It has been an anxiety-riddled year trying to prepare for an anxiety-riddled play. In a little less than two months, I will be playing Estragon in Birmingham Festival Theatre (BFT)’s production of Samuel Beckett’s classic Waiting for Godot. BFT is the longest-running community theatre in Birmingham, operating a little over fifty years. It is known for daring to do more edgy, contemporary plays and Godot was planned for their 50th anniversary season, which was to include a show from each decade the theatre had been in operation. Godot was first produced there in the 1980s and was opted as the ‘80s selection.
When I heard a production was in the works, I was stoked. As a Beckett fanatic, I knew productions of Godot are rare even in the professional theatre—it is mostly seen in colleges and universities, its eccentricities and difficulties a stumbling block for many companies who may wish to produce it, but as an example of the Theatre of the Absurd, it often proves mystifying to season-ticket holders despite its importance as one of the great plays of the 20th century. At first, I simply wanted to see the production
But then I started to think I wanted to act in it. And this was quite a thought that formed because I have not acted in a play since 2006, when I did a favor for a local Birmingham producer by playing the title role in John Forsyth’s adaptation of C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. The idea was I would act in his production if he produced my then-latest play The Summer Bobby(ie) Lee Turner Loved Me. At that time, it was an act of coercion on his part to elicit me onstage.
When I was a child, at least as early as five years old, I wanted to be a big Hollywood actor. I was admittedly one of those nerds so invested in film and television that I watched movies to their end credits, wondering what all the background jobs were (gaffer, best boy, etc.). I had a natural gift for impressions and mimicry and was more at ease speaking to groups rather than one-on-one. Despite developing an introverted personality later in life, I am still at home in front of an audience. Because of my interests, I auditioned for and was accepted into the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA), where I studied acting for six years.
My principal teachers were Elizabeth Adkisson, a nationally accredited teacher of Arthur Lessac’s Kinesensic speech training, and Tommy Canary, a local actor who had some small parts in Hollywood films. As far as high school experience goes, I was a conqueror. By my second year, as every other acting male had graduated, I was the senior male in the company and, as older plays often have a plethora of male roles, I was cast a lot. I did eighteen plays by the time I was eighteen and, as I entered college, I was already burned out.
I continued studying acting a further two years at Bennington College in Vermont. My principal teachers were Janis Young, a remarkable woman who had a part in Irvin Kershner’s lost classic Loving (1970, with George Segal), and Dina Janis, now the Artistic Director of the Dorset Theatre Festival. There, I did two major plays, a student-written one-act, and workshopped the first act of an original musical. But, even by that time, I was done. Done with rehearsing (I knew I wasn’t a true actor because I didn’t love the rehearsal process), done with costume fittings, done with wearing make-up, etc. By my third year, I wanted to concentrate fully on becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright by age 25. Well, I missed that deadline, but I have only acted twice since—for a student-directed one-act at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and the aforementioned Screwtape.
So, back to Godot, who is no doubt waiting on me to get back to him…
I decided to audition for Godot just to see if I still had it in me. Whether I got a part or not mattered very little. I knew my “technical toolbelt” from ASFA would serve me well if I still had the nerve. On my resumé, I noted I was adept at classical material (not a lie) and had performed in Beckett’s Words and Music, one of his radio plays, at Bennington. The audition went well, and I was thrilled to hear the director wanted me to play Estragon, or Gogo, though I fear if she had known me personally, she would have given me the role of Vladimir, or Didi, who is more of a thinker and talker. Gogo is mostly driven by physical needs and does more of the physical comedy. Being largely uncomfortable in my own body, the role will be a challenge although I’ve always loved performing for people, so we’ll see how it goes. By the time you read this, we will have been in rehearsal for four days.
I thought I’d do a quick memory lane trip through my acting experiences before beginning an actors journal of the process—a way of tracking how I got to this week, acting again for the first time in seventeen years. Here are some memories and things I learned along the way:
The first play I ever performed in, which was not a school or church play, was Jean Giraudoux’ beautiful pastoral comedy The Enchanted (in French, Intermezzo), but I was almost not cast at all. When I began my ASFA career, there were three males in the company and The Enchanted, though it was written originally principally for men, could well have the Mayor, the Doctor, and various other parts played by women or portrayed by women. There were only two characters that had to be played by men. And those were most certainly going to the two out-going seniors. I was expecting to be lucky to get the part of the 2nd Executioner, given I was "annoying" (my teachers’ actual words to me the following year). But divine providence intervened.
One of the other male actors failed Trigonometry mid-year and, to remain at ASFA, one must have a certain grade in their academics. Cruelly, he had to finish out the year at a public high school. But it did afford me the opportunity to play a “romantic lead,” a part I’ve never been right for, but nevertheless…
Up until then, I had wanted to be a film actor and I regarded ASFA as a steppingstone to a big movie career, so I was mostly non-plussed by my experiences learning mime and doing scene work. But, in doing The Enchanted, a comedy about a young woman’s coming-of-age, the theatre got in my blood. The very dust from the curtains coursed through my veins and I was hooked.
Playing the part of the “Supervisor of Weights and Measures,” a role played on Broadway by Wesley Addey, I had a crash-course in stage movement, projection, and telling a story onstage. Midway through rehearsals, Ms. Adkisson (then Tull) was called away to help her ailing husband. So, the Technical Theatre teacher oversaw the “directing” of the play. That left the outgoing seniors to teach me how to be stage ready. They did a remarkable job. In one afternoon, through continuous drilling, they instilled in me all they had learned in their ASFA careers and, though I don’t know how good I turned out to be (as no videotape was preserved), I played the part to the best of my ability and, by year 2, I was a serious student. My voice had lowered, my body had become more comfortable onstage, and, to my chagrin, I became the actor mostly fitted to villain and father roles.
After acting in Tad Mosel’s Pirandellian one-act Impromptu and playing three roles in a children’s musical, Wind of a Thousand Tales, I began my brief "villain career." Most actors love playing villains (this is, again, a reason I don’t list “actor” on my C. V.). I rather dislike being disliked. I don’t even love people who love me for being dislikable and so villains were roles I deplored, though by eighth grade, there were a half-dozen men in the company more suitable for romantic leads and best friend characters. So, by the time we came to that year’s major production, I was a villain. Alas.
Sarah Daniels’ The Gut Girls is an odd play of British origin. Essentially a feminist statement, it shifts from straight-forward storytelling to monologuing three quarters of the way through and portrays Victorian women who worked in the gutting sheds of London and tried to better their lives through servant work. My role was that of Arthur Cuttle-Smythe, the domineering owner of the gutting sheds. My big moment was when one of the “Gut Girls” cold-cocked me and I fell to the stage to the audience’s applause/gasps—except for my cousin Bob. When he saw the play, he laughed his hearty Midwestern laugh so loud, I lied on the stage cringing in embarrassment.
My ninth-grade year found another villain role, that of Fainall in William Congreve’s Restoration comedy The Way of the World. Written in 1700, a time when men wore wigs, high heels, and makeup and women did not, I was, needless to say, upset with the whole situation. Though written a hundred years after the works of Shakespeare, Congreve’s language was harder to speak and harder to comprehend. Most of the audience left baffled at the sexual exploits of a bunch of aristocratic whiners who treated marriage and love as financial transactions, and I was on their side. I hated the play, and it required a physical stamina which was unprecedented in my short lifetime. I remember one of the other actors suggesting we all take soluble tablets of ginseng to get through the long rehearsals and performances and perhaps it helped, but it didn’t help anybody understand the play and my parents and friends never forgave me for putting them through seeing it.
ASFA had very little money, save the Math/Science department, which was privately funded by the Russell Corporation, so we had to do plays rather than musicals (we only did the one musical listed above and it had only three songs) and we often chose European plays because such plays are typically about communities whereas American plays are typically about families and, as such, have smaller casts. So, with all our doled-out dialect tapes, I spoke with an affected English accent throughout my eighth and ninth grade years. When I ran the sound board for a children’s play about the Tortoise and the Hare, I was chastised for doing the before-show announcement affecting Laurence Olivier.
However, an American play was produced at the end of my ninth-grade year. Tina Howe’s Approaching Zanzibar is a loony little play from a wildly creative writer about a family’s cross-country trip to see an ailing family member. While the parts were originally doubled when performed Off-Broadway, the student director gave each character its own actor and I played the role of Scotty, a family friend who throws a party on a boat. What did I learn from Zanzibar? Make sure you know how to work the props. A critical scene involving us popping a bottle of “champagne” bombed on opening night as we had very little bottles with which to practice. Therefore, we never properly rehearsed it and the scene ended up double the length because no one onstage had any way of knowing how to open a bottle of the sparkling cider provided. We each tried, improvising our way through it, and the director went home crying, her dream of bringing her favorite play to life a moment of utter despair. Oh, well. I’m still not good at opening bottles of champagne, if that means anything.
I never did much community theatre because if you did a show by another company while at ASFA, it was considered “moonlighting” and it could conceivably affect your training. But summers were free. And, in between my ninth and tenth grade years, I did two shows I wouldn’t typically have been able to do: I doubled as Robin Starveling and Mustardseed in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (an outdoor production) and played Rueben in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, a guilty pleasure of mine to this day. It is perhaps not surprising that, afterwards, I wrote a little one-act called Life’s Labor’s Love, that had a Shakespearean title and was itself a kind of musical.
My tenth-grade year at ASFA was the best year of my life (yikes). Well, it was the best acting year. I literally went out of production of one show and into rehearsals for another. Being constantly “working” was a terrific experience (something most work-a-day actors never get to experience). That year, we did two children’s shows—Rutherford Wolf, a shameless rip-off of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods with its intermingling of fairy tales, and Louis Sachar’s own theatrical adaptation of his novel There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom, where I got to operate a puppet (puppetry was my first love; it may even predate my desire to act for film).
The mainstage show was Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman’s delightful Stage Door, written at a time where Broadway shows employed sometimes thirty actors onstage (this couldn’t be done today). I played two parts—that of an out-of-towner taking one of the aspiring actresses on a date and, sadly (for me), the father of one of the others. By that time, I was playing fathers rather than villains and I found the roles equally upsetting as it meant a lot of grey hair dye and pomposity. I knew I wasn’t right for “romantic leads,” but I also felt slighted by having to play older characters just because I was one of the relatively few boys in the company who could stand still for long periods of time and had developed a baritone. But Stage Door became the show I loved the most. When we “struck” the set at the end of the run, I cried. The set was so immersive, you convinced yourself you were living in that world and, when it was all over, I missed it.
But there was no time to truly weep because there were two student-directed one-acts to do directly after: A. R. Gurney, Jr’s early comedy The Problem and Christopher Durang’s wild and wonderful ‘dentity Crisis. One allowed me to do my best “J. Peterman from Seinfeld impression” and the other afforded me the opportunity to play a character who keeps switching “characters” throughout the play, alternatively playing the lead’s father, grandfather, brother, and mother's lover. In Durang’s play, the lead character is clearly sane (although she has been institutionalized) and it is clear her family are the crazy lot. So, my schizophrenic turn was probably the most challenging part I ever played, but a rewarding one. I was most impressed that my brother liked the performance and he told me my portrayal as “the father” reminded him of Michael Keaton's eccentricities. That was high praise as Keaton was someone he admired, though I never thought of channeling Batman per se.
The following summer afforded two opportunities—to play small parts in more outdoor Shakespeare. I was to play an ensemble member in Coriolanus, a brilliant and undervalued tragedy, and a tiny part in Macbeth. Coriolanus was a difficult experience. The producer wanted to create a season of the bloodiest Shakespeare possible. He had lined up Titus Andronicus for the finale, but his choice for an opener, Coriolanus, is far from the bloodiest and he and the director fought constantly about how much raw meat should be thrown around the playing area of the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. But this was not my concern. Being cast with various choral roles, I kept pestering the director for a bigger part. Putting “Ensemble” on your resumé is not as sexy as having a named character. He was having difficulty finding someone to play the role of Titus Lartius, a lesser general in the play. I kept begging; he kept deflecting, knowing I was all of fifteen and would look ridiculous as a Roman General. Nevertheless, after constant nagging and finding no one interested, I got the part. What did I learn from Coriolanus? Keep pestering. It could lead somewhere.
I eventually bowed out of Macbeth because, by that point, I was exhausted. Six back-to-back shows finally had caught up to me and my junior year loomed. Junior year was important as I had seen every outgoing student receive their big part in their junior year. By that time, Ms. Adkisson and I were friends (we would remain so until her death from cancer) and I was let into the inner sanctum (her office) to discuss possible plays for the next year’s production. The other students knew I was the teacher’s pet and began lobbying me to get her to consider Arthur Miller’s The Crucible for our mainstage show. At the time, she was thinking of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (she never thought commercially), but when I sheepishly suggested The Crucible (even though I had not, up to that point, read it), her eyes popped, and she realized we had enough male actors to do it and that was the day I became introduced to what I believe to be the greatest American play ever written.
Obviously, I wanted the role of John Proctor, but I had stiff competition, including some new skinny good-looking guys who could usurp my status. I remember the auditions well. Because it was a school, we had to audition for various parts. I was up for Proctor and the Reverend Hale. I purposely read the Proctor sides with everything I had in me. With the Hale sides, I stumbled over my lines, mispronounced words, and made everything awkward for my fellow auditionees. What did I learn from The Crucible? If you want the better part, read it better. No, I’m just kidding. You should do the opposite and read every part as if you already have it. The role of John Proctor was a life-changing experience. With black dye and hair extensions and stubble on my face, I transformed back to a leading man. I also began an illicit romance with the actress playing Abigail which sort of electrified the whole process. Our relationship ended when I made a grade of 100 on the show and she made a 98. But trifles aside, it was my opportunity to show everybody what I could do.
In a preview performance, I played the ending scene with every emotion I had. Because it is my name I screamed and cried. I had never cried onstage before, and it took everything in me to work it up. But I learned something very important from that night’s performance. The other theatre teacher came up to me afterward and said, “You cried.” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Don’t cry. Be strong. You cried for the audience. You robbed them of their moment to cry.” A valuable lesson. The crying ended that night and, in every succeeding performance, with our extraordinary makeup and the first act being darkly lit, we managed to make every audience member feel like we were twenty years older than we all were. The Crucible remains my favorite American play. It is because I think it teaches us something about ourselves—America’s predilection toward hysteria in times of crisis (I make no commentary about our present age, ha ha).
So, at this point, imagine me as the big man on campus: someone who just nailed a difficult character in a very difficult play. What was to be my next role? You guessed it: Villager #2 in a concocted Inuit fairy tale called The Ice Wolf, in full yellow-face (ashamed as I was) and with a ridiculous long, black wig. Written as the playwright’s college dissertation on Inuit culture, The Ice Wolf was a terrible script, and my part was minuscule (which hurt my fragile ego at the time), but it did afford me the opportunity to compose percussion music for the show (I was also allowed to write the music for Bottom’s song in the previously-mentioned production of Midsummer). I’m a passable composer of incidental music, but not a terrible drummer. So, banging on my conga drums backstage (very Inuit, right?) was a pleasure, even if the show was not.
Senior year was when my acting ambition waned. I had played Proctor after all! What else did they expect me to do? But in all seriousness, at that point, I had been writing plays from seventh grade on (and had even a couple one-acts produced semi-professionally in town), so I was knee-deep in my new life-role as a writer. Because of this, Ms. Adkisson and I adapted an older Russian play for the mainstage show of my senior year. Discordia was based on an 18th century Russian comedy, Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin's The Minor. Elizabeth adapted the play to a futuristic setting, and I wrote the dialogue and stage directions. It was thrilling and disheartening all at once. For one thing, I was supposed to act in it also and, although I had written a part just for me…it went to someone else. Though bulky by that point, I was forced to play the romantic lead yet again, a role I came to detest and assumed would be played by one of the skinny boys in the company.
So, on it went. I would go to school from 8 to 3, rehearse from 3 to 8, go home and do rewrites util midnight, then, repeat the process the next day with the added annoyance of overhearing the other actors complain about the script backstage. It was my first full-length play. I know it was terrible, but I didn’t want to necessarily hear about it backstage.
Discordia was a way of giving a bevy of talented outgoing seniors "senior projects" that was not directing a one-act play (the standard). A student wrote it, a student designed the costumes, a student designed the lights. It was a true communal experience, even if the play was not something I’d show you now. Being a student writer, it did give us some local press and featured the largest budget in the school’s history, including the addition of two suspended fifty-foot television monitors onstage. I don’t remember acting in it, just writing it. Isn’t that strange?
My final role as an actor at ASFA hearkened back to my first. An enterprising, bright student picked another of Jean Giraudoux’ plays, the one-act The Apollo of Bellac, as his choice for a student-directed piece. A gem of a play, it was, for me, a way of saying goodbye. And say goodbye I did, as college was looming.
I had planned to not act in college. But suddenly I found myself being one of only a handful of southerners at an institution filled with New Yorkers, Angelenos, and international students and I fit into Bennington the way I fit into a toddler outfit. So, auditioning for and acting in plays was the only way I knew how to have a social life. At ASFA, I was robbed of the experience of being a teenager and so, in terms of social skills, I went in the school an eleven-year-old and came out a seventeen-year-old eleven-year-old.
My first show at Bennington was student written and directed. Dana Barney is now a writer of mystery novels, but he was mounting his play Our Man Sam for his senior project at Bennington. I played a slippery character who usurps a man’s home, lifestyle, and wife out from underneath him. It may have been the only villain role I enjoyed playing because the part was all irony and smarm (a typical Bennington trait that went over well with its audiences). But I did two more parts in well-established plays—one experience was immersive and satisfying, the other stultifying and mystifying.
Speaking in fill Irish dialect, I played Michael John Flaherty in John Millington Synge’s classic The Playboy of the Western World, a production where I met the man who would direct 90% of my written work at Bennington and then I played Frederick Egerman, the sexually repressed leading character of Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s A Little Night Music, suggested by Ingmar Bergman’s comedy Smiles of a Summer Night.
Bennington was as equally poor as ASFA in terms of production value, so the inclusion of a musical was a major undertaking that led, ultimately, to a diminished instrumentation of three players. The director, a remarkable actor named Kirk Jackson, chose Night Music because he felt we were all in a similar environment to 19th century Sweden—a cold, sexually repressed part of the world. He had, to my knowledge, never directed a musical and the entire show to me seemed to be amateur hour, which killed my soul because Sondheim was/is my Shakespeare.
But by that point, I was a snob when it came to acting. Switching from the highly structured world of ASFA to the more experimental setting of Bennington, I was furious being thrown into “introductory” acting courses and furious at having to perform scenes with anthropology students who were told by their advisors they should get out of their comfort zone. I was elitist and egotistic, and it prevented me from doing Sondheim in a way that honored his work.
From day one, the director did not want to cast me. He knew I had the vocal range (and was the only student suitable), but I was seen as an outsider who felt he was fully trained and needed no further training. Jackson told me from the offset he would “ride my ass” to get a genuine performance and this predisposed me to dislike him from the start. The teachers at Bennington knew I knew how to do all the important stuff. They were now trying to get me to exude vulnerability on the stage. I was neither interested nor emotionally prepared to do so.
So, after months of rehearsals that felt like workshopping, I went into full snob mode and turned in a cheap performance that discredited the work of every other player on the stage. Writing it all down now, I’m ashamed of myself. My one shot at Sondheim was ruined by my own ego. I even ditched the cast and crew in their striking of the set (which cost me demerits as the professors had to think of some “punishment” for me before I could receive a passing grade). Night Music ended my love of acting for good, or at least I thought. I felt the whole experience was unprofessional and I was the one who was unprofessional. I would never act in another production at Bennington, save parts in my readings of my own plays. Over the next two years, I grew a lot emotionally and Jackson and I eventually became friends after I admitted I had been an ass.
So, my acting life was over.
That is, until I graduated college and was finding myself desperately in need of a theatre-fix. Auditions were announced for student-directed plays at UAB and, as I was working a day job in Birmingham, I threw my hat in the ring. Acting in Rich Orloff’s Playwriting 101: The Rooftop Lesson, a charming ten-minute show, reminded me what fun it could be. Though I never pursued it again, I had at least lost the ego and returned to being a useful member of a company.
Until now, my last role was as Scewtape, the Devil’s minion. My friend Eric Young was wanting to start a community theatre in Birmingham and, as C. S. Lewis was then once again fashionable (The Chronicles of Narnia being made into films in the mid-aughts), he chose a rather dull British stage adaptation, Screwtape, as his production. Again, the deal was I would act in his show if he would produce mine and he made good on the promise, though his production ended up having an audience and mine fell into oblivion.
Screwtape was pure community theatre. An ensemble of some of the most fun and dedicated people I ever worked with. We rehearsed in a shabby former department store in Birmingham and had three weekends of sold-out shows. In the back of my mind, I was thinking, “This is the last time I’ll ever have to do this.” But really, I was rewarded with a great experience that I can look back on now and cherish. The simple thing of, “Hey, kids! Let’s put on a show!” was exuded in the whole experience and, maybe that’s why, in the back of my mind, I decided to audition for Godot.
Godot is a serious play—seriously funny in many instances—but still serious. And yet I’m at a place in my life where getting together with a bunch of dedicated theatre people is a place where I want to be: pure community theatre. We will all do our day jobs and then come together at night to dive into the world of Beckett, a world where the regular rules don’t apply.
I hope you’ll support our show and community theatre wherever you are. The arts, like every other entity, are having a hard time now.
Let’s break some legs!
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