Swimming Through a Tsunami

Writer-performer Michael Shutt, working in the aftermath of a stroke

By Deborah Klugman

Shutt, pre-stroke (photo by OutLoud Sports). Top photo: Shutt at Cedar Sinai Medical Center presenting a workshop. (Photo by Mae Koo)

In 2015, actor, writer producer and all-around member of the LA’s theater community Michael Shutt underwent a series of strokes that left him partially blind and partially paralyzed. The experience frightened and bewildered him, and totally transformed his life.

At some point in Michael’s intense struggle with his disability, he began to write about it. Eventually, he was introduced to director and dramaturg Diana Wyenn, another stalwart LA community member known for her versatile direction in a variety of genres, including projects relating to disability and the environment.

Working together under the auspices of her company Plain Wood Productions, and with a grant from the National Arts and Disability Center and the talents of sound designer John Zalewski, they put together a podcast production of A Lesson in Swimming, written and performed by Schutt, a poignant humor-laced account of his journey to recovery.

Stage Raw recently spoke with Shutt about his journey up to this point and what he hopes for the future.

STAGE RAW I wanted first to ask you, what your life was like before this event?

Michael Shutt Before the event, I was an actor, a director, producer. I had also been the managing director at Moving Arts.  I helped found their Mad Lab program, which is their new play development program. I ran that for the first 5 years. Every year I worked with like five or six playwrights developing their place from the ground up.

And then I was bartending to pay the bills.

SR And so, then you had this event, and it upended your life . . .

MS Yeah, I was actually bartending when it happened. And I didn’t know what was happening. I knew nothing about strokes beforehand. All I knew was there was a moment where I was working…. and all of a sudden, I felt a jolt of electricity shoot through my body, and I literally thought that I had stepped in water and maybe hit a plug or something.  [But]I just kept working, and then — I went to speak and I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t get words out of my mouth.

But I still had no clue. I just kept working, and finally, after four days, my friends kept saying, you need to go to a doctor.

So I went to Urgent Care and that’s where they told me that they thought I’d either had a stroke or had a bleeding brain tumor. And that’s the last thing I heard. Like Charlie Brown’s teacher talking, I didn’t hear anything that anyone said after that. I sort of went into tunnel vision.

SR The thing that struck me about listening to your podcast, it made me understand so vividly the kind of loneliness and fear and bewilderment that comes from being in that kind of situation. And for me, part of the value of this of this piece is to tell people what it feels like, and to reach out to people who may have had a similar kind of experience.

MS  Yeah, you kinda hit the nail on the head there. That was one of the loneliest, most isolating times in my life, mainly because I didn’t understand what was happening. I was surrounded by friends and family that loved me, but no one understood what was happening with me and I couldn’t explain it to them.

You know a brain injury is an invisible injury.  You can’t see it. There’s a line in the show where I say, broken bones get all the attention, broken hearts get all the sympathy. but broken brains just leave you scared and alone with a fistful of fragments fighting for your life as you try to put the pieces back together again.

I will never forget the day that I wrote that sentence. I was sitting at Starbucks and I typed that sentence up and (I thought to myself) I think I just hit on the key to this whole piece,

Dress rehearsal for “A Lesson in Swimming” at Moving Arts (Photo by Diana Wyenn)

SR I imagine your story would speak not only to people with stroke, but anybody who’s gone through that kind of total debilitating medical experience. (Any situation where it seems)  as if nobody else can understand what you are feeling.

MS Yep. Absolutely. That was such a big part of why we did this. I never wanted anyone else to feel that isolation and loneliness that I did.

SR What kind of response have you gotten from the medical community?

MS In May, I was invited to Cedar Sinai.  They had me come in and do excerpts from the show for the entire neuro team. And afterwards I got so many emails from them saying that they were so profoundly moved by what I shared that they’re going to be changing some of their policies.

And then, the head of neurology at Cedar, who happens to be my neurologist, heard the radio play. She reached right out to me and introduced me to some people she thought would be interested in hearing my story. And I met with them on Zoom, and by the time I got off Zoom, I had been offered a job.

SR What was the job?

MS Creating an app for stroke survivors. I’ve been writing for them for two years now, helping them create this app. It’s called Can Do K A N D U. (It’s to help people) transition from their first 90 days out of the hospital back into their life. Because depending on where a stroke happens in your brain, it’s going to affect different things. So once they identify what kind of stroke the survivor had, they will send them articles of what they may encounter — aphasia, incontinence, mood swings or personality changes . . .

When I first learned about this, I thought: I wish I’d had this myself. Because I didn’t understand. I knew that I was paralyzed on the left-hand side of my body and I knew that I had trouble talking. But I didn’t understand any of the cognitive deficits because you can’t see those and no one tells you about them

SR Can you be more specific about “cognitive deficits?”

 MS I could not make a decision to save my life. And I didn’t understand that that was part of the stroke. I also had no working memory, no short-term memory. So that’s why I started writing. I got a notebook and started writing everything down that happened in the hospital. ‘Cause I couldn’t remember things five minutes after they happened.

SR Were you able to recover your memory?

MS The writing actually helped. There’s a writing teacher in town, Terry Silverman, who has personal memoir and essay writing classes, and she works a lot with writing prompts. So she would give a prompt and I would write about it. And as I was writing, bits of my memory would start coming back. And that’s how I wrote the whole show, every single bit . . .

Then when I started working with Diana, we streamlined them and put them together. We worked for probably three or four months, tearing the script apart and putting it back together again.

SR Did you fictionalize any?

MS I call it autobiographical fiction or what’s the other phrase? Creative nonfiction. I didn’t necessarily fictionalize anything, but I had to combine a couple of characters because there were times there were just too many characters to follow. Sometimes [I changed] the order in which something happened.

I didn’t make a documentary — I told a story.

Photo courtesy of Nathan Mohebbi

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“I never wanted to do something that felt like a vanity project. And so I always avoided doing solo shows. And then I had this moment when I was in the hospital where I was thought, I have spent the last 30 years of my life telling other people’s stories. I think now it’s time to tell one of my own.”

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SR Where does the title come from? Was that your idea at the top or did it emerge from that anecdote in the podcast about you and your dad?

MS I did a couple of what I call “living room series” readings where I invited people over to get feedback. And one day a friend said, ‘I can see the poster for this. Your face with the snorkel and the mask on and the title should be a lesson in swimming.’ And I was like Oh, that’s it. That’s the story — because actually the lesson that I learned is, when a wave crashes over, you’ve got two  choices — you can sink or you can swim.

SR Had you ever considered doing a solo show prior to this?

MS I never wanted to do something that felt like a vanity project. And so I always avoided doing solo shows. And then I had this moment when I was in the hospital where I was thought, I have spent the last 30 years of my life telling other people’s stories. I think now it’s time to tell one of my own.

SR When you wrote this, did you have a radio play in mind?

MS It was written to be performed live. We were gonna do the world premiere in May of 2020 as a co-production with the Bootleg Theater. But when the pandemic happened, everything got shut down. So Diana had the idea to turn it into a radio play. I applied for grants and I got a grant from the National Arts and Disability Center. They were looking for projects that could be done safely during COVID.

SR And how did you meet Diana?

MS We knew each other peripherally through Jamie Brandley, who is a playwright in town. Jamie suggested that we meet. I gave Diana the first draft of my show — I’d done a staged reading and videotaped that, and I sent her that. And she immediately called me.

SR Tell me about the experience of putting together the podcast.

MS We were in different places at the time. Diana was in Oregon. John Zalewski, our sound designer, was in his studio in Los Angeles. I was in my apartment and we turned my office into a little recording studio. We were all on headsets communicating with each other.

SR What are your future plans for the play? Are there any plans to do it onstage?

MS We still want to but in the meantime we’re using the radio play to reach out to people. We did do a four-night workshop just to see if it worked. That’s when Diana brought in John Zalewski. And Avery Reagan was our lighting designer.  It wasn’t a full production because we were on somebody else’s set. But everything worked. And John’s sound design was so stunning. It was like the sound itself is another character in the show as far as I’m concerned. It’s so integral to the show.

SR Do you have plans to distribute the podcast?  Is there anything like that in the works?

MS I have actually. The people that I work for, have stroke support groups. I actually lead some. In May we started a book club of my show. Each week everyone listened to one chapter and then we came back and discussed it. And it was such a profound experience. Everyone connected to something in it.

SR Are there any possibilities for future funding?

MS Possibly. We had sort of an agreement for partnership with the American Stroke Association, American Heart Association. They were going to sponsor like certain nights, bring an audience and host talkbacks. So there’s a lot of people that are invested in the show. So now we just have to find the right venue for it.

SR Anything you would like to add.

MS I started out thinking that I was writing a story about a stroke, and it turned out to be a love letter to my parents. There’s a moment in the show [when I was feeling discouraged] where my mom says, ‘Tell me ten things that make life worth living.’ And what comes up is just the gratitude I have had towards everyone that showed up for me. I had such a great support system, through the stroke, through the play, through the writing process, through everything.

What’s the right word?  I don’t want to say “lucky,” but —at the very end of the show I say “One day we’re gonna fill these cracks and we’ll discover that the stroke was the best thing that ever happened to me, I know —it is horrible. It is hard, it is life changing. It changed me, and it could have broken me.

But it changed me, and for the better, I think.

For more info and to access the podcast, go to: https://a-lesson-in-swimming-radio-play.simplecast.com/