Photograph: Michael Kushner
In performance, Alexandra Silber brings an open heart that invites the audience into her emotional journey. Theatergoers in the West End have had the opportunity to see her as Hodel in Fiddler on the Roof, the daughter who bids farewell to her beloved father in the face of an uncertain future and Julie Jordan in Carousel, the widow who must continue in spite of her husband’s tragic path, as well as stateside playing Tzeitel in the 2015 Broadway revival of Fiddler, among many other roles. As a memoirist, Silber has accomplished that same inclusionary space. She has a newly published book, her second after her debut novel After Anatevka about Tevye’s family after the famed musical Fiddler ends. In White Hot Grief Parade, Silber details the experience of losing her father to cancer at the delicate age of 18 years old. The book is a searing look of the raw flesh of grief, her ensuing experience with an eating disorder, and a celebration of her life force trifecta of friends from her creative arts high school, Interlochen, who helped pull her through. I recently spoke with Silber about the singular nature of theater kids, what she learned about her mother from Carousel, and how Fiddler helped her to say goodbye.
What inspired you to write the book? How was the process of writing for you emotionally?
I have had my own blog since 2007, it was a means for me to be creative during my first run with Fiddler on the Roof. The run was two and a half years long and it though it was rewarding, it was still challenging. I felt that I wasn’t being creative every day. I started writing and over time it really turned into this great dialogue with my fan base. The “Ask Al” series became something that was a little bit more serious and muscular. All the while there was definitely a little bit of a distance in my writing from my intensely personal life. I wanted to protect my privacy because the issues with my dad and my eating disorder were not processed so I didn’t feel that I was ready to share without exposing myself in front of people.
In 2011, there was like a confluence of things that occurred. I made my Broadway debut in Masterclass. I shared a dressing room with Sierra Boggess, who was preparing to do that great big Royal Albert Hall Phantom of the Opera. She was working on Christine Daae, who is was a character who’s lost her father. We were having a lot of dialogue in the dressing room about it. Over the course of that summer, I realized that the 10 year anniversary of his death was coming up. A lot of anniversaries had come and gone with not a significant amount of pain but something about the Broadway debut and the 10 year anniversary made me feel like it was time to significantly reflect on my feelings about my journey. I wrote a piece called “10 Years” [you can read that post at: http://alexandrasilber.blogspot.com/2011/10/ten-years.html]. I thought I might not even publish this but I need to just get it out and I was going to take down the wall. What came out was so surprising to me, I was in a much more fully realized place about it than I thought. When you lose a parent at 18 the primary concern is if will you turn out okay and become yourself. I decided to publish it and it went viral, it was this lightning moment.
At that time, I was already writing After Anatevka and I had finished the first two sections but I was really blocked about act three. My literary agent called me after the “10 Years” piece had gone viral and she said, as somebody who has cultivated and read your writing, you’ve never written anything like this. The candor and rawness make this the best thing you’ve ever done and it’s what’s missing in After Anatevka. I think you need to take a break and you need to write this story down. The second she said it, I burst into tears and I knew she was right and how difficult that was going to be. The first draft flew out of my body in about seven weeks, it was sitting in there waiting dormant for permission to come out. The moment I finished the first draft of White Hot Grief Parade, the block on After Anatevka went away and I finished the book in about a month.
So it was therapeutic and meaningful to you in a multitude of ways.
Totally. I could blame writer’s block until the end of time but the truth was I had work to do and I wasn’t going to get creative work done without doing internal work.
What role did theater take in healing from your father’s death?
I was healed by theater kids, actually saved by them. My theater journey was sort of the reason I turned out okay because I was able to continue healing in the context of the theater. Playing Hodel gave me this opportunity to say goodbye to my father that I was sort of denied in life and I was given this chance to do that on stage.
Can you talk about your three friends, Grey, Kent, and Lilly, who are able to walk through that profound grief with you, even at such a young age? Is there something innate to theater people that makes them more emotionally available in a crisis?
There is something about the theater. In the dance world, when you are in rehearsal or on stage performing, in order to get the work done that needs to get done you have to physically touch people quickly, intimately, and on parts of the body that if you were to touch them there at the bank, you’d get arrested. But the physical touch, the understanding that in a rehearsal space and onstage, that is how we touch each other in order to get the work done is this silent contract of intimacy that doesn’t need to be discussed. In the theatrical acting world, the exact same contract is valid for emotional vulnerability and you need to bring your wall down in order for the work to get done. If you were to have an emotional breakthrough or breakdown at the bank, you’d be escorted out by security. In the theatrical arena, instead there is safety and necessity in that level of openness. So when there’s an emergency, there’s a level of understanding and a level of complexity that’s already in place. While it is absolutely remarkable three 18-year-olds saved my life and my mother’s life and planned a funeral that adults should have planned, it’s also not surprising to me. There is something about the theater specifically that demands a level of exposure and emotional vulnerability that can absolutely be misused but it can also be the source of extraordinary miraculous healing and camaraderie.
Death is a taboo topic in our culture. Were you concerned that people would shy away from reading your memoir because it is such a direct look at death?
The short answer is, absolutely. As a human being, as an actor, as a leading lady and as a teacher, I think one of my gifts is creating safe spaces. I tried to bring that safe space gift to the writing where what I wanted was to say, so death is over here, dear reader, and there’s no romance or filter on it and I’m going to hold your hand and I’m right here, but we’re going to look. I hope that’s the tone that we take, creating a safe space so that we can look at it together rather than being confrontational about it.
Are you hearing from readers who have lost a parent at a young age?
There are two overwhelming responses. One is hearing from people that I didn’t know existed that knew my dad, who picked up the book without even knowing it was about Michael Silber and and coming to me with memories and thoughts and reflections on my father that add new color to a part of him I didn’t know. Then, as you said, the most overwhelming response is from the young people who have lost someone and got pointed to this book. I think the most significant feedback I got from one young girl who who went to a school very much like Interlochen who had lost her mother and just called it a “guidebook”. I wrote the book I certainly needed and I just want people to read it and feel less alone and feel that even in the mud, there’s hope.
Can you talk a little bit more about how playing Hodel and then Tzeitel in Fiddler and Julie Jordan in Carousel were therapeutic for you?
It was really significant to do Hodel and Julie back to back. When we first start grieving, particularly if we are young, we are focused of course on the nature of our loss. One can lose the same human being but of course you lose a completely different relationship to that human being. I lost a father and my mom lost her soulmate. What I experienced through Hodel was my own loss and coming to terms with the permanence of it. I emerged from the West End Fiddler feeling certainly like I had processed that in a much more profound way and then fell into playing Julie Jordan without auditioning for the role. When you audition, there’s a process that happens where you embody the character for a couple of days. This was the first time in my career that hadn’t happened. I hadn’t had to dig inside and figure out what I’m going to bring to it, so the first couple of weeks of rehearsing Carousel was challenging. What emerged was that I was playing my mom. One of the many things that I realized was that my mom didn’t just lose her husband, she lost the only person she was probably ever going to love. I think what I learned from Julie Jordan was the nature of what my mother lost. I was able to create a soul mate and literally lose him every single day and grieve over his body and move on and raise a daughter alone, like my mother did.
You can order White Hot Grief Parade by clicking on Amazon.
To read more from Silber, you can visit her blog, London Still. You can follow her on social media @alsilbs.
If you live in the Boston area, you can hear Silber discuss both of her books and her life in the theater live on August 26th. To find out more about this event, visit: https://www.tbanashua.org/event/broadway-brunch-with-alexandra-silben.html
Best,
Dr. Drama