Actor: A Novel in Three Acts

I would be lying if it wasn't validating to hear Lisa say what she said. She could have said nothing. When I was starting out, many directors like Lisa didn't even look up after I finished. Neglect at any time in one's career, was common. I got used to being looked through even when center stage.

She could have easily said, "We'll be in touch," while another actor's headshot was tight in her hand as some assistant waved me off. Lisa didn't do that. She said, “Thank you." She said, "That was great." Lisa, the head director at Steppenwolf Theatre, said, "That was interesting. I wasn't sure what you were going to do that whole time."

Per my training, I believed Lisa. I trusted her. I needed to.

I wasn't sure what to do next. So, I listened to the faint whispers from the audience snake through the theatre's seats and its aisles, accompanied as if in orchestra with their squeaks and groans, and waited. Sometimes, that's all one can do. Wait and listen. The audition was over and the side was finished. My dear reader was gone. They didn’t tell me to leave. Was this another test? I needed direction. I waited a beat longer, then started to move off-stage when Lisa, from her seat, asked, “So, what are you?”

“Huh?” I replied like an oaf. “What am I?”

At that point, I was completely out of the scene. Any inkling of Lee, his strength and authority, was gone. Lee would have shot back some quick, venomous verbal punch, but Ave had returned. I had nothing: no status, no character or scene partner or playwright's words to rely on.

“Come downstage," Lisa requested. "Your voice was great, but I can barely hear you now that you’re out of the scene."

At her command, my body advanced. There was an ache in my legs and my feet. Suddenly, I was reminded of my old, tired shoes; my exhausted, bitter bones; my existence outside of the stage and performance. This recognition raised hazy images of my unfurnished apartment, my bank account funded entirely by Dean, and the realization that once this audition was over, I had no-one to meet or go home to. The vision shifted to Edie's living room, white light beaming from its three bay windows with the sky above. Time and any sense of control scattered like dust near the ghost light as I arrived at the lip of the stage.

In my periphery, I saw a few other anxious actors waiting in the wings looking more like statues than performers. All of them were eager for their opportunity to do what I had done. Their arms were crossed, poised in quiet solidarity; a mix of envy and hatred churned in their eyes. Their glares could have been conjured by the Assistant Stage Manager’s headlamp, but I didn't believe that.

Lisa’s question was still unanswered. I didn’t know what I was. I didn’t know if I was anything. What was I? I was a twenty-two year old male. I was an actor. I was my mother and father's son. I was scared. I was many things. The director could not be ignored, so Lisa asked her question again, firmer this time.

“What am I?” I repeated. “I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean."

I put up my hands to block out the lights. Out of the scene, they felt brighter, almost hotter. Whatever protection I possessed from before—gone. The stage felt like a great, expanding, and endless desert. I was lost like Lee in the imaginary world of the play; unable to go back to the beginning, uncertain where it even was anymore.

“Turn down the lights!” Lisa screamed over her shoulder. "Point them at me actually. Just a little bit so Ave can see me." She sighed and shook her head like a dog with a rabbit in its mouth. “There’s no in between with those guys." She let out a deep sigh. "Again, I asked, what are you?”

"I still don't understand."

“What’s your background?" she persisted. "Ethnically, I mean. What are you? Where are you from? It was the first thing that popped into my head after you were done."

Lisa was standing completely still, fully in the light with wide, authoritative shoulders, curling inwards slightly at their ends. She looked unbothered at her question. She was of medium build, about the same as Edie, but with more stature. The mixed, warm complexion of her deep, olive skin was brushed with the faintest bit of scarlet, mostly around her cheeks. She had black, semi-curly hair that lounged just past her ears. I had no idea what she was. I didn't care. What are you, Lisa? Did I need to know?

All of her seemed to refract the stage lights outwards, creating a halo effect. I watched from the edge of the stage as she leaned forward into the seat in front of her, pressing her palms hard into the chair’s back, grounding herself, waiting for an answer. The nails of her fingers were painted a light forest illuminated green. There were a few gold bands wrapped at random on her slender fingers.

“I guess I’m a mutt," I said.

Sweat was building on my forehead and the top of my lip. I could feel it and I knew they could see it. My body was ratting me out and there was nothing I could do. Panic was building in parallel with the need to flee.

“I’m asking because Lee and Austin are typically mediocre-looking white guys,” Lisa explained. Her frankness put me at ease. “Just by looking at you, you’re obviously different. That's clear to me. I hope you're not taking that the wrong way. Are you taking it the wrong way?"

"I'm not," I said.

"I’m just asking: How are you different? Why? My question is out of curiosity and not trying to categorize you—commoditize you. I just can't pinpoint where you are from. Cross my heart I have a point."

It was labeling me, but I didn't say that.

“I really never think about it,” I admitted. “Is that bad to say? Should I be?"

Lisa shrugged. “I suppose that’s up to you.”

I brought up my hands and arms and looked at my still fair, tanned skin: a mix of my California suntan, my mother's fine pinkish-and-cream Nordic hue, and Dean's Spanish, Mexican amber tone—my ancestry, as best as my family told me. People mistook me for Japanese or Filipino. No one ever took me for Native, but sometimes took me for Hawaiian. I identified with none of those. That wasn't who I was, just what people assumed through their visibility. I didn't want to take on somebody else's background. That wasn't who I was. What I was culturally was an actor living inside theatre, substituting it for any texture of ancestral life.

“This is what I am on the outside most of the time,” I said, motioning up and down my body as if presenting myself. “When I’m not trying to act like someone else.”

The audience let out a pop of laughter. I wasn't trying to funny. Suddenly, I felt like a geek up there as I tried to understand what Lisa was getting at. What did she want? What was the right answer? What was this some game of hers to cast me?

Lisa stretched her body up to the ceiling, then languidly leaned forward, resting her chin on her layered hands atop the seat in front of her. She didn’t say anything. She stared at the ground staying completely still, unafraid to sit in the silence she was in total control of. After a long pause, the crew behind her unsure what was going on, Lisa said, “Mutts come from somewhere, don’t they?”

I cleared my throat and stuttered before agreeing again.

“They sure do.”

"If we're going to use you for this part, I need to know everything. If there is something about you that we can use in the context of the play, this whole project could completely change." She turned to her assistants. "Right? Or am I talking crazy?"

They nodded in compliant agreement.

"In True West, it's always been white guys. Jim Haynie. Peter Coyote. Sinise. Malkovich. On and on. They did it here for God's sake in 82'. We can do that, but we can also do something else; a whole new other conversation I had not even thought about until now." She paused. "That's all impossible if I don't know. We can't use you to your full depth. The play can't go to a new place if we don't know. We're not here to classify. We're here to show human stories through the medium of theatre with the text as a bridge. You know that. I know you know that. You know that, right?"

I nodded and told her of course I did.

She stood up straight again, looking me up and down. “Given who you are and who raised you, I feel dumb double-checking."

Outside on the street, sirens from a police car and an ambulance rushed by. Then above in the mezzanine, at the top level, a door slammed shut. It was so loud we could hear it through the lobby and into the theatre. Pandemonium. There were whole worlds out there, indifferent to what was going on inside.

“I focus on the work,” I told Lisa, trying to ignore what she had said.

“As all good actors do."

“That’s all I can really do," I persisted. "Everything else is a distraction. Out of my control. Someone told me once: there is no need to worry because there is no spoon."

"Yeah, I saw The Matrix, but what do you mean by "a distraction?" Lisa turned to look at her assistant, then back at me. “Interesting term.”

“I don't mean as unnecessary or a burden. I mean that sometimes race, ethnicity, isn't always the focal point of a play. If I used my background for a role every time I auditioned, it gets in my way."

"But maybe it is," Lisa said. "Sometimes, at least. And you have yet to be asked to acknowledge it."

It felt like wind had been knocked out of me, but I held my ground.

Lisa nodded, mostly to herself. I watched her knead her temples in silence. Her assistants switched from looking at each other and back to me. Nothing said. There was nothing to say. One of them was writing something down very fast and far away.

"Shepard's play is racially blank," Lisa said. "White by default. And I'm trying to figure out what would happen if we cast you. Would that change things? For the better? Worse? Is it definitionally 'wrong?' or just another angle to a story most people already know? Would that piss him off? Make him happy? Indifferent? Do we have to care? I think it would be good for you. Are we here for you?"

I shrugged.

"Keith Haring said ‘art is for everybody,' but should it be if it goes against the goal of the artist's art to begin with? As I said...I can't know that. True West has room for the text to be universal. It can change. It must change and I believe it's possible if the acting and the words are said honestly—which you did. Who you are uniquely, if done right, shifts its meaning based on a myriad of other things, and lets the audience do with it what they will."

I was about to say something, paused, and decided silence was my only answer.

“Does that scare you?" Lisa asked. "When you discover something new, who do you ask to cross it? Who do you turn to?”

I thought of Edie, but only let my mind say her name.

"Who do you turn to when you don't know what you are?"

Did she want to know how Edie was white, with maybe some English and Norwegian? That Dean's background was a mix of Mexican, Spanish, Native? I knew our background like most Americans—very little. Our culture was theatre, which was everything and everyone, forward and backward. There wasn't any family in San Francisco that I knew of. The only family we ever had was through the stage. Christmas parties were spent at the house of Harry, a musical theatre singer and dancer who'd studied with Fred Astaire, drank too much, and always told the same story every year. Thanksgivings were at one of the Shakespeare Pams' apartments, over rich stuffing and bubbling gravy, as they recited soliloquies and ran scenes so in sync their faces looked like clowns, the next murderers or the murdered, that I felt transported. New Year's Eve was with improv troupes in the middle of Golden Gate Park with illegal fireworks, taking ideas from the audience, naked. Easter was with the techno modernists who wrote their plays with emojis; Halloween with the ballet dancers from the East Bay that Dean and Edie knew from the old days. That was our family, and they were from everywhere and all over, maintained by every shade, pigment, and hue, all acknowledged and absorbed.

If they knew where to look, everyone was invited to Parnassus.

“I could see your commitment to the work,” Lisa said. “It’s obvious, but you're bringing a potential angle I may want to follow."

“I think it’s a great idea,” I replied.

"Of course you do, but I'm uncertain though how much this came up at all for you in the past and if that's going to be a problem. If it will come across as forced."

“I was told I was just going to be doing the side.”

“And now you’re doing something else,” she said. “Can you handle that?”

My cheeks bloomed red. I tried to look away, but there was nowhere else to go. I was there.

"We get so many kids thinking the world has been waiting for them to grace any major stage. They come up here, do the thing they've been doing for their usual round of applause. Ask them to go deeper, to take it somewhere outside those four conservatory walls, and they freeze. Their once-godly professors were jamming bullshit down their throats the whole time: how special they were, how unique their performance was, how intuitive their choices were. So when the crutch gets kicked out and someone like me asks a real question about making real art, there is nothing but shock followed by silence."

Lisa exhaled and stretched her neck around in a circle, breathing deeply through her nose, the lines of her throat thick and constricted.

“Then we’re the ones who have to break it to these kids." She said this what seemed like great pain. "They can’t do it in there because they would quit. And when they quit there goes the money. If those kids knew the chances, if they knew the odds, if they got treated by the professors with an ounce of the kind of indifference or neglect they get out in the world, they would ditch the rave reviews they got in their high school show of Hamlet, forget the praise and applause, and re-think their decision and ask themselves what they were committing their life to."

Lisa cleared her throat and held the space.

"Art is easy to put off," she said. "Art is easy to save until tomorrow, but that's how it retracts, repeats, and stops it from moving forward."

I knew my time was long over. I should have been gone thirty minutes ago, so I said one last thing, knowing that I would probably never be back again.

"One of my professors told me once: lean into the specifics or else you’ll be lost in the circus of the world."

"Your professor is right,” Lisa acknowledged. "But you’re not in school anymore. Whatever you cared about—grades, hallway cred, notoriety, girls, guys, professors…it has nothing to do with this show."

"But my background does?" I asked.

“I know you are Edie’s kid."

She said it matter of factly, but I knew she had been waiting to stab me with it the whole time.

“I’m out of here.” I turned, started for the curtains, then stopped. "Is that why you're doing this? Trying to break me?"

“Hey!” Lisa shouted. “Hey!”

My eyes flinched and began to water. The nape of my spine, near the bottom of my skull and the back, hardened. Lisa had been an actress once. I could hear it in the power of her voice. She knew what it could do. She knew the power of her body.

“Do I look like some diehard old guard that likes to pick on kids who had it easier?"

“No,” I said. “I don’t know. I don't know what you want. And I didn't have it 'easier.'

"That's not what I meant."

I started to leave again.

“My mother was a school teacher and my dad was a banker,” Lisa explained. “I got into this to get away from that. I can’t imagine what it would be like to want to chase something that someone like your mother has already caught. But you're doing it. I respect that and I'm not seeing you because of her."

“I'm not chasing her," I said. "I'm not chasing anything."

"What are you doing then?"

I turned to face Lisa. "Cast me and find out."

I told her thank you again and exit stage left.