Hello friends
Well, the show is open! It was exhausting, but it's open. We had a great week of previews with pretty raucous audiences that laughed at every word. Opening night was certainly a thing. The house was great and full of people from the company, so that was nice. There was a big opening night party at our Artistic Director's house. This opening night party was one like I have never seen before. I've been to openings at City Theatre and at the Public, but things are run so differently here. The event wasn't held at the theatre, but instead, the patrons, donors, board members, cast, crew, staff, etc. were all invited to Bob's house. There were easily about a hundred people there. Probably more. It seems like a totally different world in which Bob can announce to the audience, "opening night party at my house, be there." The thing about it, though.... it was impressive. The food was unreal, free wine and beer for days; shrimp rings, expensive Italian meats, French cheeses, homemade pasta dishes.. the list goes on. Unfortunately, the weather was atrocious that night with heavy downpours. So instead of spreading out on his back patio areas (yes, "areas" plural), everyone was crammed in his house and on a tiny lip on his back porch. Now, his house is not a small house by any means, but for someone like me who easily gets overwhelmed by crowds, it was too much to handle. Needless to say, I left pretty early. It was a fairly nice time nonetheless.
After all the tech rehearsals and opening weekend performances, I have really started to ask myself a lot of questions about why the hell I'm even in this career. Some of them are questions that I can easily answer, but others have been pretty eye opening. The preliminary question is obviously, do I like to act? The answer is easily yes. In a perfect world, that would be all I needed to know. Alas. As I walked around that opening night party, I asked myself, do I like these kinds of events? Do I give a damn about schmoozing with artists and rich people? The answer is kinda... no. I know this is obviously just a small, small part of it all, but in a way, it's not. Now, these events are not what makes me second guess what I'm doing, but rather it got me thinking about the bigger aspects of my career.
The cast I'm working with is full of fascinating, great people, who have worked hard to make a decent living as actors. But at the same time, I do not envy them. Some of them are married or in relationships, but go months and months without seeing their partners every year. Others have very little outside of their careers: no permanent home, a suitcase of the same few things; but they have story after story of productions they've done or of people they know. While that is all very romantic and, I imagine, quite fulfilling in its own way, I can't imagine that being my life.
Not to sound too much like Dave Peterson, but I was listening to the music from Sunday in the Park with George the other day, when a few lyrics actually made me want to stop my car. Bernadette Peters is singing about what her mother used to tell her, and she sings, "It isn't so much that you do what you like than it is that you like what you do." This, to me, is exactly right. I began to think about how that translates into my life. I like to act. I do what I like. What I do, however, is not just act. My life could wind up being endless traveling with a lack of home base, a plethora of schmoozing, and some acting in between. Is that what I want? I want what I do to include acting (because I like it) but with a much different lifestyle. I don't even know if that's possible, but I figure if I start with laying out all the things I would want in a perfect world, I can sacrifice and compromise as I go. I have never been a person to say, "this is what my dream ____ is." It's not what I do. Because I realize that I may not even know that I want something until it happens. With that being said, I want to figure out a way to do what I like in an environment that I control. I decide where I live; I decide when I move; I decide with whom I spend my time. To me, liking what I do on a daily basis is more important than making sure I am an actor every blessed minute of my life. If I could plan life any way I wanted to, I would want to be surrounded by the people I love, doing what I like if I am lucky enough for the opportunity. I'm certainly not saying that traveling for gigs every once in a while is out of the question, but I have to ask myself what I'm willing to sacrifice. I look at these actors who miss so much in the lives of the people they love so they can say they played x, y and z roles, and I'm just not sure if that is worth it for me.
First of all, I apologize for the stream-of-consciousness style of this blog entry, but these are things I needed to work out for my own brain. Most of it probably makes no sense unless you are sitting in my scattered little brain anyway. Maybe it is the secluded feeling of southwest Florida that is provoking these thoughts. I know that in other places, I can, in fact, act while having a stable life, even if it means having a few jobs on the side. But at the end of the day, the real people in my life mean more to me than the characters.
If you've made it through this blog, you deserve a medal of some sort: a jumbled, philosophical medal.
Who knows. Maybe I'll wake up and feel differently...
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