a poor player

Dunkirk NY – There is a perfection hanging over this early morning. There is no breeze to speak of, the moon is full, the air is pleasantly cool. It is quiet outside my window, at least for the moment. It’s a night made for sounding out the soul.

I am beginning that part of my career where I will come to realize what it will mean to grow old in the theatre. As the school year begins and the students start learning work, memorizing scenes, monologues and parts – a routine I’ve gone through for the better part of 35 years now -  I’ve not been able to shake from my consciousness a vast weariness. A class in Shakespearean acting turns into a fiasco when students cannot even come in with one week’s warning and have 16 lines of Shakespeare fully memorized. A lecture in Introduction to the Performing Arts sounds hollow and a tad defensive. Young bloggers write of playwrights turning 40 and perhaps being washed up at that age rather than being at the height of their experience and ability (“we need something fresh, something new”). The same sorts of turf wars begin to rear their heads as planning for the new semester and the 2010-11 season begin. And the familiarity with which all these stimuli hit my senses can only mean one thing – I am getting old in the theatre.

I do not think of myself as physically or even emotionally old. Perhaps as humans we never do. Perhaps psychologically we’re only capable of seeing ourselves at age 28. But theatrically I feel the age. I feel the weight of every single year. I re-play old performances, consider past triumphs (such as they were to me then), examine past failures, reconsider every word that has come out of my mouth during an acting class, and begin to wonder what it has all amounted to. In this culture of instant gratification, with all its attendant distractions and hype, what does a life in the theatre mean anymore? And what will it mean as I get even older?

Was there a time, I wonder, when growing old in the theatre meant you could sit back with some satisfaction and see those coming up behind you building on your work rather than dismissing it? Was there a time when you could pass on your experience or wisdom and have a reasonable expectation that someone would listen to it and count it sage, worthwhile advice? Do we still stand within a tradition of 2,500 years of history, or is the baby dangerously circling around the drain with the bathwater? These seem to me to be the kinds of questions theatrical elders would ask, and here I am, asking them.

If youth has within it the quality of self-righteousness, then age, it appears, has within it the quality of self-doubt. Generations go through transformations faster now than in any time in human history, at a pace such that the elders cannot recognize in their present circumstances anything of their youth. Your world and all its reference points begin to slip away. You long to direct musicals which have musicality. You yearn to direct plays which have poetry and reasoned, careful structure and language. You are certain people no longer have the ability to produce such things anymore, or at the very least to appreciate them. Nor are they willing to sit still, listen, and learn. They must have whatever is now, new, fresh, and above all, marketable.

I found that, beginning in my early 40s, I was beginning to let things I had always believed in drift out of my life as they lost relevance. Organized religion was cast aside. Partisan politics became boring and pointless. Noble causes ultimately became corrupt or beaten down. Only in the theatre have I chosen to continue to grow old, clinging to it like a drowning man clings to an ever-deflating life preserver. What, I wonder, keeps me from surrendering, from letting go?

September is a strange time to start a new school year, or a new theatrical season. As the days become shorter, and as nature begins to shed its lushness in anticipation of the bleak barrenness that is to come, we attempt to renew ourselves educationally and artistically, and begin again. The two realities mesh poorly.  They bring to mind Beckett’s powerful image from Godot: We are all born astride a grave.

I found a leaf on the ground outside the arts center entrance the other day. It had already turned color, a beautiful shade of autumn red. I taped in on my office door. We cannot stop this process of growing old, but if it must be so, then I’ll need that leaf to remind me how to face it. The theatre itself has been growing old for some time now; perhaps it’s just been waiting around for me to keep it company for our final journeys together.  -twl