a poor player

Fredonia NY – I’ve just arrived to my office from a class on acting Shakespeare and I await a session for directing a scene to be presented during a guest workshop coming next weekend. I am tired.

As I was sitting in my chair, I almost fell asleep with the door open. Part of it is from watching the Rays lose to Philly last night, but part of it stems from the sheer exhaustion I have upon completing an acting class. I am sometimes too intense.

I seem incapable of containing this intensity. While viewing students work, I just become so caught up with trying to get a grip on what will work best to help them improve, and my desire to help them improve while at the same time give them more self-awareness about how they are working on scenes and on their craft in general seems to overtake me. At the end of class, I shake my head a bit, walk up the stair to my office, remove my glasses, sit, and contemplate once again retirement. I am caught in between: to retire or not to retire; that is the question at the moment.  My heart tells me “yes;” my 401K – along with the fact that I love what I do as I am doing it – tells me “no.” A struggle, I think, that will continue for awhile. -twl

Dunkirk NY – I feel the need to write. Perhaps it is the oncoming winter which creates this urge. When winter arrives, I become more pensive and feel a bit caged in. Baseball season soon will end, and I will end up pacing the living room, not quite knowing what to do with myself. Writing seems the best way to get me to find something to do with the physical restlessness.

I will not bore you all with details on why it has been so long since I have written anything here. Suffice to say I began to feel that blogging was a useless activity. It was not producing action; rather, I became overwhelmed by the feeling that blogging was not bringing people together, but only serving to give people soapboxes on which to tout their particular points of view.

And I bought into that originally. When I first began my own blog, I felt as if I could make a difference, and through blogging I could get a degree of notariety and fame. I would get my ideas out there, people would listen, quickly see how right I was, and I would get lauded for that. You would think, as a person gets older, they would not remain so naive. Alas!

When the realization hit me that nobody was really going to pay any attention to what a triple-A actor in a triple-A city teaching in a small-town college had to say about anything, I threw in the towel. It was gradual. At first, I said to myself I was too busy directing and teaching, and after this next play I’d get back to it. The play ended, and I kept staring at the blank screen wondering what I could write. Nothing came; or more accurately, nothing came which I thought was important or significant enough. Reforming theatre just seemed a quixotic task of which I no longer wanted any part.

Then my brother’s colon cancer took a severe turn for the worse, and everything else became unimportant. By the time he died in mid-July, I was physically spent, emotionally fatigued, and depressed. Blogging about theatre? What a waste of time.

But a few weeks ago I began to read this blog. I was impressed with the mixture of good writing, poetic images, wonderful photos, and practical advice to boot. Here, I thought, is a guy who loves what he is doing, has a terrific sense of his own interior voice, and manages to be practical all at them same time. And I thought, maybe I could emulate this style.

So it is that I begin a different approach to blogging. My secondary tag line is “mediations on the art of theatre,” and I have neglected that. As I think about what I do all day, as I create my theatre in my corner of the planet, as I interact with my students – that’s what I’ll write about. In truth, I love what I do, even though I have misgivings about it, and even though I want to see a lot of reform in what I do. But the everyday interactions with students, watching them grow as young artists, helping them become more aware of themselves; this I like, and this I think will never change. And this is what you’ll read about if you return. -twl