At the end of 2024, I was cooked. Fully crispy, charred artist-on-a-spit. Four major surgeries in four years, disillusioned, gaslit by the career I thought I loved, ghosted by people I used to admire, and filled with a creeping sense that I was the punchline to a cosmic joke called Show Business. I couldn’t even walk IN to a theatre, I couldn’t watch TV or movies, listen to music, or look at a stage without feeling totally nauseated.
Like I’d let down the ghost of my teenage self
and every hope of my long dead father
like I was in my own little Euripides play
I joke now, but months ago? I was all dactylic hexameter and up-at-night, inter-generational questioning.
My inner monologue had devolved into: “Why are you doing this to yourself?”
I was staring into the void of my creative life and wondering if there was anything left to revive—ready to quit The Showbiz move to a small town and open a candle store called something tragic like Cutting Room Floor or Final Act (or something) and never speak of “the industry” again.
So when 2025 began, I made a very quiet, barely-uttered promise to myself: no more striving. No more hustling. No more saying ‘yes’ to things out of panic. Every project I took on needed to meet one simple criterion: it had to be nourishing. Not career-advancing, not résumé-polishing—but quite literally nourishing. Nothing I took on could be to impress anyone, gain me clout, or “advance my brand” (please stab me)— all it had to do was very simply make me feel vaguely human again.
The rule was simple: if it didn’t nourish, it didn’t happen.
There comes a time in every working life when the great “why” that once powered you—the burning sense of purpose that made exhaustion seem noble—simply burns out. One day you wake up, and the thing that once filled you with wonder feels hollow. The rituals of your calling turn mechanical; the air goes out of the room.
I think that’s the part no one warns you about: how meaning doesn’t vanish all at once, but by degrees. You bargain with it. You tell yourself the spark will return when the next job comes, or the next success, or when the world feels less cruel. When meaning leaves a person, it does not leave politely. It takes
with it your sense of direction, your appetite for risk, even the reason
to get out of bed in the morning. And when it finally does go quiet, the silence inside you is deafening. You start to wonder if you’ve been a fool to love something that can’t love you back.
But here is what I have learned in the slow rebuild: meaning is not an idea; it’s a practice. It returns not through revelation, but through repetition. Just like the art of theatre acting itself: the identical daily exericse. The play is not different, but the world is, and you are. And thus meaning sneaks back in during the work itself: line by line, scene by scene, hour by hour, shoulder to shoulder with other people who are also trying, also hoping, also just showing up.
The doing becomes the proof.
The companionship becomes the faith.
And one day, almost without noticing, you feel the warmth again—the quiet understanding that purpose isn’t something you find, it’s something you make, together.
When Dial M for Murder at Drury Lane came along, I said ‘yes’ because my instincts told me it felt good. Not strategic, not glamorous—just good. I came back to Chicago—and found not only work, but warmth.
First of all, Chicago is that girl. Warm, funny, affordable-ish, and full of theatre people who will drive you to Trader Joe’s when your loaner car craps out. I forgot how much history I had here. Colleagues. Friends. Kin. People who had called an ambulance, seen me single, sad, on morphine, knew every “bad side” and still answered my texts. I never like working far from home, but Chicago now feels like a second one, with (sorry, New York), superior hot dogs.
And then there was the unexpected joy of finally sharing a contract with my high school friend of twenty-five years, Adam Immerwhar. Adam led with taste, humor, and (a helluva lot of) grace, and together we filled our utterly preposterous “digs” in the windowless attic of this actual theatre with something I think I remembered called joy. There were martinis. There was the wearing of costumes from the seemingly permanent “Christmas Carol” clothing rack, and as a result of all of this: THERE WERE BITS.
And my God, this cast. Unreal. Every single person was both a phenomenal actor and a functioning adult. One of the best companies of my career.
We built our own little speakeasy backstage—a ramshackle bar affectionately named “The Bywater Scissors.” It became our gathering place, our late-night lounge, our hub of laughter, Erik-Hellman-prepared cocktails, and gentle mischief.
Joy, shared.
Exhaustion, witnessed.
Kindness, on the rocks.
There was something sacred about it.
This company has been a miracle of balance—funny, kind, honest, supportive; and all emotionally literate, have been around the block in The Showbiz, and all with a nice grasp on reality. We managed to stumble into the anti–regional theatre cliché: no drama, no ego, no chaos. Just real grown-ups playing pretend together for a living fully committed to the backstage bar.
Now, as the show closes and 2025 saunters to its end, I can say this: I’m not “fixed”—let’s not start that rumor—but I am better.
It turns out, rehab doesn’t always happen in hospitals or cult-y Malibu retreats. Sometimes it happens at The Bywater Scissors, surrounded by people who remind you that there really IS still magic in the thing you loved when you were fifteen.
Still here.
Still showing up.
Still loving a ridiculous, impossible art form that somehow refuses to let me go.
So, to the artists (Amanda, Erik, Ian, Jonathan et al) who maybe unknowingly helped me find my way back to wholeness—thank you.
And thank you, ‘The Theatre,’ for taking me back even after I ugly-cried and told everyone we were “on a break.”
There really are no people like show people.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment