In the House

I'm sitting in a small theater in La Canada, a place preseved in time without stadium seating, the screen staring out over our heads...okay, wait...I am...the only one here. Blame the rain. The news suggested, because of rain & lightning, that people might want to stay indoors. For me, lightning lost and cabin fever won. Rain is one of those things that I just can't resist. Plus, I had a free ticket for a movie, so I came out to see Juno.

I was in a different theater last night, and the irony rests in this: I don't wonder for a second why I'm sitting here instead of my beloved Arclight. I did, however, wonder what the hell I was doing back at Playhouse West last night. I was originally asked to help with a recording session, and then had to jump on the logo because the crazy director wanted to use a noose to represent the two one-acts. A noose. I ended up burying it in the text of the title, but still, those two responsibilities formed the hook that brought me back to Playhouse to oversee two small productions which the director eventually hailed as the Second Coming.

Both shows have been exhausted in classes, and one of the two was produced at least twice before at Playhouse. The three actors did a nice job - which was to be expected at the beginning of a run - but I just don't know that I saw the same shows that the director did. I have, in the course of the hundreds of performances I've seen over the last decade, seen some chilling performances, including the entire run of the first production of one of the two shows. It irked me when the director said that he had been waiting for 30 years to see work on that stage that resembled the work in his class, because he has come to see my shows and loved them. (Maybe he's just talking about his students. Yeah, that has to be it.)

And then it hit me. This is exactly the kind of culture that the director, who also happens to be the founder of the school, seems to love. Over the years, the people trying to find a voice in the theater company have fought, competed for time and space, and struggled against an apathetic student body to get seats filled. Each production becomes an army unto itself, knowing that a good percentage of fellow actors and directors who come to see it will only come to tear it apart. I've even seen the same behavior at the film festival, where the slogan has been repeated: "Lie, cheat, steal."

So why, I have to ask, do these people work so hard at trying to squash competition on the home front? Why do they work so hard on their own productions and fill their minds with the need to be better than everyone else? Call it my insanity, but I worked with the tunnel vision of why we needed to do the show we were working on. I wanted my actors to act seamlessly and not think, and to never finish working on a role. I wanted my production to stand on its own, with my particular brand and style, to speak for itself as a living thing. In the end, because of my failed struggle to keep the theater company within the reach of the entire student body (just a couple of people in charge did everything they could to squash those efforts), I ended up flying my pirate flag and focused my casts entirely on the center of the production and nowhere else. I isolated my casts and only depended on the school for production space and advertising. I have been with the cast of one play for about nine years now, having played more than a handful of roles in it. Whenever the founder gets involved in the production, I see the same culture coming up again, this time with a handful of people with questionable talent being held up and apart from everyone else. I isolate myself and stay focused. Why does it have to be this way?

Ultimately, I like to think they only win the moment of recognition, the conditioned response that they maneuver people towards, and the people they fool are spent mindlessly. Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE, preached the concept of 20-70-10, in that 20 percent of the work force gets promoted, 70 percent do much of the grunt work, and 10 percent need to be fired. He based this on a competitive performance curve. Acting schools, and I imagine the entertainment industry, are built on something closer to 10-50-40, in which 10 percent are held as the elite, 50 percent are what pay for the acting school and the teachers salaries, and then 40 percent drop out. Know what that means? Everyone is expendable. This probably holds true just about anywhere that greed and insecurity can take root, but I guess in hindsight, the noose in the logo shouldn't be so shocking. It serves the same purpose it always did, to intimidate and illustrate the law of the land.

In the moment where I'm faced with this reality - which I've had a lot of experience with over many years - I always have to make a choice, and it becomes clearer every time. Am I who they want me to be, or am I what I believe I am? The actual answer falls right in line with my search for work. It forms the relevance of my close friendships. It's built into the rhythms of the journal/blog that I've been writing for 23 years now. At the risk of sacrificing everything - and I have sacrificed a lot - I am what I believe I can be. I'm not done evolving.

Being in two old theaters reminds me of how simple things get complicated. I beg you to understand that it doesn't have to be this way. Even a cynical heart like mine can find the simplicity in life and appreciate it completely, but you have to have hope. That is the best preparation for the very next moment.