Actor: A Novel in Three Acts

The red-orange glow of the pizza place across the street stained the printed audition side as I read:

All scenes take place on the same set: a kitchen and adjoining alcove of an older home in a Southern California suburb, about 40 miles east of Los Angeles.

A kitchen and alcove forty miles east of Los Angeles. In reality, I was a thousand miles further in the middle of Chicago with no kitchen to speak of and no alcove...just a window, a kettle, and the glow of a pizza place I could barely afford. Food could wait. This audition was more important. Nail it, then food. Good food. All the best food.

I dropped the side to my hip, turned from the window, and looked around my empty apartment, imagining the stage or audition space that would soon confront me as it does all actors with Stanislavski's "black hole." This void, if I didn't have my figurative box of nails to pick up and organize, would consume me.

Acting is action, Edie told me.

This is why she trained my body to allow for nature-given intuition, based on subconscious feelings, and an actor's instincts. All of that came if I allowed myself to be open in the moment and to it. If not, stale, mechanical, un-true disconnected actions and movement—death.

“There," I said aloud, "is where I'll put a chair if they have one. If they give me a table, it will go...there. If they give me nothing, well, I will have nothing and prepare for that.“

I pointed to a spot beside the chair and then stepped on it. This would be my mark to return to as I made way around and positioned myself to see the reader, the director, and whoever else would be there. That and so they could see my face, hear my voice, and feel my soul if the muse decided to show up.

I dug my heels into the cold of the hardwood through my socks, aware of my tiny kitchenette to the left and to the right, nothingness. If I had a TV and a couch, maybe, but I had neither, so nothing, for now, would have to do. With structure, I could pick one or two moments from the script and work.

Prepare, prepare, prepare, Edie hammered into me. So you can make it look like you've been doing it your whole life without even trying.

Even here, even alone on the other side of the country, she was there, directing.

“Lee," I began, pacing and reading from the side, "is his older brother, early forties, filthy white t-shirt, tattered brown overcoat covered with dust, dark blue baggy suit pants from the Salvation Army, pink suede belt, pointed black forties dress shoes scuffed up, holes in the soles, no socks, no hat, long pronounced sideburns, 'Gene Vincent' hairdo, two days' growth of beard, bad teeth."

I stopped and reread the first line.

“Early forties.”

I was twenty-three, not early forties.

Tim told me the director wanted me for Lee, not Austin. He did, right? Lee was supposed to be weathered and beat down to death by two decades of desert sun, bad decisions, and hard drinking carved into his face and body. The man was broken...so was I, but not that broken. Not yet.

I wanted to play him. I needed to play him, but was it believable?

It's not your job to argue but to trust the vision, I sneered at myself. Find the truth in the gap, and act as if I was under the given circumstances. Age could be suggested and played. Weariness could be performed.

Malkovich was twenty-nine when he gave his infamous performance, and no one questioned whether he belonged on that stage or what he did. Why not me? If they didn’t want me, they wouldn’t have called me in and wasted their time…unless it was just a favor for Tim. No, I told myself. Stop thinking that way. Poison. Death. They saw something else, and that’s what mattered.

I was Lee. Use and transform what you have. Become.