Reverse Chronology of an Actor

An hour before I teach on Zoom my stomach begins its climb into my ribs. The churning starts soon after. My nerves are not new and I’ve come to accept them, if not with affection, at least with tolerance and recognition. It’s not a performance I tell myself as I track the perimeter of my apartment. I add other words of comfort: No one will hate you if you’re nervous. 

Teaching was not a planned career choice, but when the opportunity arose it became a source of quiet satisfaction and, at times, unexpected pride. It’s the longest job I’ve ever held. And yet, before class my palms still sweat. My tongue swells into the lower half of my mouth. To distract myself from myself, I make additional last-minute notes about each student’s work. Likely I will not use these during the class but I’m prepared; I know my lines should I need them. I shake my hands with rigorous flicks to rid myself of the trembling before I daub a veneer of red onto my lips. Not too much, just enough to mark them. I’m convincing, I think. I look the part of a teacher. 

                                                                       ***

An old friend, still in the business, works a season at the Shaw Festival, a repertory theatre company two hours outside of Toronto. She gives Izzy, my twelve-year old daughter, and me free tickets to her production of Carol Churchill’s Top Girls. Before the show Izzy and I scan the grid of black and white photographs of the cast on the wall. I admit to my daughter that it was my dream to be an actor at this festival. She asks me why I stopped acting. I cannot answer accurately even after all these years. I could say I failed so spectacularly that I ran far and fast in the opposite direction. I could say I lost faith in myself. I could say that the intense desire to escape my life caught up with me. Instead, I say it was stage fright and leave it at that.  

As the house lights of the auditorium dim, I whisper to her, “I love this play.” What I’m also saying is that I love theatre, with all its sweat, pretension, ritual, and energy. In the darkness of the third act I mouth the words to the scene between the sisters. After all these years the lines return as though they’d been simmering inside me for decades. 

                                                                     ***

My daughter sashays onto the Fun Fair stage to take the mic. The neighbours say to me, “She’ll be an actor for sure.” I pinch my lower lip between my fingers and silently wish for her to become anything else. Please don't let her pick a career where the cult to please an audience overcomes a sense of self. Let her not have to prove herself each time she gets an audition. I want to whisk her off the stage, rush her home, wrap her in a blanket and tell her—what exactly? I have no lines for this except dread. 

                                                                     ***

After graduating law school, each Bay Street law firm that interviews me says the same thing. “You were an actor? That’s great training for a lawyer.” I respond with a practiced, ironic laugh and receive several job offers.  

My office is on the 55^th floor of a firm with a prestigious litigation department. My costume is a pressed white shirt, a black fitted jacket with matching pants, and black leather shoes that I shine to a polish each weekend. This is a career for a sensible life with a steady income, ideal for grounding a family, which I start to consider more and more. Despite the status and benefits of this career, I cannot pretend for long that this job suits me. 

                                                                    ***

For a year I bus tables at a restaurant in the Eaton Centre mall and avoid anything to do with acting. I quit auditioning, stop going to see plays, and tell my agent that I’m retiring. He asks me what I’m going to do instead. Rather than admit that I have no idea, I tell him I’m going back to school. 

The idea doesn’t seem half bad, maybe I will, but in the meantime the limited energy I have goes to my restaurant gig. If I wipe and clean the tables quick enough, I get a decent cut of the tips at the end of the shift. 

I have one line: “Are you finished?” 

                                                                   ***

The summer stock theatre is intimate enough that from the stage I can guess which drinks they’ve ordered on their table. Rum and coke. Lemonade. Wine spritzer. Twenty minutes into our production of Crimes of the Heart and the ice in their glasses has already melted. I’m miscast in the role of Meg but there are worse problems. What was once pre-show nerves has grown from mild fright into acute terror, abrupt and inexplicable. Each time I inhale, my breath gets shorter. My hands become the wrong size and weight, almost from another body. I try to hide them under the folds of my arms while reaching for my next line. What is the next line I’m supposed to say? A thrum of bees swarms my mind. An audience member downs the rest of his drink. The red exit sign is just behind him. What if I ran off the stage and left the theatre? I immediately dismiss the idea, ashamed it even occurred to me. More than anything I need to prove that I’m good enough, that I can stay in character and finish the performance. Rather than waiting for the other actor on stage for my cue I run through the entire play in my head and hope that will loosen my memory. The actor opposite me finishes speaking and waits. A millisecond stretches into what feels like a permanent state of alarm. I don’t know anything: not my lines, not my name, not even where I am. Yet, somehow, words empty from my mouth. The play continues, but the terror stays, through each scene, night after night, all summer long. 

                                                                  ***

Shaw Festival calls and books me for an audition. I have waited years for this and yet in the weeks leading up to this coveted opportunity, I am lethargic and listless. I cannot retain much in my head and only want to read Virginia Woolf’s diaries, quiet and alone in my bed. When I practice my monologue, I’m not sure why I cry. My audition day arrives and halfway into my speech I blank. My throat stops where the words should be. The artistic director, in a kind and patient voice, asks me if I want to start again. Despite my focus, my training, my desperate drive to prove I can be successful, I choke again. I reach the line: “I made my soul a garden and walked therein” and stop. I can go no further.  

In the days and months that follow I think: what can I be if not an actor? The answer is an echo chamber of nothing, nothing, nothing.

                                                                 ***

I book a jeans commercial, my first. It’s good for the money, especially if it runs for a while and I get residual cheques. The commercial director is surprised, however, when I show up. His eyes graze my torso, my hips, my thighs, then briefly, my face. Acne erupted since the audition. I’m wearing three layers of base to hide the red cystic bumps which nevertheless burn through my foundation. “Are you Makeup?” he asks. “No,” I correct him, “I’m the talent.” His lips divide into thinner lines. He asks his assistant to get a hold of casting but to me says, “Well, you’re here, we may as well use you.” They give me a pair of jeans to wear and shoot me walking toward the camera. “Smile big,” the director says. I pull my lips back into a panic grimace. “More,” he says. It takes less than ten minutes and then I’m told I can leave. When the commercial airs, I can’t find myself in the ad. Only the third time do I spot a flash of my face, one of fifteen, that shuffles like a deck of cards at the very end. No residual cheque materializes in the mail. 

                                                               ***

At the end of the opening night of Happy End, the applause is vaguely disappointing. I never know how to act during the curtain call. No longer in character, but not myself yet either. Who is it that needs this acknowledgement? I can’t answer that head on. The backs of my knees shake as the company stands and bows in a line. I’m exhausted from my job touring schools during the day and from the weekends and evenings of rehearsing this play. The strain on my voice has started to show—I cracked in a few places—but I got through. At least I remembered my lines. 

                                                              ***

I land a gig working for a multicultural theatre company. I play a cat and tour schools across the greater Toronto area. I shout out lines to a gym auditorium of cross-legged children, more baffled than entertained by our performance, and the company pays me $350 a week. This is enough money to cover my rent, utilities, food, with twenty dollars leftover for extras. I can legitimately say I am a working actor.   

                                                              ***

In theatre school I learn how to warm up, how to jiggle my larynx, how to identify the beats of a scene, how to slate, and where to angle my body on a raked stage. I am advised to be less reactive, less timid, and less suburban. Make bigger choices, my acting teacher tells me. I try, very hard, to do all these things. Sometimes all at once. 

In my final year, rehearsing The Comedy of Errors, the director says to me, “What can you do other than be pretty?”

I stand and wait for my heart to stop tripping over itself. 

                                                             ***

At my audition for a theatre school in New York City, my focus is so intense that I fall to my knees at the dramatic moment. My jeans tear at the knee but I keep going. When I finish my monologue, I join the director of the program at the desk. He says, “Wonderful, that was wonderful.” But that’s not quite what I hear. In my ears, the compliment is larger. It encompasses the total sum of me. You are wonderful is what I hear. Anytime someone compliments my acting, my brain instantly readjusts and applies the praise to my entire being. I’m careful not to show how much this approval means to me. 

“You were committed,” he says to me. “You even tore your jeans.” 

I look down and feign surprise, “Really? I didn’t notice.” 

A scholarship arrives in the mail.

                                                            ***

Each year my high school theatre club takes a field trip to Shaw Festival. My drama teacher says it’s the best theatre company in the country. “This would be a good place for you,” he says to me in particular. It sticks in my dreamscape and becomes my ambition. Someday, I say to myself, I will be an actor at the Shaw Festival. I tell my parents my plan and, typically, they have opposing reactions. 

My father: “Can you make any money at that?” 

My mother: “I could have been on the stage.”   

                                                            ***

The mute in The Fantasticks is not a coveted role, but I’m consoled by also playing the understudy of Louisa, who has lots of lines. As the mute, naturally, I say nothing. My costume is a black unitard. A week prior to opening night I starve myself on iceberg lettuce salad and rice cakes with thin scrapes of smooth peanut butter. My hip bones jut and I think: success! 

                                                            ***

I audition for the lead role of YumYum in The Mikado in grade eight. The night before they announce the parts, I place a note in my window. Please God, give me the part. The next day my name appears typed across from YumYum. It is a sign. 

I am a believer, not in God, but that I am meant to be an actor. 

                                                            ***

Attic. Mom’s cracked wooden trunk open. Filmy scarves, jewel-tone dresses, mules, felt hats, a fur stole crushed at the bottom. My two older sisters and I play house or rich ladies or three girls on an island. Whole days up there. Carla pulls out the purple flower dress, Nik takes the green one with crinoline, and I scuff across the floor in mules. Nik tilts the dented hat on her head and clips on beaded earrings. Stuffed socks for boobs. She’s Queen of the Northern Empire. Carla’s a rock star with a small red broom as her guitar. I’m a groundhog buried in the chest, then a mayor, then an orphan. “Wait, try this,” Carla says to me. “Pretend we’re a rich pregnant lady.” The plan is for me to get on her shoulders. Once I’m there Nik yanks the flower dress over the two of us. I’m the head of the body and Carla’s the belly and legs. We wobble as she walks blindly. We could topple at any moment. We sway but don’t fall. It’s a delicate balance but, if I hold on tight, I’m the biggest I’ve ever been.