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.