Published: Thursday, March 27, 2014, 8:55p.m. Updated 16 hours ago

When Morgan FitzPatrick Andrews comes to town, he doesn't just ask friends if he can crash on their couch.

He also wants to borrow their bedroom as a performance space for his site-specific work Nobody's Home. The piece is touring the country one bedroom at a time.

Andrews is the founder of the Medium Theatre Company, a Philadelphia-based collaborative of artists who create site-specific performances. The company is stopping in Pittsburgh from March 28 to 30 for three performances of Nobody's Home in three locations around the city.

Andrews directed and designed the show, which he co-authored with Mason Rosenthal, who appears as the Nobody of the title.

The work grew out of Rosenthal's desire to do a show in his own 12-foot by 12-foot bedroom, inspired by the guided-meditation techniques of German spiritual leader and author Eckhart Tolle.

When the meditation goes wrong, the play turns into a relationship drama, then a game show and a high-school dance, Andrews says. The show is very funny even when it gets serious. A lot of people don't know whether they should laugh or cry.

Andrews and Rosenthal don't drive, so they use public transportation to travel from city to city and bedroom to bedroom. That required them to restrict the show's technical elements to items that could fit into a single trunk that travels with them.

Props include a shadowy owl, some plastic turtles, a coyote, hot oil and platters of fruit. There are sound effects and choreography. Tea is served.

The show utilizes all the senses. When you use all five senses, you are more engaged, Andrews says.

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Nobodys Home is a bedroom drama that plays out ... in bedrooms

By Anthony Meindl | Posted March 28, 2014, 3 p.m.

Youre good enough, just as you are right now, at this moment. Youre good enough as you are, without having to change anything.

Youre good enough for love, to have an amazing career, to have happiness and full self-expression, to experience the most amazing relationship. Youre good enough in the body that you currently have, the weight that you are, the age that you have turned, to be the lead on your own TV series, or to work with Meryl Streep.

Part of being good enough is to simply love and accept yourself for who you areand where you areflaws and all.Not because of the things you accomplish, or how you look, or how successful you are, but just by being alive. Its extraordinary to simply be alive.

But you dont wake up saying, Im extraordinary. Part of that has to do with our own self-worth. We dont see ourselves in relation to who we already are. We generally see ourselves in relation to what we havent yet accomplished, what we havent succeeded at, what we struggle with, and where we fail.

So we dont see our own extraordinariness just by being, but showing up in our own lives and being brave enough to live our dreams and do the best we can is extraordinary.

We are worth so much more than we often give ourselves credit for. To that end, find a symbol in your life of something that represents how much you are worth. It might be shocking to discover that you hold onto things because you dont think you deserve better. You might think thats all youll ever get, so you hold on. Or you wonder, Why even bother? Or you control everything, because its scary to let go. It could be an old pair of shoes you dont throw away. It could be an outdated belief. It might be a car you never clean because you already think its crappy. It could be your hairstyle or the pair of glasses you wear. It might be the resolution you never keep, or even a boyfriend or girlfriend.

What if you realized that thingno matter how small or seemingly insignificantmight represent how you really see yourself? But the truth is youre bigger than that. Youre worth so much more than that. Let it go and create the space for something that represents your real worth to come into your life.

When you do, youll realize I am good enough, and other people will discover that you are, too.

Anthony Meindl is an award-winning writer, director, producer, and artistic director ofAnthony Meindl's Actor Workshop(AMAW) with studios in Los Angeles, New York, London, and Vancouver.It was honored by Backstage three years in a row and named the Best Acting Studio in Los Angeles (Best Scene Study and Best Cold Read).

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How to Get Discovered

By ALICE T. CARTER Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

PITTSBURGH (AP) - When Morgan FitzPatrick Andrews comes to town, he doesn't just ask friends if he can crash on their couch.

He also wants to borrow their bedroom as a performance space for his site-specific work "Nobody's Home." The piece is touring the country one bedroom at a time.

Andrews is the founder of the Medium Theatre Company, a Philadelphia-based collaborative of artists who create site-specific performances. The company is stopping in Pittsburgh from March 28 to 30 for three performances of "Nobody's Home" in three locations around the city.

Andrews directed and designed the show, which he co-authored with Mason Rosenthal, who appears as the Nobody of the title.

The work grew out of Rosenthal's desire to do a show in his own 12-foot by 12-foot bedroom, inspired by the guided-meditation techniques of German spiritual leader and author Eckhart Tolle.

"When the meditation goes wrong, the play turns into a relationship drama, then a game show and a high-school dance," Andrews says. "The show is very funny even when it gets serious. A lot of people don't know whether they should laugh or cry."

Andrews and Rosenthal don't drive, so they use public transportation to travel from city to city and bedroom to bedroom. That required them to restrict the show's technical elements to items that could fit into a single trunk that travels with them.

Props include a shadowy owl, some plastic turtles, a coyote, hot oil and platters of fruit. There are sound effects and choreography. Tea is served.

"The show utilizes all the senses. When you use all five senses, you are more engaged," Andrews says.

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Bedroom drama plays out ... in bedrooms

CAPE COAST, March 28, (BERNAMA-NNN-GNA) -- Executive Director of Healthy Ghana Professor Agyeman Badu Akosa, has expressed regret that some Ghanaians still held the belief that superstition, instead of germs and said this was one of the major drawbacks of the health care system in Ghana.

He said it was worrying that even the highly educated held firmly to this belief and would resort to prayer camps instead of hospitals until the situation became worse.

Prof. Akosa was speaking on Communication, Culture and Health at the third day of the first University of Cape Coast (UCC) Faculty of Arts Colloquium in Cape Coast with the aim of providing a platform for researchers in the humanities at UCC and other avenues to disseminate research findings on selected themes in order to inform policy briefs of the University and the nation.

Participants, drawn from various health, culture and communication disciplines including staff and students of the Faculty of Arts are being taken through three plenary presentations, forty-eight scientific research reports, a seminar as well as a round table discussion.

Prof. Akosa expressed concern that the poor and aged were invariably accused of using witchcraft to cause diseases and other predicaments, adding that many lives which had been lost to convulsion and other health conditions could have been saved if the superstition factor had been eliminated.

He said even though prayer camps continuously abused peoples trust , patrons would always choose the camps over hospitals and warned leaders of such camps to be careful with their activities since they could be legally held responsible for the death of the sick persons under their care.

He condemned the belief that the human urine could cure diseases and urged the general public to be wary of the kind of medical advice they adhere to.

Prof Akosa, a pathologist, said the superstition factor had led to the lack of trust in pathologists since most people thought it was unnecessary or held strongly to the belief that some people especially traditional leaders were not supposed to be operated even in their demise.

He said some Ghanaians even the well -educated did not possess the habit of reading about their health conditions either on line or in magazines and therefore encouraged them to read more about health especially the labels and briefs that come with drugs.

On herbal medicine Prof. Akosa said the mystic power of herbal medicine had eluded the herbalists ability to identify the active ingredients in the herbs and had therefore set the stage for criticism of herbal medicines ability to cure more than one disease.

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Superstition Is A Drawback To Ghana's Health Care System

Just 60 years ago, Tibetan Buddhism was the most secretive religious tradition in the world. It reserved its initiations exclusively for monastics, who had to prove themselves worthy of higher teachings with decades of intensive practice locked away behind the worlds highest mountains. Now you can sign up in any small Western city for a weekend workshop that will offer you those same practices for the price of admission. And you may combine those Tibetan practices with your yoga, with your faith in Christ, with a little Zen or with some personal combination of everything.

People seem to be leaving conventional religion in droves. The reasons for the desertions are multiple: sex scandals, power scandals, the inability of traditional religion to come to terms with contemporary culture and its evolving moral values, personal experience being given increasing priority over religious dogma, the development of a spiritual supermarket offering views and practices from all over the world, and both people within religious traditions and people with none swapping notes and making their own selections from the myriad spiritual options now available. Some people choose to stay within their religious tradition but incorporate the wisdom and practices of other traditions into an understanding of their own.

Meanwhile, the sharing of therapeutic and psychological methods has become a mainstream activity, aided, for better and for worse, by media celebrities like Oprah and the dozens of yoga and meditation shows on television. The result of all of these changes is a spiritual supermarket, and shopping at it is the movement of the times.

You may rail at what you perceive to be the commercialization of religious practices and of personal stories, but its happening. And while many may trivialize what they learn into yet another easy belief system or the development of a spiritual ego that has suddenly seen the light, others are being spurred to ask questions that they may never have addressed on their own. They are drawn to take the journey inside, and for many, that journey is not just a progression toward a healthy ego invaluable as that is in itself but also an opening to the transcendent dimensions of human experience.

More than ever in human history, people everywhere are on a rising curve of individuation, developing a conscious wish to deepen their relationship with their inner core. Individuation is not individualism. The latter is the pursuit of my happiness regardless of yours, and it has been on an upward trajectory ever since the old allegiances of family and tribe began to be chipped away in earnest by the Industrial Revolution. Individuation, however, is a maturing authenticity that enables you to feel not separate from, but intimately connected to others and the collective good. Individuation requires us to ask questions of ourselves rather than be content with easy answers questions not just about our personal live

but the larger, existential questions too, about our values, our purpose, our meaning. America is also an engine of individuation.

Those who are on the path of individuation are the most likely members of the spiritual, not religious sector of the population. These are the people for whom faith tends to be more central than belief; for whom religion has become a personal spiritual affair instead of an institution whose belief system you sign up for. People like this are not so concerned with what they believe or dont believe; they want to know how rather than what how they can connect to a world beyond their own ego, a world of meaning and value that they intuit to be present, and yet are not always in touch with.

Another sign of the times is that, while traditional religions are on the wane in the West, atheism is seeing one of its periodic revivals. Its high priests are best-selling writers such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens. The physical universe is all there is, they say, and if there are mysteries in its workings that we do not yet understand, science will eventually unlock them with the rational application of the scientific method. Three pounds of gray matter is the source of all wonders. In refuting the supernatural in any shape or form, a rational understanding of the world also necessarily seems to eliminate the question of faith.

More than a hundred years ago, William James noted:

[Rationalism] will fail to convince or convert you. ... If you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level that rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk ...

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Roger Housden/column: In the spiritual supermarket