Actor: A Novel in Three Acts

Over those early years, Edie molded me into a vessel for her own ambitions, her own...anxieties from—as she named them—"everything fate chose to keep from me."

What came of this disloyalty from destiny was Edie pouring every experience, every lesson, every technique and whisper of wisdom she possessed as an actress, as well as everything she had never done herself, into me.

Why? Time, she believed, as well as the industry, was no longer interested in her transmuting the above through her to an audience.

"The muses have spoken," she believed. "No other choice in this world of worlds, but to listen. I would be a fool to ignore them."

With that decree of mind, every play she had ever read, I read by her command. If she had trained in a certain technique, be it some esoteric breathing method or random dialect or movement, she made sure I tried. Any connection she made herself, be it with a director or a casting or stage manager, Edie reached out to them to make sure they knew me even if they didn't remember her or care. Edie was driven, deaf to the present wants of those who made the rules and made it her life to ensure I created art from the well spring of everything she had ever known.

How could I refuse such faith...such blind energy? How could I not absorb and be lead by it? Who was I to deny her?

That's not to say Edie didn't settle scores early on in her career. Before she met Dean, Edie left San Francisco and tried to work in all the big cities—Washington, D.C., Chicago, New York—to make a name for herself in the tiny cliques and theatre networks. Like most, she struggled and was mostly ignored by her parents. They didn't understand her dream of wanting to be a part of the human drama and condition of her time through acting and theatre, not merely a commodity born to serve it.

They didn't leave her destitute...just enough to get by, so Edie worked flexible jobs to pay the rent and get to auditions whenever they were open. She went to classes and met other actresses and actors, worked with them, drank and partied with them, fucked some of them, and lived scenes from a bourgeois life of an actress until fate, one day, decided it was time for Edie to get her chance.

In 1976, she was cast alongside Irene Worth in Sweet Bird of Youth in New York, playing Heavenly Finley. Born in 1950, Edie was the perfect age to work alongside Worth as Princess Kosmonopolis, an aging actress. Irene Worth won a Tony Award for the role. Edie didn't realize it then, but Princess Kosmonopolis was a premonition of what was to come. She wasn't nominated for anything, only honored in the way all actors are: lucky to be working at all. She watched the awards from her shared apartment, with a glass of wine and congratulations for her cast member, but never nominated over the years she stayed in New York until she returned back home to San Francisco in '78.

There she met Dean and, suddenly more in love with him than the road, decided to settle down. Part of his allure was Dean was a talent agent and immediately took her on...kind of. He could only do so much as the director and casting were—most of the time—the ones with final say. Try as he might, Dean eventually got her work behind the scenes at the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.). He insisted that it was good for her regardless if it didn't mean she actually got on the stage.

"This is what it is." Dean told her. "You take what you can get and see where it leads you."

"Scraps," she groaned. "Morsels and scraps to a dead dying dog."

She took the job and, as Edie had worried, was never cast. Instead, she worked as a stagehand and as an usher, staying as close as she could to their core actors and productions, including the 1979 staging of Buried Child, Sam Shepard's Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Edie said she watched everyone second of the process, even to the point of where they sometimes asked her to get out. This was, in many ways, what would always frustrate and damn her: she was always on the outside...always within arm's reach of becoming the actress she knew herself to be.

Then, by way of the A.C.T. connection, Dean got her an audition at the ground floor of the Shepard era at the Magic Theatre from 1974-1984.

"She knows Shepard's stuff," Dean told their casting director. "She watched his fuckin' stuff every night!"

It worked. She was cast as understudy to Kathy Baker playing May in Magic's 1983 run of Fool for Love. The character, who was supposed to be around 32, was perfect for Edie being 33. Shepard, known to be tight about who he worked with, said she had the, weight of time in her eyes of someone who knew the present was the place to be but couldn't seem to let go of the past.

Edie only got the call once, but said that time on-stage with them was the greatest moment of her career as it allowed her to connect at last to an inner circle of artists—Shepard, Ed Harris as Eddie, and the rest of their crew—defining, in their way, what it meant to be an American dramatist. Thereafter, her name became started to become synonymous with that scene and with acting that it brought. She had finally found her home.

Then, she had me.

Her path—once fragmented and free—suddenly became defined by something she could not ask to take time off from in order to act. Edie couldn’t run off to New York to try working with the Living Theatre, or go to Chicago to try her hand at improv like she used to. And at that point, Dean was working overtime in Hollywood and LA as movies were getting even more popular. Edie loathed it all, but because she wasn't working, he had pay the bills and was never home or around. Acting was suddenly out of reach in yet another new way.

This chain of events for Edie was also unfolding alongside the aftermath of New Hollywood, or "the American New Wave"...a period from the mid-1960s to 1980 when traditional movie studios gave way to a new generation of auteur directors. By the late '70s and into the '80s, the world was ready and hungry for "High Concept" or "Blockbuster Era" films like Rocky, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Stripes. This further pulled audiences from the theatre, suddenly giving them not reflections of their lives but brands they could consume and live through vicariously in fantasy. Exhausted by the Old Hollywood formula and the classical rigidity of the stage, audiences moved on...leaving Edie feeling she had only made it halfway to where she was going. And she wouldn't do movies, however hard Dean pushed her.

Some of my earliest memories were Edie ranting and raving about this...true, unbridled terror-rages that would have made German-Jewish philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin best known for his 1935 essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," very proud.

"If I wanted to look through a fucking keyhole, I would set up a nice big door, put it in the middle of my living room, and do it! I want to see the actor’s spit. I want to give them my actual sweat and feel the floorboards vibrate underneath my raging feet. I offer my whole being for the sake of connection, and now the world wants pre-chewed phony spells of good-looking people with overpaid dialect coaches projected through the eye of a needle! Never. I'd rather die than be a traitor...and I know they need me. I know they need real theatre training born and bred from the work of Shakespeare, Griboyedov, Gogol, and Chekhov...but they can't have me, ever."

Whatever fulfillment she had found in the opportunities she had been given, along with the deeper disappointment of not having more time to see what else was within her to share with the world, was ultimately redirected toward me.

I would be the vessel through which she finished her journey. I would be the second half of a career cut short, the answer to every "what if" she'd never gotten to explore...the living proof that her time as an artist and actor and the sacrifices she made had not been in vain.

Born with the silver spoon of theatre and acting in my well-prepared mouth was a blessing. I'll be the first to admit the physical action of Edie training me since I became conscious of my five senses and was able to walk gave me an advantage. Negating nepotism would be a lie and seeing my job—to quote Stanislavski—was to "transmit the universal hopes and tribulations of man," via artistic truth, not letting my leg up be known...would be trying to hide the origins of my imagination.

That said, Edie's direction was, as shown before, by force. I was not so much given but ordered to become everything I needed to become the actor and artist Edie hoped the industry would reward. Returning to Stanislavski, this physical course Edie set me on, would influence or, perhaps, manipulate my "spiritual" interiority, or to use today's terminology, my own psychological inner life or subconscious intent:

"There are no physical actions divorced from some desire, some effort in some direction, some objective, without ones feeling inwardly a justification for them...all action in the theatre must have an inner justification, be logical, coherent, and real...in other words there is a complete union between the physical and the spiritual being of a role."

I could walk away whenever I wanted, but like Edie, I think I became obsessed once I discovered the joyful, maddening challenge of attempting to achieve the limitless connection to humanity the "magic if" provided...sometimes achieving, sometimes failing, and sometimes having no clue what happened at all...like life.

The gift and embrace of acting discovered through Edie was the infinite perspectives I could become, offering a broad point of view to act the plays of our time for people. This black box of the art was simultaneously a way to find oneself and learn about humanity in every play, production, director, actor, and word. And if I missed my mark, the stage and the craft, as it's always been, were there for me to try again.

And I say "I think" because even to this day I wonder: if I had never been Edie's child, if she had never led me to that stage and made me roar, would I have done everything I have done in my life as an actor? I can't say. I don't know. Maybe I'm not supposed to. But what I have come to accept, and even take pride in, is that none of it would have happened had I not broken from Edie to realize my own ideals of heart, mind, and soul...to reflect the artistic cravings of my contemporaries with my own autoluminous nature.

It wasn't easy, as you will see.

Years later, after Victoria Theatre and a lot of other things, we were at my senior year Cal Arts School of Theater showcase where I took my final bow after my final performance of my showcase.

Edie and Dean had naturally got me into Cal Arts. They had steeped me like a tea bag in nepotism, making certain, up to that point, that I got every audition, double-checking I was confirmed for every callback, and working every side back to front with Edie's methods in place...always, always making sure my imagination was backed up by theirs.

The signs were there throughout that final year I was breaking from this crack-up: drinking too much, not showering or washing my clothes, and unable to memorize anything I was given to work. Because I was questioning everything I was as an actor—the most important part of theatre—the energy of the inspiration needed so to be called forth was gone. One professor said outright I looked like one of the customer designers mannequins had "come to life" and smelled of mildewed laundry.

I've told myself the unofficial diagnosis was a slow-moving death of my "sincerity of emotions"...what Alexander Pushkin, Russian poet, playwright, and novelist, once called "true feelings in given circumstances." This is what we ask of a dramatist, which I couldn't truthfully say I had up to that point, constructed as I was.

This epiphany couldn't have come at a worse time for me, as an audiences of peers and their loved ones, strangers as well as directors, casting directors, and agents were all clapping and shouting with high praise...but they weren't clapping for me. They were clapping for the puppet Edie and Dean created over the years of my life. Every gesture, every intention, every emotion had been operated by them. What had I done in my life to that point that was genuinely me?

I could not truthfully say.

I tried to smile as the house lights rose, the applause more of a beating than praise. Then, out of the darkness of the wings as the true artist I'd convinced myself that I was died, my director was suddenly behind me awarding me the emerging actor prize. A sweat burst from my forehead, my cheeks flushed red...something that only came when I had lost all sense of calm or sense of where I was.

They were awarding a fraud: a spawn of a co-creation better defined as a Frankenstein of one person’s greed to expand their network and the other’s long list of divine malcontents because their puritanical vision was out of step of their present reality so eternally falling short of the sun.

I tried to wave the award away, but he demanded I accept it. The crowd cheered even louder...clapped even harder.

At the after party, I shook hands and kissed cheeks of everyone I knew, acting as if everything were alright as I had been trained to. Inside, I felt I had to go or lose any chance of reclaiming myself. We were all on-stage, milling and seething about with glasses of champagne. Out in darkness of the theatre in the audience, I knew Edie and Dean were there waiting. Fearful they could smell this change in me, I stayed as long as I could up there working to keep my mask of masks intact.

"So, what's next?" a classmate I'd worked with once but didn't really know asked me. "And congrats."

They nodded at my award.

"Thank you."

I sensed a hint of jealousy in their voice.

"You must be staying in LA? Pilot season's coming up."

"Chicago," I said, only because the plaque on the back read "Made in the Windy City."

"Brrr," they joked. "Cold, isn't it?"

"Pilot season starts in January."

"What?" they asked, thrown off.

"Pilot season starts in January."

"Oh," the classmate murmured. "Of course."

"And is pilot season even a thing anymore?" I asked. "Streaming doesn't seem to have a schedule."

"Speaking of cold..." Then, as a dig I couldn't defend, they asked not if I knew anybody there but if Edie or Dean did.

The timing of the question and the truth of it left me unbraced.

"Edie or Dean..." The weight of guilt, anxiety, and fear made me start to tremble like a little boy. "They..."

"I'm sure they'll connect you with people out there... as they're known to do," they said.

"No," I replied, gathering myself as I gripped the award and headed for the exit. "I don't think they will."