My One-woman show is about the roles we play in life. And how they can keep us from fully participating in life.
I just returned from a solo 54-day road trip spending time in nature, visiting friends and performing my show in California and Arizona. It was an expansive and invigorating adventure. 
The closer I got to my home in Washington, the more deflated I felt. Walking through my front door felt like I was walking into a box. Longing to be back on the road, I contemplated what it was that made the trip so fulfilling for me versus the constricted feeling that was now magnified and yet had been with me most of my life.
One insight was when I watched a replay of myself on a recent zoom call.
I didn’t look happy. There I was, in a box on my screen. The pattern I noticed was how often I answered the fast-paced conversation with the word ‘right’. As an observer, I realize I was playing an old role of a schoolgirl wanting approval. Trying to make the person on the other end of the call feel important. This is how I acted at times with my Dad and my older sister.
I compared this to how I felt on the road where no one had any pre-conceived ideas of who I was.
I felt free. I was fully participating, not from an expected role but completely in the moment. Whoever I was participating with was also free to express themselves.
That’s the beauty of coming from our internal spark, not an unconscious role.
We can fall into the trap of playing roles with strangers too, but the trip highlighted this differentiation for me.
On another trip traveling through Darwin, the wife of an Austrailian government official met me and invited me over for tea. With each sip of her tea, she released more and more of her feelings of sadness and frustration. Apologizing with every admission, yet saying how good it felt to be with someone just passing through. How freeing it felt to express herself without the need to look like the perfect, happy wife people expected her to be.
Staying with a friend during the Chicago Fringe Festival, I wondered why I felt so free in his house. Suddenly it hit me. He’s got expressive works of art on canvas in his living room. All without frames. Then I stopped at a relative’s house who has wall to wall pictures of family members in wooden frames. I felt boxed in looking at them. It’s beautiful to see big smiles and fancy clothes, but are we putting pressure on ourselves and others to live up to a certain way of being?
My one-woman show is about overcoming the suppression I felt growing up as the youngest child in a farming community. It’s an autobiographical play where I reveal how I continued playing roles in order to get love. And how liberating it is when we stop playing roles others expect of us. In an entertaining and truthful way, it demonstrates how much deeper our relationships can be when we truly participate with each other at a soul level.
The workshop I facilitate after my show is a place where people learn to speak their truth while deeply connecting with the person in front of them. Even when people have known each other for a long time, they see a new side of the person in front of them. We take time to notice how people are changing every single second. It’s slowing down enough to get a glimpse of the true soul of a person. Names and titles drop away. Genders don’t matter. It’s a vacation from having to perform a role that either we’ve placed on ourselves or accepting a role others have placed on us. It’s getting out of the proverbial box and keeping our spirit alive.
As Hafiz, a Sufi poet from the 14th century said, “The small man builds cages for everyone he knows. While the sage, who has to duck his head when the moon is low, keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful rowdy prisoners.”
If you know a spiritual center, school or women’s group that would like to book my show and follow-up workshop, please contact me at www.PamelaZiemann.com.