Deb dramatizes personal struggles

If you want to see the eyes of a Yale Theater Studies major light up, simply mention the name Deb Margolin. In her three years of teaching at Yale, Margolin has developed a loyal following of students who describe her as more of a guru than a theater teacher, and her classes as more like group therapy than the traditional performance workshop.

COURTESY OF DONA McADAMS Professor Deb Margolin is appearing off-Broadway in her own '3 Seconds in the Key.'

"For me, theater is always a way of stopping time and pointing to experience," Margolin said. "If I didn't have that way of pointing to what I see, I would go mad. Theater is a way of saying, `Excuse me, am I the only person who saw that?'"

This month, students have gotten a glimpse of Margolin's method in practice. The Obie Award winner is the author and star of "3 Seconds in the Key," playing all February in the East Village's Performance Space 122. The play, which details Margolin's experiences contracting Hodgkin's disease and undergoing chemotherapy, is different from her previous performance pieces.

While Margolin's plays are usually performed as low-tech solo pieces, "3 Seconds in the Key" comes with video technology, a basketball hoop hovering over the front row, and a cast of eight men who portray the pro basketball players Margolin watches on television with her real-life eight-year-old son, Bennett. "There's eight men, so right away that's fairly hot," Margolin quipped.

Most of the play deals with Margolin's changing relationship with her son as her disease takes hold of her life. She said, "The way I coped with it was by watching basketball with my son, and we lived from game to game." It was during that period of basketball obsession that Margolin promised her son that she would turn that period of their lives into a play. Part of the thrill of this process for Margolin has been watching Ben-nett become a skilled actor. Somewhere along the line, he discovered the joy of milking a laugh line. Margolin attributes her son's growing talent to his newfound love of performance. "Desire makes all the difference," she said. "We have given each other a great gift, my son and I."

Desire is the keystone to Margolin's approach to performance. She finds acting and writing indistinguishable, and in her classes she pushes performers and writers alike to let their desire to speak lead them in their creative work. The best acting, Margolin says, is done when actors find themselves so deeply connected to the text that they feel authorship over it. "Memorization enables you to understand [a text] at the deepest level, because then it occurs to you at that moment when you would have written it yourself," she said. "And acting is the most sublime example of that, because it's full and embodied and characterized."

Margolin spent three months sporadically writing the pieces of "3 Seconds in the Key" while an artist-in-residence at NYU last summer, finding the order of the material only after she had completed it. She prepared for "3 Seconds in the Key" by arranging several meetings with the NYU girls' basketball team. "So much of entertainment is common between basketball and theater," she said. Besides teaching Margolin how to shoot hoops, the players also informed her of the vocabulary of basketball. At least one basketball mantra became an important motif in the final play, and a powerful metaphor for Margolin's fight to reclaim her own body: "I refuse. I refuse to lose."

For Margolin, one's writing and one's body are inextricably bound. When faced with serious illness, Margolin said, "I felt like I was living in exile from my body, and what are you then?" The basketball player's job is to pull her back into her body, reminding her that she is first and foremost a mother. She said, "I believe that writing is very physical. It boils from inside the body." And any student of hers who has given up the comfy stools in the GPSCY to sit on the wooden floor and write knows that she really means it.

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