The NYC Actor

I have a hard time answering questions like this. Same goes for “what’s your favorite [blank]?” It may be because I haven’t had that moment yet (or found a favorite anything) and it may be because I am chronically dissatisfied. Maybe a bit of both.

But… there is a moment in my life when I realized that this was the career/life for me. So. For all intents and purposes, I’m going to go with that as my “proudest” moment. I feel like I may have already written about it, but I don’t remember… SO!

When I was 18 and in my final year of high school, we produced the play Faust. I went to a very liberal, artsy school called Michael Hall. It is a Steiner, or Waldorf, school and it basically saved my life. I went to a catholic girls school before that and had a terrible time fitting in because they held me back a year for not being especially academic. When I switched schools I was put in the correct year with classmates my age and everything changed.

One of the great features of a Steiner school is that they specialize the first few hours of every morning with a main subject matter. They’ll focus on this subject for two weeks or so at a time. We studied many, many subjects and towards the middle part of 12th grade we had Drama where we worked on our final theater production. The teacher decided that Goethe would be an appropriate writer to focus on and that his play Faust would be a good example of his work for us to analyse and mount as our 12th grade show.

As a class we got in to heated discussions about the translations of the play, the characters, what the intentions and themes of the play were, but I got especially riled up over the character of Mephistopholes. If you haven’t read the play it is actually ambiguous whether or not Mephisto (as he is known) - he second lead - has a gender. Therefore, when it came time to casting I was adamant that it was inappropriate to only consider men for the role. I don’t remember thinking that I would be well cast at it or not, I think I was simply on a feminist kick and wanted it to be acknowledged that the women in the class were being overlooked in the casting. Well, I got into such a heated debate over it all with the director/teacher that he thought it would be amusing to make me play the role. He mad e the class vote on it and they all nominated me to do it. I was studying fine art and fashion design at the time and had already committed to doing the costumes for the play, but I thought FINE! I’ll do it and I’ll show you!

That play took everything out of me. I have always been a jack-of-all-trades and have found a lot of things easy to pick up. But nothing, including art and design, had ever consumed me as much as preparing for that role. So much so that, at one point, I collapsed from exhaustion. I was made to take a couple of days bed rest so that I’d be fit to perform in the actual show. Sitting in bed learning my lines and doing some basic background work on the character it hit me. It just became very clear that I’d never felt so devoted to anything before. And that, even though I was wiped out, I was deeply happy. Well, I went on to do the performance, and to be honest I have no documentation of the show. I don’t think a single family member made it and I’m not in touch with any of my friends from back then (the ones I am in touch with were IN the show), so I have no one to ask about it. Nor do I know if I was in fact any good in it. All I know is that as far as I was concerned I gave it all I had and poured myself into it every night.

The whole experience is a blur but after that show, the director - with whom I had been in a battle of wills with the entire time - took me aside and told me that if I didn’t go on to be an actor that I would be wasting my life. To have a man, who had basically been my arch enemy through the entire thing, remove any animosity he had for me and encourage me as an actor, was deeply humbling. There was no reason for him to do it except that he felt strongly about it. It was the first time I felt like an equal to an adult. It was pretty empowering. 

It took me another two years almost to make the transition out of design and illustration, but I will always consider Warren Ashe, my director and teacher, the person who helped me discover what it is I truly love - my dharma, if you will. And for that I am both grateful and proud.