Day 127…
What would I do if I couldn’t work in theatre?
I’ve often thought about that.
Several years ago, a friend of mine came home from a date and while he was trying to get into his apartment, fell down a couple of stairs and became almost completely paralyzed.
The work he did became impossible. Bedridden, with only minimal use of one hand, what do you do for the rest of your life?
What most of us are facing isn’t that. What we, in the theatrical community are currently going through is not even close to that. Nothing has really changed except that our industry is no longer functioning.
While I was in high school and then in college, I thought that I was going to be an actor. I was already working as a stage manager and, by the time I got to college, was actually getting paid for it. It never crossed my mind that that was what I was going to do with my life. Stage managing was just the job I was doing to make money.
As kids, we were all warned against going into acting as a career. “If you can imagine doing anything else with your life, then you should do it.”
At any given moment in pre-COVID times, up to 97% of the members of Actors’ Equity Association were unemployed. To succeed in this business, you had better be fully committed. However much you might want to do it, there are hundreds if not thousands of people competing against you who want it just as much as you do.
I spent my junior year of college in London.
During my sophomore year at Columbia one day, I was walking to class and I saw a sign for a meeting about studying abroad and knew that that was what I wanted to do. I’m sure there were hoops to jump through in order to make that happen, but I don’t really remember what they were.
I got to London that fall with a bunch of kids from other schools and we were immediately sent to Cornwall for a week. Part of the program involved a week’s homestay with a British family as a way to acclimate us to being in a new country.
That week was incredible.
The family I was staying with were lovely. They were a young couple with a ten-year old kid who lived in Penzance. I spent a little time with them over that week and a lot of time with the other kids on the program. Many of us are still good friends to this day.
We rented bicycles. We had our first Cornish cream tea at a farm and went to St. Michael’s Mount - a castle out in a bay that you can only get to on foot when the tide is out.
My host family took me to an incredible open-air theatre called the Minack that was carved into the cliffside by the sea. Since I was going to be an actor, they insisted on taking a picture of me standing with my arms open on the stone platform that functioned as the stage.
We all got back to London and settled into our new school. I saw an audition posting for an on-campus play and I was determined to get in.
The morning of the audition, I got ready and headed over to the theatre building. I got about half-way there when the thought suddenly struck me that if I got cast in the play, that would mean that I wouldn’t be able to explore London and the rest of England with my new friends. I’d be stuck in rehearsals.
I didn’t audition. There was something that I wanted to do more than act.
It took me a couple of more years to fully realize that I wasn’t going pursue acting, but when I look back, that’s really the point where I made the decision.
At the time I graduated from college I was working on the musical revue A… My Name is Alice down at the Village Gate in Greenwich Village. Jackée Harry was in the cast. At the time I think that she was understudying Alaina Reed who was also in the cast. Jackée later became famous on the TV series 227, along with Alaina actually, and dropped her last name.
Jackée’s day job at the time was working as a regular on the soap Another World. One day, a bunch of us were talking and the stage manager suggested to Jackée that maybe she could get me an acting job on the show. Jackée hemmed and hawed a bit and finally said something that suggested that I would need to spend more time at the gym first. It took me a while to realize what she meant.
At that point, I was taking acting classes with William Esper who was a legendary New York acting teacher. We were working on an exercise one day in class and I had a flash where I realized that I was never going to be an actor.
I was not willing to really do the intensive inward work that Bill Esper was having me do. I was not willing to spend the time necessary in the gym and, most important of all, I was not ready to give up the other things in my life that I was doing that were taking me away from my acting training.
What was I going to do? Well, it turned out that what I was going to do was what I had already been doing.
Overnight I went from somebody who was working backstage just to make some money, to somebody working backstage as a professional stage manager.
Same job, different outlook.
One of the friends I made during that week in Cornwall came from Boston. His mom is an art dealer. When I was fretting about how I was ever going to make enough money to live by working in the theatre, he told me something that his mom had told him, “Do what you love, and the money will follow.” I’ve never forgotten that and, I have to say, it’s proven to be true.
So now I am confronted with the actual question, what would I do if I couldn’t work in theatre?
This pandemic is not going to be over any time soon. We are just about to hit 3.5 million cases in the United States. The government’s actions seem destined to just make everything worse and all of this last so much longer than it should. As much as I would like to continue working in the theatre, there is no theatre to work in at the moment.
It’s taken me 38 years to get to where I am professionally. I had to learn a lot along the way and I still have a lot to learn moving forward.
After a couple of months of this, the one thing that I do know that I DON’T want to do is retire. I’m not ready yet and, frankly, I can’t afford to.
I know that I am not alone in facing this. So, what do any of us do moving forward?
When my friend became a quadriplegic, I tried to imagine what I would do were I in that position. There’s a remarkable book called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by a French journalist named Jean-Dominique Bauby. Bauby suffered a massive stroke and was completely paralyzed. The only way that he could communicate was by blinking. He dictated the entire book by blinking.
I’m not physically paralyzed thank god. Not even close. Nothing within me is stopping me from doing anything I want.
What we are experiencing now is almost certainly not permanent. It has, however, now gone on long enough, that my emotional paralysis in the face of all of this is wearing off. I do have to do something.
What I realize is that I have been doing things.
Bernadette Peter’s concert that we pulled out of the vault and aired last week, raised over a quarter of a million dollars for Broadway Cares / Equity Fights AIDS. Tonight, we are launching our first ever Virtual Broadway Barks! adopt-a-thon online. Working on both of those events as well as the Jersey Boys Who Loves You video a few months back have been incredibly satisfying. They aren’t generating any personal income, but I haven’t really needed it because of the unemployment PUA.
While I have been trying to figure out what I am going to do, I have actually been doing something. I started working on these posts without really thinking about it. They have been a way for me to organize the flood of news that has surged our way. More importantly, they are helping me process it all.
That people are reading them almost seems beside the point. The publishing of them seems to be something completely separate to the writing of them. I love reading all of your responses to them and seeing which of them land with some people and which of them land with others. I am almost always surprised.
I guess I have figured out what I would do if I can’t work in the theatre. I seem to have been doing it.
I have a lot to learn, but it looks like I am going to have a long time to practice.
What would I do if I couldn’t work in theatre?
I guess I would write.
Yes! Yes! Yes! Starting with “ Diary of the Covid -19 months” !
everything you write lands
in my heart
So incredibly inspiring to me
to be reading
your minute by minute
jammed packed with facts
as we walk through
Covid
together
Funny, as you write
what will I do
every day
you do something
incredible and inspiring to me
You have become the world’s
stage manager through this
I know where to and not to go
how to and when
Every day
is a hit
I am
the first one
in the standing
ovation
to you
❤️