Two
weeks ago yesterday, I closed my first one-woman show. But I don’t think it’s closed for good. And I’m wondering, deeply, how the experience
will shape my life and my career going forward.
I
wrote Cinnamon and Cigarettes in
three days at the beginning of December, right after I got home from a semester
teaching and directing at The College of Idaho.
I had done the research I required during the summer and early fall, and
then set it all aside while I focused on Pericles,
Theatre History, and Fundamentals of Acting.
The
play poured out of me, or poured through me, during those early days in
December, with terrifying force. I didn’t
know if I could trust it, but I knew that I must, since I was performing the
play at the end of January. Six months
earlier, I had signed up for a “fully staged production” of this piece to be
performed in January, which I had only named and barely begun.
What
kept me driving forward was a deep-seated need to tell, as fully and honestly
as I could, the story of my first best friend, who taught me about loyalty and
trust as a child and wound up a toothless, sometimes-homeless drug and alcohol
abuser who died in a train yard before age 30.
I had been living (and still live) with a fear that few people would
remember him, and those who did would only remember his mistakes.
I
didn’t want to glorify his life, or make him out to be some kind of saint or
martyr. I wanted to tell his story
because it was beating against the walls of my body to be told. He lives inside me, and I wanted to reawaken
his spirit.
I
realize, as I try to enumerate the reasons I wrote and performed the play, that
it isn’t possible to fully explain the story I needed (and still need) to
tell. And that’s why I need to tell it:
I can’t explain it any other way.
This
feels like quite a revelation, and I’m having trouble remembering exactly why I
thought I needed to be an actor before these last few months. I know I have a passion for it, or else I’d
have to be crazy to keep plugging away at something so terribly competitive,
difficult, and financially unstable. I
know the artistic heights feed some kind of fire within me, that is painful and
crushing whenever I veer away from this art for something that might be “easier”
(like actuarial science, for example).
And yet, only two weeks out of this experience of solo creation and
performance, I am plunged into a depth of questions that may have no concrete
answers.
I
think Cinnamon and Cigarettes was
some of the best work I’ve ever done, and I think I followed it with a couple
of really mediocre auditions. Why? Is it because I’m a bad actor? I’ve become lazy? The work of solo performance took all my
artistic energy and I don’t have anything left?
Have I always been a mediocre auditioner and I’ve just gotten lucky a
few times?
These
questions aren’t fun nor particularly helpful, except that they bring me back
around to why I’m doing this in the first place. How can I build upon the sense of pride and
connection this piece of art created in me, rather than slipping back to some
lower, unhealthy place? I loathe the cycle of rejection that even good (and especially mediocre) auditioning creates: "I didn't get this role. Maybe I suck. Maybe I'll never get another role. Maybe I shouldn't even go to any more auditions because I'll never get another role..."
I
have entered the play in three fringe festivals. Perhaps it will be chosen for one, and I’ll
have the privilege of figuring out how not to lose my day jobs, as I also figure
out how to raise the money for 10 days of travel and venue rental, in order to
share this story that seethes with immediacy in my innermost being.
Maybe
I’m just a moody artist. Sometimes I’m
convinced that’s true. But I think I’d
rather deal with the issues of being a moody artist than let the most important
stories go untold. Because in the end, I
believe that the threads of our stories, when they’re shared with naked
vulnerability, bind us together as human beings, saving us, somehow, from
falling apart.
