Dreams

"No matter how your heart is grieving,

If you keep on believing,

The dreams that you wish will come true."

-- Disney's Cinderella

--

Just had a dream last night, the night after Christmas. An acting dream.

We are doing a show called Measure for Ending Well and Then Some, our director's idea of a script that satirizes the problem plays of Shakespeare. It is a sprawling, epic, disastrously long script, one that makes me think of Hugo's Hernani or Ibsen's Brand. I don't know where I fit into the show. It will come to me in time. It's a big one: most of the theatre people whom I know from high school, college, and elsewhere are involved in this play. I see them as I wander around backstage.

There is a bluish gray light coming from somewhere. It allows me to see a gaggle of beautiful girls dressed as Celtic maidens, perched all about an oversized wooden arbor (or maybe it's a pergola) that has been painted to represent rocky cliffs. Or something. They speak to me with the allure of a siren, these nymphs hanging in the air. With the voice of their characters, they ask me the questions of a friend, blurring my reality, and I begin to think they have actually transformed themselves into spirits. Then they shush me and rush me into the wings, so I won't be caught on stage during their entrance.

No, not Hernani. Wagner's Ring Cycle.

For clues, I examine my costume in the blue light. I need to know what I'm doing here, and nothing is "coming to me," as I'd hoped. I'm wearing Elizabethan garb (the black pantaloons, shiny doublet, poofy shirt) and I have a mustache on.

I'm playing the villain.

--

This vacation began as a disaster, and not the sort that arises from burnt food or other sudden, instantaneous crises. No. This one began with what we'll call motherly resentment; a kind of silent, chilly chide; my mother was mad at me for something. My first full day here, my dad had to take me out to dinner, where we discussed what I had done with my life, where I was going, and why I had offended my mother.

Long talk, and since these matters are personal, I don't know how to handle relating it here. So I won't.

It all means this: I may try something else career-wise in 2009.

--

Don't know any lines. None.

I rush to my dressing room and discover that this theatre is the Taft, in downtown Cincinnati. The air in the wings is warm. The hallways and stairwells backstage glow behind semi-closed doors like orange portals to heaven. I go there.

Find my script. It's on a table and it looks like this. I scan the pages for highlights, but apparently I haven't done my acting homework. No indications of who I am or what I say, anywhere.

My dressing roomie walks in. "Ready?" he asks, straightening the lace around his neck.

"No." I can't think of any better way to explain it to him. "No, I'm not."

He sees I'm holding the script. "You've forgotten it all?"

"I don't think I ever learned it."

"You learned it, all right. You just forgot. Here." He takes the book, rips out some pages, and hands them to me. "Roll these up so it'll look like your scroll. You're playing Spallier. Let's go."

I walk with him, rolling the papers.

--

It's not that I don't want to keep acting. Honestly, I would do this forever if I could. I just wonder if I can anymore. If I should.

I've always wanted a family. Right now, I work part-time in an ill-paying position, doing a faint imitation of what I really want to do. Never really was completely enchanted with children's theatre, and the scary (funny?) thing about it is that it seems to suck people in. You don't intend for it, but you first get a steady paycheck, then get hired onto the staff, and before you know it, you've married a local, you have a mortgage and kids, and you don't know how to do anything--anything that pays you better--except let playwrights, directors, musicians and technicians make all the serious decisions for you. All you have to do is walk through their prepared world, and you don't even have to do a terribly good job. Just be adequate, and you always have a job here.

It's not what I signed up for when I declared a Theatre major, and it's not what I envisioned for myself when I decided to take acting as a career. And that's the God-honest truth.

--

We're on stage and I can't see the audience but I can feel their silence. That wonderful quiet. Nothing is happening There, or Then; it has all been replaced by what is happening Here and Now.

There are two of us on stage. I see by the light of a tiny lantern that the other actor has plenty of speaking time before I interrupt him with a goofy sidekick line--and then it makes sense. I'm not the villain. I'm the villain's sidekick. Yes.

He stops speaking. I interrupt, shamelessly reading my lines from the "scroll." As I read my lines aloud, I find that I am supposed to be reading a letter from the villain's brother, so it's fine for me to read this scroll. It feels more than fine. It feels friggin brilliant.

The scene continues, and I glance down the page and see that soon, very soon, I am supposed to rip the scroll to pieces.

--

I'm good at my job, yes, but I know I could do anything. The question is whether I would like it or love it, or come to that point in time, or whether I would spend all my days in some other career dreaming about what I could have done in the theatre.

This longing, I believe, is what propels decent, hardworking American adults into that most grotesque form of theatre, that driven and funded not by talent, but by the community.

--

I don't rip the scroll. Instead, I give the other actor a warning look and jump lines to later in the scene. We've completely vaulted the scroll-tearing business, and now we're talking about the holidays.

And before I know it, after a final punchline about how "it's best to slaughter people when they feel most prepared for it, during the unhappy holidays," the audience gives us an encouraging batch of giggles and we leave the stage.

"What was that?" the other actor asks. He is angry. "Nothing came to you?"

"Nothing. What's the next scene?"

"Figure it out yourself."

--

My parents are clear: they think the military would be a fine option. And it is. It really is. It's just that if I had wanted to enter the Armed Forces, I think I would have done so.

Then again, Einstein flunked math, dropped out, and delivered mail before he found his higher calling.

I'm trying to think of my life in terms of What I Want. Some people want only the thrill of being on stage and telling stories, and I have to say that's a big motivator for me, too. But I've also wanted to publish a book (several, if possible), raise a family, live in a safe neighborhood, teach my son baseball, own permanent furniture (I'm still sleeping on an air mattress, for what that's worth), save up plenty of money, travel, and this, and that, and on and on and on.

I'm realizing that it isn't possible with my current job. Unless I get full-time employment (exploitation?) and an inside track to high-paying producing jobs, something I don't honestly want right now--or just move away and try for another job or go back to school, which is what I'm considering--I can't have those other things later on.

Those "other things" are my dreams, and what I have now is my reality. Why is raising a family and having a simple, stable life a dream? I'm nearing my mid-twenties, and soon my late-twenties, and then my thirties. I don't want to have my first child when I'm forty-five.

--

There are no other scripted scenes for Spallier and his villainous leader. None that I can find, anyway.

The director has come backstage to yell at me. It is intermission. He asks me what I've done and why. I tell him I did what I had to do, because I didn't know what else to do. He tells me that is a poor reason to do anything. I say I know.

I go back to the wooden arbor, looking for the ladies that encouraged me before. Those beautiful actresses. But they are gone. The wooden arbor sits behind other set pieces, abandoned, and now under harsh working lights it looks old and decrepit, like a gas station in the middle of nowhere, or the exoskeleton of a long-dead spider. It is obviously painted to look like something else, garishly painted, and in a way it looks beautiful and ugly at the same time.

It would have made a fine wooden arbor, holding up vines in someone's landscaped backyard, giving shade to grass and standing up to the sun, being a cliff only for the kids who would climb it. Now, there are splinters on its beams and an actress is complaining about it. It can never be a cliff.

--

Then I wake up.

I have to think about my dreams.