A lot of my friends are stage actors trying to make their living in "the business," bleeding out money for headshots, suffering through auditions, constantly schmoozing up contacts, always on the look-out for a break, worrying constantly about the next job once this job is over (no actor is sentimental when a show ends because it means unemployment), mucking around in second- and third- and fourth-tier productions because some work is better than none (like doing Sweeney Todd with the Anytown Community Players in the Town Hall with a dull razor and a lighting plot done with 100-watt lightbulbs in coffee cans). I couldn't do what they do -- I have no talent for pretense, no urge to walk the tightrope of rejection without a net. Bless their hearts that they want to pursue a vocation that requires them to fillet their innards and display the cuts with no guarantee of love, money, or appetite from the audience.
Why do they do it? Like most things in life, it depends.
Some have the gift -- to do anything else would violate some law of necessity that requires all physical bodies to follow their natural trajectories. These are the ones who, when they act, seem so much the part they play that the skin of the character's words grows over their own. Some do it because they just truly love the theatre: when they're in a show, with the dazzle of lights and spectra of costumes and the tossed-up bouquets of applause, they feel at home, rooted, defined. They may or may not have the talent to succeed (whatever that means), but success almost plays second-fiddle to the fact of being there, the privilege of standing in the light and being noticed.
Some pursue it as they would any business. They make their contacts, diligently do their schmoozing, lay out their schedules of auditions and performances, follow their workplan -- for them, how much work they do is almost as important as what they do: industrials, musicals, training videos, commercials, voice-overs, staged readings, tours all provide grist for the career mill. In an odd paradox, their ambition makes them schedule their spontaneity, calculate their artistry, and in the end can turn them into what every actor dreads being: uninteresting and tiresome. And then come the ones who have no talent but are blissfully unaware of it, barging along and sometimes getting work; the hangers-on who need to be around something brighter than their own dim lives; the perpetual chorus people who inevitably will always play the wordless Nazis in Sound of Music or the "descamisados" in Evita.
All of them hover around the flame, hoping in the same motion to finesse the light and avoid incineration. But even though all these motivations exist, one gold thread connect them all: having the skill to bring an audience to that moment when artifice turns to truth and freshens the audience with more than what it had when it walked in. To make this happen is a heady experience for actors, heady enough to keep them going past uncomplimentary reviews, miserable pay scales, the tedium (and sometimes terror) of rehearsals, and the constant fear of being forgotten or irrelevant. It's a chancy business, of course -- the moments are, like Elton John's phrase, "a candle in the wind," highly perishable illumination. But that is the edge on which actors live: like shooting craps, the occasional good run keeps the actor coming back to the table one more time to see if the luck will hit again.
But to get to those peaks, my actor friends have to travel the lower reaches of the business: auditions, classes, callbacks, seminars, endless schmoozing, and, if the dice fall right, a show with decent wages and a satisfying run. Once in a show, they can leave the gaming tables for the moment and concentrate on the relatively more durable pleasures of practicing the craft they've worked so hard to learn.
A show usually follows an amplitude, like a sound wave, beginning with the crest, sloping down to the trough, then back upward to the crest, but a crest advanced, richer with information and purpose. When a show begins, at that first read-through, when the newly minted cast assembles on the bare stage and the stage manager hands out scripts and scores (if it's a musical), when the director welcomes everyone and people introduce themselves, the whole company finds itself arrived, in a place where, momentarily, the workaday worries fall away and people can relax knowing that for this many weeks and that many performances they will have a home and a focus. That first read-through, before the director has shaped anything, makes up one of the best moments in doing a show: loose inventiveness among a company of equals momentarily forgetting their rivalries.
But then the regimen begins, and the show moves toward the trough as everyone struggles to learn lines or dance steps, remember blocking, fight off the "am I terrible?" demons, endure tedious stretches of time that require one to hurry up and wait. Occasionally someone throws a diva fit (or a "hissy fit"), or the Equity captain testily reminds the stage manager about break times, or the director rants, or the choreographer has to change a number because people are too breathless to sing, or the costumes accent every wrong dimension, or the set is still not finished, or the prop master can't find the one item that will clinch the scene, or the lighting designer can only hang the lights in the middle of rehearsal, or the orchestra won't be in until two days before opening: nerves spark, self-doubt fevers the crowd, increasing caffeination increases anxiety, and the enterprise has now become a kind of desperate water ballet, where everyone must swim in synch or all will drown. Ecce the trough.
But as all actors know, as all the seasoned backstage people know, there will come "the moment," like that moment in winter when liquid water, its molecules sluggish and errant as they descend to zero degrees Celsius, suddenly crisps into crystal beauty, full of light and solid, waiting for the cut of a skate blade. During the hell of tech week, when all the music and lights and muslin and costumes and props and furniture must come into synchronous orbits, people can feel this build toward the aptly named "opening," and the alchemy begins, transmuting that ordinary stuff into complexities of gold.
But there is an even deeper magic than just the way color and light transforms a rube goldberg of human egos and painted surfaces into a "show." For the people on the stage, the transformative power of being in the theatre does not happen by the "soft magic" of color and light but by the "rough magic" of Prospero, who congregated the powers of earth and beyond to create new visions without erasing or falsifying the original nature of the materials he used to produce his pageant. Working for Prospero, so to speak, is what makes the theatre such a heady and addictive experience: to know ascendance without leaving the earth, to satisfy ambition without having to kill anyone, to read your own entrails without seppuku, to take your meanest traits and without embarrassment display them, to take the opaque confusions of life (one's own and everyone else's) and for a few hours make them tolerable if not transparent, to become more than who you are without having to abandon all the quirks and demons you have so carefully collected over the years.
This is what my friends in the theatre seek out: not just those moments when the audience lifts its hands in applause to them like a benediction but, more importantly, the sense that they are engaged in and not on the periphery of life, that they bristle with it (the word written in italics and with an underscore) as they dig around in the raw pain of things to uncover new connections, refining and refinding and not simply limping along towards death -- all shaped by a discipline that releases what it has found into the uncertain and sometimes fickle, but always necessary, keeping of an audience.
For my part, I'll go see everything my friends do, offer up my support on the salver of my applause, hoping to keep them aloft so that they can pursue what they dream and turn into it into a flesh that will sustain them until all the lights go out.
(January 1996)