by David Fairhurst
Over the years, I’ve made lots of mistakes in both relationships. But unlike, say, accidentally hanging up the phone on a girlfriend just as she was about to reach the scintillating climax of her epic monologue recounting the unbearably cute thing her cat did the other day, and then trying to pass off your gaffe as a joke, which she doesn’t find the least bit amusing and now she’s giving you the silent treatment and won’t return your calls—not that anything like that has ever happened to me, you understand—the great thing about theatre is it’s always willing to give you a second chance: No matter how badly you may screw up one performance, you get to go back the next night and try again.
I’ve often felt as if my entire acting career were my effort to correct a mistake I made 25 years ago.
It was my first acting class, as a high school senior in 1981. Though I had done some extracurricular acting with the high school drama club, I certainly didn’t aspire to it as a career. As a shy, skinny, nerdy teen (back in the dark ages before “nerdy” was the new black), I figured I had about as much chance of making it as an actor as I did getting a date with Kristy McNichol. No, I started doing theatre for the same reason every heterosexual boy starts doing theatre: to meet girls. And then I signed up for this acting class because my friends were taking it and because it seemed like an easy elective to help me coast through senior year.
Toward the end of the semester, after performing a silent comic improvisation that had my classmates laughing so hard the glint from their braces could have blinded me, our teacher, Mrs. Duley, interrupted the class to make an announcement. Turning to me gravely, she said, “You should be an actor,” and from her tone I could tell she was serious. For several long minutes, in front of an equally startled class, she lectured me that if I didn’t pursue acting as a career, I would be betraying my talent. Needless to say, I was flattered, and not a little stunned. Despite a respectable academic record, no one had ever said anything like that to me. I walked out of class that day elated and embarrassed, reluctantly accepting both congratulations and envious stares from my classmates.
But at 17, who really knows what they want from life? Not me. And so I proceeded to make the biggest mistake I've ever made, a monumental blunder for which I still haven’t forgiven myself: I ignored her. And worse: It wasn’t exactly as if I had other plans. I was just a dumb, mindlessly antiauthoritarian kid, with that mixture of innocence, arrogance, and ignorance that’s the hallmark of the American teenager.
So I went off to college, graduated (still without any focus), and then spent much of my 20s as the prototypical slacker, drifting between dead-end jobs for which I was vastly overqualified, trying to be a “writer” without ever actually writing much, and attempting to convince myself that a life of aimlessness and indecision was really independence and open-mindedness and thus, somehow, ennobling.
Yeah, right.
Fast-forward 14 years, to 1995. In a last-ditch attempt to inject some meaning into my life, I’d returned to the one thing that I had—without really meaning to—most enjoyed in high school. I’d been acting again for three years, studying and performing with several small theatres in Providence, R.I., when a former director of mine, Ed Shea (now artistic director of Rhode Island’s up-and-coming 2nd Story Theatre), offered me the opportunity to fill in for an ailing actor and perform with the Trinity Rep Conservatory, where he was then teaching.
For those unfamiliar with the culture of Rhode Island theatre, it’s divided into two very distinct categories: Trinity (referring to the state’s Tony Award–winning professional Equity company) and Off-Trinity (everything else). And let’s just say there were certain students in Trinity’s highly respected Conservatory who never missed an opportunity to remind poor Off-Trinity slobs like me exactly which side of the tracks we lived on.
So for me this was the classic Broadway fable: An unknown, yanked from the wings and into the spotlight (if only for one night), in a 48-hour roller coaster ride of crammed lines and rushed rehearsals, capped by a performance fueled by nerves, guts, and adrenaline (I even managed to improvise a line to cover a fumble with a prop—and got a laugh too). It was the thrill of my life, and just the blow to the skull I needed to wake me from my somnambulism.
It wasn’t until the next day, however, that I realized how irrevocably my life had changed. Because the next day, the ride was over, and I had to go back to work. Back at the mind-numbing routine of my latest dead-end job (at which point my resume had so many dead-end jobs, it was starting to look like a rap sheet), I was miserable, and for the first time in more than a decade, Mrs. Duley’s words came back to me. Why in the world did I stop acting?, I thought. It’s the only thing I ever really enjoyed. How could I have been so stupid?
Somehow Mrs. Duley saw my future when I was 17. Unfortunately, it took me another 14 years to figure it out. That’s why—despite the struggle, the setbacks, the heartache—I keep going. I won’t give up. I guess I’m trying to turn back the clock, recapture what I felt in that classroom at 17, correct a 25-year-old mistake, and maybe make up for those 14 lost years.
Wow. Now that I think of it, that’s an awfully heavy burden to hang on an acting career (why not cure cancer and adopt some Third World orphans while I’m at it?). Which may explain why so often I don’t enjoy my career much. Maybe I should just act for the simple pleasure of acting and let the rest of it go?
Good. Now that that’s settled—and seeing as I’m single again—do you think Kristy McNichol would go out with me?