I just didn’t like it.
The audition made me feel vulnerable and just plain bad about myself. On top of that, I was embarrassed not to have thought the whole thing through more thoroughly. I wanted my Equity card so desperately, I hadn’t stopped to ask myself what I was comfortable doing in order to get it. In art, the painter presents his canvas. In acting, the canvas is you. Over the years, I’ve learned to have a sort of distance from myself in certain situations—I’ve regularly stripped down to nothing in front of a stranger in order to have a fitting, for example. As actors, we are poked and prodded by other artists whose contributions are vital to presenting the canvas at its best: hair, makeup, lighting, scenery. The canvas is given lines to say, someone else’s clothes to wear. In acting you have to have an objectivity that enables you to, at times, turn yourself over to someone else and let them do the painting. But this was my first experience paying more attention to the canvas part than the me part, and I realized both sides needed to line up. I’d thought it was mature and professional to do anything asked of me to get the job. I learned a little too late that day that maybe it was more complex than that.
The girl who got the part was an apprentice in her second or third year, a great comedienne with a great figure. She had no problem being semi-naked in rehearsals and seemed to really enjoy doing the show every night. There’s a lid for every pot, they say, and there’s definitely an actor for every role (and then some). The truth was, even if I’d gotten it, that part just wasn’t a good fit. The me of today often reads scripts I don’t connect with, and I’ve learned not to worry about it too much. If a story doesn’t resonate with me—even if it’s a really good one, even if it’s one I wish I could be part of—I just have to accept that I probably wouldn’t be as compelling as someone else could be in the role. And it’s become fairly easy to let them go.
One of my incredible acting teachers, Wynn Handman, always talked about how important it was to have a feel for the material. He dismissed the idea that every actor should be able to tackle every part. “Charlie Chaplin did just one thing,” he’d say. “He just did it better than everyone else.” Later on, I’d learn not to feel too bad when I realized a part wasn’t right for me. But at that young age, with only high school and college plays on my résumé, I didn’t think I had any right to be choosy or to have much of an opinion about what I wanted to do. At the time, I had only the vaguest hint that my instincts might be worth respecting.
It would take many more years to learn how best to respond to those instincts. But when, during the course of my early career, I was asked a few more times about nudity, the answer was always a fairly easy no. Nothing wrong with it, and a vital part of some kinds of storytelling; just not for me.
In my second summer at the Barn, I was given an Equity role without even having to audition for it. I was chosen. This was a real honor, and a very big deal among the other apprentices, and it happened so much earlier than I thought it would. My headshot plaque dreams returned! The character was named Marjorie Baverstock, and the play was called The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940. The 1940s! The decade all my after-school TV viewing had been preparing me for! It was meant to be. My character was an older aristocrat in her early fifties whom a bunch of young theater hopefuls are trying to impress so she’ll give them money to put on a show. The fact that I was ten years younger than the people playing the “young” hopefuls was no problem! This was The Theatah, and I was an actrice, up for any challenge! I’d simply bring my years of high school experience putting on old-age makeup to bear, because everyone agrees that drawing all over your face with a white greasepaint pencil to simulate wrinkles looks convincing as hell.
My character sits in a chair near the end of Act One while the young hopefuls keep trying to impress her with increasingly frantic and ambitious musical numbers. What they don’t know, but the audience sees, is that during one of their numbers Marjorie is stabbed through the back of the chair (hahaha?) by a mysterious villain. So while the performers think Marjorie isn’t responding to their audition because she’s not impressed, in reality she’s not responding because she’s not alive. The crowd dissolves into giggles (supposedly). The trick of this entire gag is that Marjorie, although dead, keeps her eyes open. That’s why the audition kids go on singing and dancing for so long. Hilarious!
There was only one problem. Well, actually, there were at least three problems: that I was playing thirty-five years older than I was, that I’d apparently learned nothing from the previous summer’s Snak-Ens diet, and that, too late in the rehearsal process, I discovered that one of my special skills was not an ability to keep my eyes open for as long as was required. I don’t know how the person in the original cast did it. After twenty seconds, my eyes started to water, and after about forty-five seconds, no matter how hard I tried not to, I had to blink. I think we can all agree that in general, dead people don’t blink very much. The audience was supposed to laugh at the enthusiasm of the young hopefuls’ frenzied auditioning, but on opening night, the biggest laughs came from my supposedly dead Marjorie having dry contact lenses.
In the first professional review I ever received, the Kalamazoo Gazette said that while my character died at the end of the first act, they wished—for my sake—that I’d died sooner. (AHAHAHAHAHA—more tears behind the theater.) “Look at it this way,” the director said later. “Your reviews can only get better from here.”
But I’d never know, because I haven’t read a review of myself since that day. I’ve also never Googled myself. What good can come of it? I’ve learned over the years that when someone says something really nice about you, in print or otherwise, it has a way of reaching you. Friends and agents can’t wait to tell you when someone says something positive. When the papers say something not so nice, your friends (and agents) get a shifty faraway look, or say nothing, and that tells me everything. What more details would I possibly need—“I wish she’d died sooner”?
In high school, my acting teacher, Brian Nelson, told us there were only two important pieces of feedback in the theater: if someone told you they liked what you did, or if they said they couldn’t hear you well enough. As an actor, “speak up” is a pretty objectively helpful piece of criticism. The rest is just one person’s opinion. (Though the one thing I’d add is “pronounce words correctly.” And try to know the difference between a stringed instrument and a fish.)
Years later, I would finally make it to BroadWAY after all, and it was just as thrilling and exhilarating as I’d imagined—quite literally a dream come true. But my name was on the poster, and I discovered there was a lot of pressure and responsibility that came with that. And even though I was honored to play Miss Adelaide in the revival of Guys and Dolls and loved being a member of that incredible company, a part of me also longed for simpler days, back when it was plenty thrilling to just be in the chorus of Oklahoma! and Brigadoon, when the furthest my imagination could stretch—the biggest success I dared wish for, the closest I thought I’d ever get to the dream of becoming like my idols from The 4:30 Movie—was to have my picture hanging in the lobby of a small theater in Augusta, Michigan.