“Why are you wasting your time directing?”
“Why are you wasting your time directing?”
September 29, 2023, 11:30 pm
Filed under: Acting, art, Creative Process, theatre, writing | Tags: Acting, directing, theatre, time wasting, weird compliments
I’ve been thinking a lot about this thing someone said to me when I was in graduate school. I’d just performed a role I’d always dreamed of playing ( Imogen in Cymbeline) and at the cast party was propped up on some chairs resting the ankle I’d twisted during the show. A faculty member came up and complimented my performance (those compliments are lost to my memory) and then said, “I don’t know why you’re wasting your time directing.”
Let me give you some context for this very odd compliment. I was there in that graduate program as a directing student. I was less than one year away from an MFA in Directing. My class had only one director and it was me. This particular faculty member, while not someone I studied with, was married to my advisor — that is, my primary directing teacher. In praising my performance, she was also dismissing my entire purpose in being there.
But — truth be told (and I think this is why I’m thinking about this now) whenever I get a chance to get back up in front of an audience as an actor, I think of this again and I think she might have been right. Why waste my time directing if I could be acting? Acting feels good in a way that Directing hasn’t in a long while.
But the irony is, before I went to that grad program, directing did feel as good, if not better than, acting. It was that program that strangled my joy of directing and I only ever get hints of what that joy used to feel like, mostly in memories.
It’s also very funny to suggest to someone that they give up directing to be an actor. Acting is the lower status job and it is relentlessly difficult. Not that directing is a piece of cake but there are a lot more doors open to directors than actors. There is more agency for a director. There is more power.
But still, whenever I get a chance to perform, I hear this woman’s voice in my head, wondering why I waste my time on anything else.
But, of course, I gave my acting career the best shot I could. I saw the writing on the wall and moved into other lanes. (Is mixing metaphors okay when you’re just using cliches?) I don’t think that was a waste of time. I’ve made a lot of things I’m proud of. In fact, I manage to do a lot of the things I want to do a fair amount. Sometimes I act. Sometimes I sing. Sometimes I write. Sometimes I direct. I’m not wasting my time on any of it. The only time that feels wasted to me is when I’m compelled to do something far away from art.
But I think I think of this weird compliment from years ago when I get back to acting because acting feels good. It’s like when you haven’t had a food you really like for a while, you think, “Why have I been eating anything else? Can I have polenta for every meal?” And the answer is, no, no you can’t and you shouldn’t have an all polenta diet. I love acting but an all acting diet would be likely to become just as tedious for me as an all polenta one.
The truth is, if I’d been given more opportunities to act, I would never have fallen into directing. I think writing would have happened regardless, as I did a fair amount of it, even in the middle of some acting jobs. But directing only happened as a way to a) keep my hand in the theatre game when I wasn’t acting and b) to get my writing on stage. Acting itself almost always wins the “Would you rather — “ game for me but the business of getting those jobs always loses it. Acting is always waiting for someone to choose you and I am much too impatient for that game.
But every time I do it, it feels so right, I end up right back in those chairs, post show, listening to a theatre scholar ask why I would do anything else. It’s a compliment. An insulting one but a compliment none the less.
Given the way most of our memories work — in that we tend to remember negative things more than positive ones — it actually makes sese that this memory persists so strongly, even though it happened something like seventeen years ago.
But of course, it’s also potent because I often wonder if I made the right choices. Should I have figured out how to tackle the acting business a little better? Stayed on the actor’s path? I don’t regret starting my theatre company at all but I do regret going to graduate school — so you know it all gets mixed up in questions of what I should have done differently.
Ultimately, the choices I made are the choices I made and I am lucky to get to shift around into different roles. None of which are a waste of time, thank you very much!
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Originally published at http://artiststruggle.wordpress.com on September 30, 2023.
