Theatre

Theatre is a dangerous profession.  The work is sporadic, unevenly compensated and the rejection inherent in it takes a dreadful toll on one's self-esteem. Beyond that, though, there are other risks.

The best actors are able to use their human vulnerability to connect with the material, their fellow actors and the audience.  Day after day, that vulnerability is tested and worked until, perhaps after a particularly harrowing role, the actor walks around feeling like a human wound.  There is a different kind of vulnerability in improvisors, but it is still present.  They must make themselves walk out onstage without the benefit of a script and just blindly trust that their scene partner will take the leap into the unknown with them and that the audience won't revolt or, worse yet, yawn.  It's scary, to spend your work life looking into the abyss and hoping that it won't swallow you. For that is the very purpose of theatre. As David Mamet said in Writing in Restaurants, theatre's purpose is "to represent culture's need to address the question, How can I live in a world in which I am doomed to die?"

Moreover, there's the fact that the very nature of our work is temporary.  For a period of days, months or (in the rarest and best cases) years, we work with a company on a performance.  The people that we work with become like family during that time.  We celebrate, we laugh, we cry, we fight like ill-tempered weasels, we live together.  And then the show closes.  Sometimes we stay in touch, sometimes we don't.  But every closing night is the dissolution of a family.  We clear out our dressing rooms, have our glass of champagne and walk out of the theatre never knowing if we'll see those people or work on that stage again.  I suppose it's part of what makes being in a show so special, but I somehow only tend to see the hurt.

And then there's the larger community of actors. We see each other at auditions and make small talk, maybe.  Or we take a class and roll around on the floor in elastic waist pants pretending to be zoo animals together.  Or we see a show starring a friend of a former castmate and feel personally invested because we know someone who knows that guy up there, acting his heart out.  We are somehow all connected, even those folks that whose paths haven't yet crossed ours.

So, when a member of this community dies, it hurts.  That person was connected to so many other people whose own connections inevitably wind their way back to us.  A death in the theatre world is like an earthquake with innumerable, infinitely vast aftershocks.  I saw this first in Georgia, where a tragedy took three beloved members of the local theatre community.  I saw it again this week where two young performers died within the span of seven days.  I didn't know them, but I am still shaken and sad.  Those who did know these young people are devastated and I  grieve for them.  I grieve because, at the very heart of it all, they've lost a family member.

No one tells you how dangerous this career can be.