April 12, 2012: How to Be an Actor 04/12/2012

1. Start out as a more-than-slightly neurotic child, perhaps with a nervous tic or a speech impediment—or at least as a kid whose parents are divorcing. Having an emotionally distant father and/or alcoholic mother is helpful, too. Homosexuality is a definite plus.

Start small: Reenact toothpaste commercials in your basement. Do impersonations. Memorize the cast recordings of Man of La Mancha and Pippin. Practice lying. Crash your mother’s Canasta party, bellowing an impromptu a cappella rendition of “Buckle Down Winsocki” from The Girl From Oklahoma. Vamp. Tell people, “Theater is my world.”

2. Follow your first public appearance—as a shrub in P.S. 42’s Christmas Follies—with the role of Second Villager in your high school production of Fiddler on the Roof. Wear black. Practice your Tony acceptance speech for hours. Develop a confused sense of self. Faint. Tell people, “I see myself as a cross between Medea and Maria von Trapp.”

3. Hire an acting coach. Take up smoking. Spend your last pennies on head shots, then tell casting directors, “They don’t really capture what I plan to achieve on the stage.” Study the Method. Work a day job that you hate—preferably waiting tables or as a hat check clerk. Accept a role as Shark #5 in a black box production of West Side Story for no pay, even though your rent is four months late. Sleep with your director. Decide you hate the Method. Gossip. Develop bipolar disorder. Starve. Begin work on a one-person show about all your crazy experiences in the Theater World. Say, “I’m finally giving myself permission to examine who I’ve become through my art.” Weep.

4. Give up. Say, “This acting thing is something I’ve passed through.” Join the work force. Marry. Procreate. Force your child to study voice and tap and to appear in a backyard production of The Threepenny Opera. Divorce. Tell people, “I’m thinking of returning to the stage.” Accept a job as assistant wigmaster for your church youth group’s annual “Teen Scene” pageant. Begin revising your Tony speech.

5. Return to the stage. Offer to perform your one-person show about all your crazy experiences in the Theater World at a local strip mall theater in Ahwatukee for no money. Accept instead a job painting flats for the theater’s kiddy version of HMS Pinafore. Audition for the role of Jet #3 in a little theater production of West Side Story. Plead. Accept instead a job as assistant stage manager. Say, “Anything to be part of the theater.” Because theater is your world.

 This essay was originally published by me in Phoenix New Times in October of 2005.

Thing I Hate Today: Lisa Alther’s boring memoir.

March 15, 2012: How to Be a Theater Critic 03/15/2012

1. Start out as an overly solemn and often pretentious child with a more-than-passing interest in Gilbert and Sullivan. Worry your parents with constant criticisms of their clothing, their taste in furnishings, and their favorite television shows. Ask Santa for an IBM Selectric and a velvet-lined cape. Brood. Be sent to the principal for referring to your third-grade teacher as “overzealous in her interpretation of an educator.” Cast withering glances. When asked what you want to be when you grow up, reply, “Alexander Woollcott.”

 2. Develop a superior attitude. Declaim. Have the last word. Learn to look bored, even when you’re having a good time. Refer to your sister as “Sarah Bernhardt” and your mother as “Cornelia Otis Skinner.” Memorize all of George Sanders’ lines from All About Eve. Claim to know Jerome Kern and to have seen the original Broadway production of The Amorous Flea. Roll your eyes. Sneak out of bed to watch the Late Show, scribbling notes about blocking and costume design. Learn to wear an ascot.

"Robrt Pela" by Suzanne Falk

3. Join the staff of your high school newspaper. Be sent to the principal for your review of the drama department’s production of Brigadoon, which you headlined “Brink of Doom” and which included the sentence “The scenery was nice, but the actors got in front of it.” Begin sleeping with other men, because you plan to be a theater critic one day and there’s no such thing as a heterosexual theater critic. Embrace irony. Develop a talent for seeing in the dark and/or the ability to write without looking at your notepad. See Cats and live to regret it. Develop a thick skin.

4. Be mistaken for a drama critic in the lobby of a theater by the managing editor of the local weekly. Accept her offer of a job. Write several thousand reviews that employ the words “execrable” and “hopeless.” Repeatedly insist in print that a show was so dreadful, it caused you to have to lie down with a cold compress on your head. Acquire a stalker—preferably a musical theater actor about whom you once wrote, “He sings like a hinge!” or a director whose production of Amadeus you compared to a Build Your Own Catastrophe kit. Learn to arch an eyebrow and smile acidly when, in response to the declaration “I’m a theater critic,” most people reply, “So you write about movies?” Laugh uproariously when people suggest that you secretly want to be an actor. Bask.

5. On your deathbed, criticize the nurse’s shoes and the unflattering lighting. Roll your eyes at the priest performing your last rites, and accuse him of “indicating.” Expire knowing that your words will live on, and that you have pleased an entire city full of actors simply by dying.

(I wrote this essay a few years ago; it was previously published in Phoenix New Times in November, 2005.)

 Thing I Hate Today: Weeds.

What I published today: New Times print edition, Stage column: http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2012-03-15/culture/broadway-s-kathy-fitzgerald-returns-to-phoenix-in-gypsy/