Tonight, I’m seeing a show that a friend of mine has put together. Years ago, he and I, alongside a few other friends, were going to put on a similar show, authored by the same writers, at the same venue, and right as we were about to start production on it, we heard those glorious words, “Two weeks to flatten the curve”. Five years on, he’s able to have another swing at it. Good for him. It's a beautiful thing when something has another chance to shine.

I like theatre as a medium. I even, to some degree, enjoy acting in it. Though I’ve never been a part of any production I’d label as “profound”. I once had a part in a church play when I was a child, wherein I had a line that my character’s father walked around in his underwear. I happened to notice a congruity in my character’s home life and my own, so I decided to remark, to both the rehearsal crew and the cast, that my real father walked around in his underwear too. I hadn’t considered that since my father was a pastor there, that comment put an image in people’s heads that may not have been a welcome one. They’d had context, and I think they didn’t like that. Maybe it was ungodly, though I was never one to care about adhering to that particular stricture.

Beyond that church play, I had never felt compelled to act, though I had friends who were on major television shows at the time. The next time I appeared as someone else in a performative context was high school. I had been in band, with a primary focus on not associating with or identifying myself as what one thinks of as a “band kid”, and during that time I had stayed friendly with the theatre kids. I’ve always had a love and appreciation of theatre, as well as a respect for how hard it is to put together and perform. It’s different than recorded mediums such as television or film. On a screen, you can do as many takes as you want. On a stage, you got one shot. Now, if you’re not a moron, you probably know that. But perhaps I have a skewed view, being someone who has lived around the entertainment industry all my life. Many, if not all, of my closest friends were in the theatre program. One day, my friend, who happens to be the one I referenced a few paragraphs ago that I'm seeing tonight, suggested I audition for the musical. I staunchly refused, and gave an ultimatum that I’d only audition if the musical was one of two very specific shows. I knew they wouldn’t pick either of them. So in this, I had a way out. But by some twist of fate, I found myself in the audition room anyway. I remember two things about that audition process. One, after I'd finished the initial audition, the theatre teacher was upset with me. She asked, “Where have you been the last three years?” I said, “Across the hall”. She said there were so many parts I could have had in that time, but she was glad I’d come to join them, if only for a short while. The second thing I remember was when we had callbacks. Callbacks, if you’re unfamiliar, is when the people who weren’t awful in the first audition have to come back and learn more of the material, then perform it. That performance determines who gets into the cast and what part they’ll inhabit. At callbacks, nobody in the school had ever heard me sing. For the part I had my eye on, I decided that an emulation of the singing voice of Howard Keel would fit more than my natural voice. As I opened my mouth to sing the song, I saw my peers visibly think “Oh my god, I didn’t know he could sing”. Many remarked so afterward. I suppose that was a moment that generated some diminutive amount of pride. I got in. Those rehearsals were a joy. I discovered that I’m quite good at getting off book. Maybe that has something to do with how obsessively I delve into whatever I’m doing. My role was ridiculous, so I got to indulge some of the ridiculousness that I hold intrinsically, which was liberating. Now, keep in mind, it was a school play. We were inexperienced high schoolers. You don’t go into that ordeal expecting King Lear on broadway. Although it was still better than Hamilton. Regardless of the slipshod nature that the thing could occasionally fall into, it was a lot of fun to do that play. I made many lifelong friends. And even if just for a moment, I felt like I was a part of something.

After high school, I had a friend who asked me to be in a short film for USC. Beyond that point I was a part of many shorts, films, prospective television shows and the like, But never as an actor, mostly as a composer. I never considered myself to be any kind of great talent where acting was concerned, I was just a really good liar. Around this time I had already tried to make my own short films, which turned out to be complete wastes of time, so to only have to worry about my own performance was a breath of fresh air. As I recall, that short film required me to play a depressed guy who goes and sees It’s a Wonderful Life in a theater, and that somehow cures his depression. I suppose in a fanciful medium like that, one can temporarily suspend their disbelief. I don’t remember ever seeing the finished short, but that friend has gone on to do some great work for a studio that largely concerns itself with fedora wearing whip crackers and things set in galaxies far away and long ago or however it goes. Then, later in college, another fellow creative enlisted me to play a barista in another short film about a girl who couldn’t get a date for some event or something. The shoot was right in the heart of Downtown L.A., which has never been an area I’ve loved to be in for more than thirty seconds at a time. I think we shot three or four hours of her trying to flirt with me, and failing catastrophically. Most of it was improvised. A lot of me just having to look confused. I did end up seeing that finished short, and I’m glad that nobody else likely ever will. Not that I think I was bad in it.

Time passed, as it often does, and one day my best friend mentioned that he wanted to audition for a show a local theatre company was producing, and suggested I do the same. My other friend, the one who got me to audition for the high school show, happened to be assistant directing. I wasn’t ecstatic at the prospect of being in the show, but I did audition with him. He and I got two roles that acted in tandem the entire runtime. It was a joy to work with him on scenes, laugh through them, understand each other’s dynamic, and provide great performances for dwindling audiences. The cast was great, we had a lot of fun. The director of that show (not my friend the assistant director) happened to be quite the insatiate petulant child. Not someone I’d choose to work with again. He picked favorites, I wasn’t one of them. But it wasn’t for my performance or my ethic or my attitude, those were all just as good as anyone else. It was something completely in his mind. I’m no infallible being, I’ll admit my shortcomings. But nothing he nitpicked were things anyone else had a problem with, or considered something that the director should have ever focused on. He’d single me out, have me say lines, and then he’d yell that I was doing it wrong. Then he’d say the line, either exactly how I had just delivered it, or closely similar. It perplexed me. He often thought it acceptable to carry himself as a toddler, upset that his toys weren’t doing what he wanted them to. It was also insanely frustrating that he had never even seen a single production of the show, so he was directing it, operating on a smaller understanding of it than all of us, because we’d actually seen the thing multiple times. It’s upsetting to have to deal with someone who makes it their mission to have an issue with everything you do, just for the sake of having something to nitpick and micromanage. That’s an experience that didn’t end up confining itself to that theatre company. It manifested in other vessels, bodies who may have operated out of jealousy, hatred, or stupidity, and were determined to be a toxic source of negativity. One of our actors walked off the production in reaction to the director being such a toxic source of negativity. That put my friend, the assistant director, in a position of having to step in and replace him. At least I got to be in a show with two of my best friends. To my understanding, that director hasn’t gone on to do anything, but we all have. The other issue I had with that show was that my role was vapidly written, and often quite annoying. So ninety to a hundred percent of the earned merit of the character came from my injection of physical comedy. I’d argue that I nailed all that, considering my friend and I got most of the biggest laughs of the show. But where I was happy to slightly follow in the footsteps of physical comedians I admired, I failed to realize the immense toll that type of role takes on your body. I’d get daily cuts and bruises. I was flipping over things, hitting my head, running, jumping, throwing myself on the floor, it was more akin to being in the circus than acting. Why couldn’t I have been one of the guys who just walked around the whole time, said my lines, and gone home? I don’t know. My spirit wouldn't allow it. But we did end up putting on a great show. I was a part of it, even if it wasn’t as rewarding or fun as the first one I did with them.

As I entered the theatre tonight, someone told me that I looked familiar, and asked if I was an actor. I said I wasn't, but I had done a show a few years ago. As it happens, that's where they knew me from. Strange to be recognized like that for something I did once, and not for something I've poured my life into doing. Needless to say, tonight's show was great. To no surprise, my friend ended up being the best part of it by far, and I say that with no nepotistic affect or bias. As I walked to my car, I passed by two sixty year old men playing Jimmy Buffet songs for an empty wine bar. To my mind, the tragedy was that they had to spend thousands of dollars on that equipment.