Choosing a Career: Talent or Passion?
I caught the acting bug pretty early.
In 5th grade my friend George Clark and I got excited with the story of the Trojan War, and, for reasons I couldn’t possibly reconstruct, decided to write a parody of it for our elementary school talent show. We wrote the script, painted cardboard scenery (there is still the outline of a horse on the basement floor of my childhood home), plundered our parents’ clothing for costumes and got a spot on the program. The 15-minute play was, as you might imagine, a laugh riot.
Sample dialogue:
Narrator: And so Laocoon died.
Laocoon (clutching his side and keeling over): Oh, my girdle is killing me!
As I said, hilarious.
By tenth grade I was in my first musical, playing Snoopy in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.
As Snoopy in a dogfight with the Red Baron, before my career crashed
The show made me feel alive in a way I’d never really found anywhere. I loved the shock of walking out in front of hundreds of people who were desperately hoping to be entertained; the rush of recovering when a prop failed or someone forgot a line; the way no scene played exactly the same way from night to night; the dialogue with an orchestra while performing a song; the joy of the curtain coming up and the curtain coming down.
Over the next few years I got just good enough feedback from just enough people to think that maybe acting was something I could do professionally.
So I gave it a shot. The SRO Straw Hat Theatre’s summer season in Wilmington, NC was six weeks of back-to-back shows, a new one each week. As one of the two full-time paid actors, I had the lead in two of the shows, smaller roles in two others, directed one and did publicity for another. I worked 100 hours a week, rehearsing one show in the morning, making media calls for another in the afternoon and performing a third one at night. I made $75 a week. At the end of the season, I made a crass money grab, going into the film business. There I pulled in $40 a day as the “Second Bailiff” in the movie Marie: A True Story. Surely you remember that one.
It was intense, exhilarating, and exhausting. It was also revealing: by the end of a four-month period I realized I was not going to be a professional actor.
My criteria for a career at that point were two: I either needed to believe I could be one of the best in the world at it or love it so much I didn’t care that I wasn’t.
I wasn’t very good at acting and I didn’t love it enough to be okay with being mediocre. So I bailed.
That was clearly the right decision, but it doesn’t mean I can’t admire those who made a different call. Seeing two recent productions at different ends of Broadway helped me to crystallize the distinction I saw early on between talent and passion – and the importance of both.
Everything about the revival of Camelot – the lighting, the sound, the set, the costumes, the choreography – is a tribute to people who are the best in the business. The knock on the play when it debuted in the 1960’s was that the script stunk (as a former King Arthur, I can attest to that), so for the revival, the producers brought in writing whiz Aaron Sorkin (he wrote The West Wing, A Few Good Men, The Newsroom, etc.) to do a rewrite. Now it has a spunky new script to go with a great set of old songs and Broadway’s best: the team of talent is the theatre equivalent of what you would see at a Big 5 tech company or in major league sports.
If Camelot on Broadway was the NBA, the show I saw the next day off-Broadway might be the G League — absolutely professional, but a step or two away from the bigs. Where Camelot seated 1100 people at about $200 each, Rock and Roll Man squeezed in maybe 200 at $50. And the pay scales reflect that: union actors working on Broadway make roughly twice what off-Broadway actors make ($2400 minimum per week when they are working vs. about $1100), and top Broadway stars can make $100K a week or more). Pay rates are similarly varied for orchestra members: each of Camelot‘s 31 orchestra members make more than Rock and Roll Man’s five.
Professionals living one part of the dream in Rock and Roll Man…
But I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a group of performers more passionate and committed to what they were doing than the group in Rock and Roll Man. I was there on a Monday night, when almost every theatre is closed, and for two hours I didn’t see a single actor miss a beat, roll an eye, mail in a dance move, or give me and my fellow audience members anything other than total respect for being there. Through dumb luck I had ended up on the front row, so I saw everything: my biggest concern was dodging the sweat coming off the performers. THAT was passion.
A little while after I gave up on professional acting, I changed my criteria for how I decided what to do with my work life. Instead of requiring that I had to be extraordinarily gifted at the job or love it so much that I didn’t care, I substituted a couple of goals: I had to be fascinated by it and believe it was a useful thing to do. And I ended up finding at least eight different jobs that fit that criteria.
I think that was the right reframing for me. But seeing the performances this month, at both ends of the Broadway pecking order, I have a new respect for both those who made it to the majors, and those who are still struggling, and willing to love every minute of the experience.
Fergie Philippe (right), shown playing his normal role in Camelot as a knight. For the production we saw, he stepped in as king for a day.
There was a final very cool bonus to the performance we saw of Camelot: the regular King Arthur was sick, so his understudy, a guy named Fergie Philippe, normally a mere knight, got a chance to star. After a few rough early moments you could almost see him standing taller, getting more confident with every scene and song and sword fight. His final speech in the play, about the importance of pursuing your dreams, even if you don’t reach them, could have been a mantra for every actor I saw. As the show closed and he took his bows, he cried, in some mixture of relief, satisfaction, and what I have to believe was supreme joy. I don’t know if he’ll ever get to play King Arthur again on that stage, but for one brief shining moment, all the talent and passion and years of work came together – he killed it.
References:
Camelot on Broadway: https://ew.com/theater/camelot-review-aaron-sorkin-revival-phillipa-soo-andrew-burnap-jordan-donica/
Rock and Roll Man off-Broadway: https://stagebuddy.com/theater/theater-review/review-rock-roll-man
Broadway pay scales: https://playbill.com/article/how-much-money-do-broadway-actors-make
Off-Broadway pay scales: https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/how-much-money-do-actors-make-75180/#:~:text=Off%2DBroadway%20actors%20working%20for,in%20a%2099%2Dseat%20theater
The G League: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_G_League