When enough time has gone by, some people find they can be philosophical about what change did to them. Susan Russell took that step earlier and more literally than most of us.
She had been an actor. Her years of theater and voice studies in her home state of North Carolina and at Florida State University had led to decades of regional-theater work and recognition, including a South Florida Carbonell Award for best actress in a musical. After performing with the San Francisco company of The Phantom of the Opera for several years, Russell joined the Broadway production, playing the character of Madame Giry, the ballet mistress, and also understudying the role of Carlotta, the opera diva who runs afoul of the Phantom.
For five years, she performed with that company, frequently singing the Carlotta role, meeting a fellow cast member who became her lasting love, living the life of an artist in New York. She was at the top of her game. Then two things happened.
The first seemed like the worst: 9/11. In a single morning, the city that was the locus of America's theatrical industry and of Russell's greatest success became a nightmare place of fear, destruction and death as terrorists crashed jet airplanes into the World Trade Center's twin towers. Though she and her fellow Broadway actors somehow rallied, continuing to perform the shows that had suddenly turned into symbols of New York's staggered yet unextinguished spirit, life there changed profoundly. Normality had been shattered and it didn't feel as if it would ever be restored.
The second thing was much smaller at the start but, on a personal level, even more cataclysmic: She went to see a chiropractor about problems with physical tension. Something went wrong during the manipulation of her neck, badly wrong – she could feel it. Three weeks later, she was standing on the Majestic Theatre's stage as Carlotta, singing the first of that character's high E's, when "there was an explosion in my brain," Russell said. She experienced no pain, just a sense of light, and heard a voice in her head ask her, "So you've been dying to sing, have you?"
She thought, "Oooohhh nooooo."
With only about 30 seconds before she had to sing again, she turned upstage, away from the audience, still hearing the voice, which said, "If you want to stay, it's going to be really hard." But Russell had just found Beth, the woman she would eventually marry – she had to stay. She would stay.
And it was hard. Doctors later discovered that Russell had two concussions from the neck adjustments and that one of her vertebral arteries had likely slipped between two vertebrae and gotten nicked, causing a brain bleed. Russell had followed the chiropractor visit with five shows singing as Carlotta before suffering the onstage brain injury triggered by the bleeding. Afterward, her eyes wouldn't work; the left one drifted. Her larynx stopped working, too: first, her top notes went, then she became unable to sing at all. She had constant migraine headaches. She had to stop performing.
And she lost her suit against the chiropractor because she couldn't prove that what he had done to her had caused her traumatic brain injury.
"That shift was a monumental shift from everything I had worked my whole life to achieve," Russell noted.
Everything was different – her sight, her hearing, colors. The universe had just delivered a colossal "f--- you" to her and she knew she had to get past it. But what do you do with a change this size? "What is on the other side of 'f--- you'?" she wondered.
Her answer was to return to school. This is what her family had taught her to do: Turn to books for information and other people's ideas and experiences. Still recovering, and with Beth continuing to work in the cast of Phantom, Russell went back to Florida State and in five years earned her Ph.D., becoming what her new brain wanted her be, she said – a scholar, an historiographer and a philosopher-poet. But especially a teacher.
Penn State University's theater department quickly hired her. Reunited with Beth and living in Happy Valley with her in their first real house, Russell taught courses in literature/criticism and playwriting, but soon began taking performance studies in innovative directions that coincided with her readings in ancient and classical works of theater, myth, religion and philosophy.
Before her retirement at the end of 2022, Russell had created Cultural Conversations, a collaborative community program that used storytelling through music, dance, theater, and visual arts to help young people discuss current social issues; authored the books Body Language: Stop the Violence, Start the Conversation and Body Language: Cultural Conversations Reaching Out and Reaching In; served as the 2014-15 Penn State Laureate, connecting all of Penn State's campuses in an ongoing, systemwide conversation about dignity; co-founded and directed the university's Center for Pedagogy in Arts and Design, a tech center and studio than uses arts-tech equipment and presentation approaches to enhance onsite and remote learning; and instituted in Penn State's College of Arts and Architecture a program called the Moral Moments Project, an open conversation – using storytelling techniques and rooted in the community values of morals, ethics, action and faith – that explores current issues through questioning and decision-making.
To say that Russell had taken on a mission vastly different from playing, say, Gilbert & Sullivan characters would be both an understatement and misleading. Exploring human nature and human dilemmas though feelings and ideas has always been the tacit purpose of the arts. But Russell's approach to that purpose had indeed changed drastically. Her focus had moved from her own story and growth to the lives and development of others – a switch that not only changed what she did, but also the internal atmosphere in which she did it, she said. Call it a change from constant participation to contemplation.
"The beauty of moving into silence after such a loud life was, I could choose to take the change that happened to me and define it through a different iteration – and that iteration was teaching," she explained. For her, the question was, "How can I take what I know … and teach a kind of erudition of the heart, of the soul, of the human journey?"
An experience with a Jesuit silent retreat helped her along the way. "I had to learn to think, but not to intellectualize – to absorb an idea without rationalizing or distancing it. To let it in. That, to me, is poetic thinking."
After all she's been through and all she's learned, Russell realized, "all you want is the cessation of sensation, for all the chatter to stop. It was a blessing to become quiet."
There was another blessing, too – choosing love. "Beth Nackley is the reason that everything I went through in rebuilding myself through love and peace was worth it," said Russell. "I thank myself every moment of my life."