Surely it is not the unemployment, which is frequent.
Not the eight-show week.
Not the just-for-the-holidays nine show week.
And not even the six-show week, which is mysteriously just as exhausting.
Not the matinee.
Not the two-show day.
Not
Saturday night after the two-show day, when civilians suggest “getting a
drink” as though you have not just spent seven hours being emotionally obliterated beneath industrial-strength, gorgeously designed lighting.
Not the dressing room with no window, the apartment with no dishwasher, the hotel room containing one fork and a refrigerator apparently designed to chill three individual grapes.
Not the audition. Certainly not the self-tape. Not the self-tape requiring a reader, a tripod, two full-body shots, a slate, a song of your own choosing and, presumably, a minor in cinematography.
Not the dignity, which you surrendered somewhere around the third callback requiring you to “bring movement clothes just in case.”
Surely not the stability.
Not the money.
Dear God, not the money.
Not the magnificent union health insurance one spends half one's career trying to qualify for.
Not unemployment forms.
Not taxes in seven states.
Not learning that you apparently earned $68 in Ohio eleven months ago and Ohio would now like to discuss it.
Not the the glamorous housing, with its miniature refrigerator, useless saucepan and mattress apparently designed by the CIA.
Not the notes.
Not the reviews. Not the absence of reviews. Not the reviews one claims not to have read and can nevertheless quote verbatim seventeen years later.
Not opening.
Not closing.
Not the exquisite little death of packing one's dressing room into a tote bag while you hear the demolition-screech of the work crew dismantling the world you have inhabited for six months, twenty feet away.
And yes, we Theatre People kvetch and winge and bemoan and complain because the theatre really does ask so very much of a person.
Time, for one thing. Evenings. Weekends. Christmases. Summers. The years when other people acquire houses and sensible shoes.
It asks for the body. Eight times a week, please. Healthy or tired, heartbroken or menstruating, grieving or merely middle aged.
It
asks for faith without evidence. Patience without guarantees. Rejection
without bitterness. Confidence without arrogance. Vulnerability on
command.
It
asks you to leave home. To live in strange apartments with one spoon.
To love people ferociously and then, on a Sunday evening, pack your
dressing room into a grocery bag and perhaps never see them again.
It asks you to begin again.
And again.
And again.
And it is astonishing knowledge—blindingly elegant in its straightforwardness—that after a lifetime of all rejection, airports, bus
terminals, callbacks, unemployment, bad digs, good reviews, bad reviews,
illness, heartbreak, triumph, disappointment, eight-show weeks and
Sunday-night trains—that I am, somehow, still here.
An entire ridiculous life is narrowed to one illuminated stagedoor I have walked through one hundred thousand times.
I and still here.
Still standing in the dark, just beyond the light.
Experiencing that humiliating, inconvenient, financially indefensible sensation:
Oh.
Right.
This.
This ancient, sacred, indescribable-in-its-profundity human ritual, is what I love.
That's why.
Perhaps the mystery isn't how I ended up here, but why, after everything, I still love it.
What does a person owe the thing she has loved all her life?
The theatre asks for everything.
Surely thirty years is enough payment, I think, more often than I care to admit.
And yet, beneath all the indignities, compromises, dressing rooms, unemployment, bad housing, opening nights, closings, and years spent wondering whether one really ought to have become a lawyer—I stayed.
And I am beginning to understand, belatedly, that nothing in this artistic life was ever owed in the first place.
Only offered.
Only entered.
Only returned to, again and again; the ritual we cannot quite stop believing will change us, one rising curtain at a time.
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