a poor player

This is more or less the practical side of “what it took.” Having recounted a sort of inner journey last time, this is the outer journey.

If I were to take every single show I have ever been in and count them all up regardless of their quality or where they were done, I am probably somewhere near the neighborhood of having been involved in 200 shows. I cannot remember a time in my life where I was not involved with being in a show. My first really strong recollection of being on stage came in the third grade, when my younger brother was thrown out of a show for having shot spitballs in class. They called on me to take his place. I had 14 lines as the Narrator in that year’s production of Cinderella. I remember practicing my lines with my father before bed. My parents bought me a nice new blue suit for the show.As I went through grammar school I was in several other shows. The music teacher back then was someone who loved staging shows, and so the grammar school did a show every year. And I mean a show – complete with costumes and scenery and all. I was first in the chorus of an edited version of Pirates of Penzance. A funny story about that show was that I took a bow once during rehearsal when I wasn’t supposed to, and got a scolding for it. I followed that up with nailing the lead role in Johnny Appleseed. I can still sing you the title song, as well as a little ditty called I Hate Apples (That Make my Tummy Ache).

I transferred out of public school to the local Catholic school which had recently been built. They did not do shows there as such, but I found myself as the back end of a dancing donkey for a Christmas pagent because I was the only kid who could dance while looking at nothing but the floor below me. I also found my way into the local community theatre production of The Sound of Music as one of the children. They re-arranged the script to make me as Kurt the youngest of the kids, since I actually was the youngest member of the troupe. I had a large 7th-grade crush on the woman playing Maria.

I did two shows in high school. As a freshman, I was asked to audition for a part in e.e.cummings’ The Spirit of Christmas. The part was The Boy. It was my job to inform Santa that he was ruining Christmas for everyone. Father Harold Buckley, a brilliant man who was in charge of directing the dramas, did not let me off the hook because I was a mere freshman. I did not know it at the time, but he put me throught the Stanislavskian ringer. It was the first time anyone had asked me such hard questions, making me try to justify every move and every line. In my senior year I played Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, and Father Louis Newman was there to tap into my love of things Broadway. My father was a Broadway and opera buff, and he had a substantial collection of original cast recordings (which I now have, all vinyl). I could also somewhat play the piano back then, as could Fr. Newman. The production was a highlight of my senior year, but even so I never really thought about theatre as a career.

Undergraduate school brought my first real introduction to full-time theatre. I did not get involved with the theatre department until the end of my third semester, when I auditioned for and got the role of Jerry in Albee’s Zoo Story. From there on in I was fully involved. I had a great time and loved every minute of it. My first mentor, a man who lived a rather dissolute life in many respects, gave me my love of Shakespeare by getting me involved with his independent touring company, Shakespeare ’74. We toured area high schools doing storyline cuttings of Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies. We also put on independent productions of Hamlet, King Lear, Tewlfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the college’s “Old Main” auditorium. It was radical, wild and fun.

I married my wife straight out of college, went back to Long Island, and got a job as a teacher in a Catholic high school (which I got through connections), so for the next three years I taught in the daytime and went into the city in the evenings to pursue acting opportunities. I very quickly came to realize, however, that the commercial theatre world was not going to be for me. I was in NYC at a time of transition. The 1960s had brought an upheaval into the theatre world, as off-Broadway was becoming the place to be in terms of creativity. The Broadway book musical was dying off, Stephen Sondheim was taking off, and the Guare/Wasserstein generation of playwrights was being produced in theatres other than Broadway. Andrew Lloyd-Weber began to dominate the musical stage. I had no idea how to market myself as an actor, but on top of that I knew I had no desire to do so either. Turning myself into a “commodity” simply did not fit in with my concept of pursuing a vocation. So in 1977 I decided to audition for graduate school, and was accepted into NYU’s MFA acting program.

At that time NYU was a school full of terrified young people. In the building on E. 7th St., you’d walk into the student lounge, and the atmosphere was always tense. The “sophomore slaughter” was a well-known institution, and people lived in fear of it. At that time, any one member of the faculty could have you dismissed for whatever reason they wanted. The prime tool of actor training at that time was the “psychological breakdown” method, where they attempted to expose all your flaws, both personal and theatrical, and then purport to “build you up.” It was done in a cruel, cold and efficient manner. In my estimation, and as I experienced it and witnessed it, it was inhumane. I refused to submit, and took a critical, vocal and public stand against this kind of treatment. I was dismissed in the middle of my second semester, having spent eight months there. My dismissal came at the hands of the master acting teacher. It was protested by every other member of the faculty, to no avail. It was pretty much a life-turning event, as to this day I sometimes wonder what my career might have been had I received an MFA from NYU.

I took several odd jobs to stay afloat, while my wife continued her teaching career. Over that summer we both worked as aides at a migrant labor health center up in Warsaw NY, a job my aunt, a registered nurse, got me. At the end of the summer, I got a call from my undergraduate school telling me my mentor had taken another job five days before the semester started, and would I want to come up and take his classes for a semester? I said yes, and got my first experience as a college teacher. I ended up staying a year, and by the end of year realized that this was the career for me.

When I returned to the city, however, I thought maybe I could be content to go back to teaching high school English. I had my NYS teaching license, so I applied to some teaching jobs. I loved upstate New York a great deal; I think it was always the case of a city/suburban kid loving the open green spaces. I thought a life and career living in such beautiful country would be good for me. But I also pursued the possibility of moving to Seattle WA, and going back to grad school at the University of Washington, where a man named Duncan Ross was teaching. He had been recommended to me by the scene designer at my undergrad school. I knew I could not afford out-of-state tuition, so I was also trying to get a job in WA and spend a year establishing residency. I managed to get an offer from a high school in Geneseo at the same time I got an “almost” offer from a school in WA, and not knowing which way to go I flipped a coin. Geneseo won.

It turned out to be a disaster. Within four months I quit the job, because I came to discover I could not handle the conservative nature of the job, nor the constant interference of the parents and administrators. Two weeks after I gave notice, we discovered my wife was pregnant. I spent the winter looking for work with little success. My wife was a teacher’s aide, so she was bringing home some money, but not enough for everything. We were reduced to living in one room of our rented house to save heat, with the thermostat set at 58 degrees. This was during the depression of the late 70s, and the first oil crisis. It was the lowest point in my career: no job, no theatre, pregnant wife. I washed dishes a few days a week in the downtown cafe, and took the 1980 census in the area. I was rescued from this situation by a former colleague at Oswego who was now teaching at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She invited me to come there and get my MFA. Realizing this was an opportunity to get my MFA to go on to teach at the college level, I did so. I left in May to work at Nebraska Repertory’s summer theatre season, and my 7-month pregnant wife joined me in June. Our daughter was born in August just as I started classes.

UN-L at that time had a two-year MFA program. In addition to my grad teaching stipend, I was allowed to take an outside job because I had a family, and so I got a job at the neighborhood donut shop, Dippy Donuts, working early morning shifts before classes. My wife wanted to be a full-time mother after the baby was born, which was not the original plan, but that’s how it turned out. We got on a lot of public assistance in my second year in school, getting food stamps and public housing.

I did OK in grad school, but found my opportunities were limited and my reputation somewhat sullied because I admitted I was in graduate school in order to earn my MFA and go into university teaching. This admission was frowned upon in a pre-professional atmosphere. I was, apparently, supposed to be there to advance my career in the professional theatre, despite the obvious fact that everyone on the faculty had their MFAs and PhDs. However, for the first time in my life I bit the bullet and kept as low a profile as I could, because now that I had a family I needed that degree. I became the only member of my graduating class to complete my thesis and graduate on time. I managed to secure my first teaching job at a small community college in Nebraska, as the instructor there wanted to come to UN-L to get her PhD. I spent four years teaching there as a one-person theatre department, and it was while there that I discovered the Wisconsin Shakespeare Festival, where I eventually spent 8 seasons before it folded. I came to like the Midwest, but I always wanted to return to New York, partly to be closer to family, but partly because I love upstate NY and the geography of the state. My eventual goal was to find a position at a four-year college, and if possible a SUNY college, since I received so much from SUNY as an undergrad. I finally managed to get a full-time position at Genesee Community College in Batavia NY, halfway between Rochester and Buffalo, and after two years there managed to secure my present position at SUNY Fredonia.

The remainder of the story simply is that for the past 18 years I’ve been teaching and directing at SUNY Fredonia and acting in Buffalo, with the occasional foray into Wisconsin. I consider myself a very lucky person, because I get to do theatre full-time. I teach acting, I direct in the college season, and I perform in Buffalo frequently. I have been able to have a family, raise three children, and enjoy the beauty of upstate NY. In most respects it’s been a conventional life doing conventional things. I tend to think of my career as one might view the career of a utility player in baseball’s major leagues, guys like Luis Sosa or Miguel Cairo (utility infielders for the Yankees). I never played in an All-Star game, never hit for a large average, never smacked many home runs; just a steady guy on the bench doing the job well whenever asked. But I played the game; I had a career.

In fact, I got the career I set as my goal once I found the fit for me. I help young people to discover themselves, awaken them to a different kind of theatre, and on good days help them better themselves. I get to perform on stage, which I love. Occasionally I get to experiement, but not as often as I’d like. I have maybe one of the last occupations in this country which offers an amazing balance of free time and work time, as well as the ultimate in job security. This is why I think “what it takes” depends on what your goals are. Perhaps it can be said that my goals were too modest, that I did not aim high enough. Perhaps that’s true, but I do not personally subscribe to many of the false dreams which abound in this industry. Sometimes, as Stanislavski observed, less is more.

What should I do next – that is the question. I think I now need to spend more time doing what it may take to reform university training. I’d like to do what I can to move academic training away from its own New York centrism and towards thinking about creating theatre artists with an eye for seeing the whole of this culture rather than focusing so narrowly on the New York City cultural scene, as if that’s all theatre has to offer. I’d certainly like to move it away from the “mini-Broadway” mentality, and begin to use the resources we have as academics to encourage experimentation and creativity rather than slavishly copying or re-creating theatre’s past. What that will take remains to be seen, but I believe the first fews steps are just around the corner. -twl