I Buried it Next to My Theatre Career.

After a year of not touching theatre,

(with the exception of a cabaret performance or two and one audition)

After an imperative year of seeded beginnings for racial reckoning in Atlanta theatre and primarily white theatre institutions across the country,

After a year of being able to eat dinner at a reasonable time, go to bed at a reasonable time and have hobbies like a reasonable person,

After a year of aching, stifling loss of my creative medium,

It is hard to navigate just how I feel about theatre any more.

I miss it and I don’t.

I need it and I don’t want it.

I guess rather, I don’t want it as it (often) was.

I don’t want brutal hours and dehumanizing work schedules that don’t allow space to eat, sleep, breathe, learn my lines, do laundry, see friends, live, live well.

Hustle culture is dead.

It died in the pandemic; I buried it next to my theatre career.

I turned down my only other audition this year because of its sexist script. Brandon turned down an audition this year because of a culturally appropriative script. We’ve asked questions of producers -- Why are you producing this work? What are you doing for equity at your theatre?

The deeply rooted racist, misogynist, ableist roots of American theatre are not dead.

They are alive and well.

The theatre kid in me legit feels like Les Mis -- we the people, the artists, and especially us white artists, are the ones responsible for the barricade. All of us have to deny those in power the right to our talents if they refuse to be complicit in dismantling white supremacy and the patriarchy. Work will be lost in this battle -- equity cards discarded among rubble. Bridges will be burned. Livelihoods are the currency. That is scary. The work must be done.

I have fostered a lot of anger and resentment towards theatre in these 12 months, reflecting on abuses in our industry, ones I’ve experienced and those I’ve been too privileged to experience. I’ve fostered a lot of anger and resentment towards myself in these 12 months for every time I was complicit in a broken and abusive system. At what cost? For another gig?

I don’t want theatre as it was.

I don’t miss theatre as it was.

And yet, I do miss theatre as it could be.

I miss the storied expression. The ability to play at someone else’s heart for a while on stage, all the while it is actually my own heart, and not, and yours at the same time.

I need that.

And I need the beautiful, creative, mad people of the theatre.

So I’ve been trying to heal. Because I can’t help our industry heal if I’m a broken, angry thing.

To cut through the pain and shame and rage, I tasked myself to vividly resuscitate something, anything, I had loved about theatre.

And the memory shot forward from the dusty recesses of my mind; a fellow actor back-lit, waiting in the wings to enter.

See, this is my favorite thing in every show.

That glimpse of the shadowed, pure potential of my cast mates in the wings, electric with the energy of “about to be”.

If you have been in a show with me, at some point I have felt sheer awe at the beauty of your backlit halo -- you, at the precipice of another life; at the outskirts of the stage, faceless, a phosphorescent outline lit from behind by the dim blues of backstage lights or in the profiled glow of jewel-toned gels spilling off their stage and into the wings.

This is the real glimpse of ‘an actor prepares’. I feel the wood and metal that surrounds us, the dust and bones of the set, the cool of offstage and the rippling heat from on-stage, the muted sounds of voices through black velvet, and the crest and fall of laughter from an audience all grounding us to this common reality. There is pure presence in this space, and I feel calm, and powerful and grateful, and a little bit in love with everyone who has ever tread the boards.

It is a meditation, that moment I see your aura of light backstage, the breath before life. In that meditation I can’t help but feel wonder and admiration for this noble cause. To sacrifice our bodies, our time, our minds and hearts to tell stories to help others heal, or feel or laugh for a time.

There is so much healing that needs to be done. So much more fighting too.

These flashes of dark theatres and glowing castmates past call me to the space of resilience where I can work and play and fight and tell stories once again, in the hopes that someday, the endings of those stories will get to be new ones.

When it is hardest to forgive yourself and others and society, what is the luminescence of your backlit castmate guiding you towards healing?

Do you have one?

I’d love to hear about it.