Onstage

It has been, I just realized, eleven years since I last gave any kind of performance on a stage in front of an audience. I did not know, when we did that last show of the 1995 "Buckets O'Beckett" festival for Splinter Group in Chicago (here's a story about their later transformation into Irish Rep), that that would be the effective end of my performing life, but it was. I had always given specific advice to any young person who said they wanted to be an actor: Don't do it. Ordinarily I'm not that blunt, and if someone wants to try something then they should; but any profession in the arts is so brutal that I have come to firmly believe that if someone isn't driven by mortal necessity to do it, then for the sake of their sanity they shouldn't. In other words, "If you're not gonna fall down dead because you're not onstage, then for God's sake don't get on a stage." Therefore, if some young person can be dissuaded from seeking the actor's life, then s/he should be. But a real actor, that poor unfortunate who just can't help it, won't listen to me and will go on and do it anyway, and good for them.

Some time after that last Beckett performance (in the sublime "Ohio Impromptu"), I realized that it had been a few months since I had even gone to an audition, and that I really hadn't even noticed for a long time that I wasn't auditioning. In other words, I wasn't onstage, and I wasn't falling over dead because of it. Sometimes you just have to take your own advice, so I did, and I quit. (It helps, by the way, that that final performance of "Ohio Impromptu" was terrific, maybe the only performance I ever gave that I was completely happy with.)

About a month ago, my friend Ezra Buzzington sent an e-mail. He is a company member at Theatre of NOTE in Hollywood, a 25-year old group whose recent anniversary video I edited. Their focus, as represented in the acronym NOTE (New One-Act Theatre Ensemble), is on original work, so every year they have a weeks-long vetting process wherein the various plays under consideration for the next year are given readings in front of the company members, who then vote on which productions they want to mount.

Ezra wanted to do Barry Rowell's "Before I Wake," a fascinating retelling of Stoker's Dracula novel in which, amazingly, the character of Dracula never appears. He is an unseen, offstage, felt presence who constantly influences what's happening onstage without ever being seen as an active participant. The play is short, and constructed like some kind of intricate chamber orchestra piece; indeed, Ezra's direction cast us all for the quality of our voices, and he gave us all instruments to keep in mind (as the Narrator reading stage directions, I was a cello). We rehearsed several times because this just isn't the sort of thing you can slap together in an afternoon, and on Saturday we performed it.

About halfway through, I began to remember--yeah, this is what this used to feel like. An audience sinking into an experience, their reactions transforming the work of the actors, all those live bodies and minds interacting to create something different, something far more interesting, than the piece that had been rehearsed. There was also, again, the impulse to play into the audience's reactions rather than to play with them, and it's an important distinction: the former is indulgent, while the latter can be revelatory. And I'm happy that even after all these years, I was able to spot that impulse as it happened, to avoid the easy laugh and to at least try to reach for the deeper response. (As much as a guy reading stage directions can.)

In other words, it felt good. And for just a second, I thought, Wouldn't it be kinda fun to maybe do this again? But then I also remembered: night after night of rehearsal, traveling across town through lousy traffic to fight for a parking space within a mile of the theatre, weeks of performances when maybe your audience is ten people or fewer, all the time spent and then the performance is gone into thin air as if never been.

It may be another eleven years, then, before I step on a stage again. But it was awfully nice to have done it again, just this once. Made me feel like a guy in my 20s again, and that's pretty nice too.