The End of Theatre ?
I have always explained an acting career to those outside of the business as a journey up the Emergency Stairs of a large Office Building. This Fire Escape doesn’t run from bottom to top of the building on one side. Instead, you have to climb up one floor, enter that floor and cross the entire floor to get to the next flight. Along the way, you are going to pass offices, cubicles, and small meeting rooms that you will get to visit and meet people, and learn things about the entire building (As well as a lot of gossip about ‘The Penthouse Level’!), or you will sprint across that floor believing that you cannot learn anything more. Suddenly, you will find yourself at the door to the Emergency Stairs to reach the next floor up.
I have always been goal-oriented, so the idea that there is an ‘elite’ level of actor that gets first ‘dibs’ at jobs as they come up is a perfect goal to aim for, and I realised that a small TV job that I had booked was actually a Union position as was an earlier TV I had done in the Spring. So, I’ve hit a whole new Plateau – Union Membership (Pause for applause!), which, of course, has created a whole new set of challenges to deal with. Especially as I almost immediately made Full Membership by booking two ‘Movies of the Week’ within two months of each other. Up the Fire Escape! However, a hurdle has already come up. I don’t think that I can commit the time for Theatre projects anymore.
At this writing, I am ‘working evenings’ for a professional theatre gig (another coincidence.), and the shortened timeline of two-and-a-weeks, 9-5 rehearsal, followed by a month’s run of eight shows per week has fallen just right not to miss any broadcast audition or job possibility, but there was a lot of ‘just so’ timing that appeared to fall into place serendipitously for it all to happen right. I can’t guarantee that it will all happen like this in the future.
I believe that the work you do on stage and film is the best possible training, practice, and networking you can do. The financial reward aspect (up to this point) has been secondary to getting a full Resume and a good Demo Reel. Now, however, all of the last four year’s work has resulted in the three end points I was working toward in one step, and now I have to work on getting better while I am only working on Union sets and stages. From a Stage Acting point of view, I have been lucky enough to perform in 11 plays in the last three years, but is it all over, now?
