I’ll tell them I don’t know.
After a lifetime in theatre and half a lifetime of Buddhist practice, I’ve learned the importance of seeing each performance as an end in itself. If it sparks another iteration, that’s icing. This performance is the cake. I know now that doing today’s work with your gaze fixed on tomorrow robs you of what’s most essential—the experience itself. Do that too often, and your whole life can pass without your ever having inhabited it.
And so I remind myself at every step that this moment—rehearsing, taping up a flyer, typing these words—this too is the event, as much as the day the cast steps onstage and forms an indelible bond with the audience, both those in the theater and those watching from afar. This step, this breath, this moment. This, this, this.
And then?
(Sigh, laugh.)
I don’t know.
The Fourth Messenger at the Ashby Stage, Berkley, CA. Photo by Mike Padua.
A Concert Performance of The Fourth Messenger will take place at The Ark in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on March 18, 2023.
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*To go more deeply into the details of Mama Sid’s choices and their consequences would be to give away the secret at the heart of the piece. I won’t do that, so if you want more details, you’ll have to see the concert!
**Union actors have to work a certain number of weeks each year on a contract at a certain level to secure their health insurance for the following year.