I’ve written a few times in other places about why I decided to stop acting. It had been my career dream since I was a kid, I’d studied theatre and mostly focused on acting for most of my college experience, and even when I’d started moving towards dramaturgy and the production side of things during my final year, I kept acting for fun in friends’ projects, and always had half a notion that maybe someday it would turn into something I could return to.
Let’s get out of the way, of course, that I probably wasn’t really going to make it as an actor even if I’d tried. I think I was and still am a well above-average speaker of Shakespeare, but that’s not really as valued as it should be and I didn’t have anything else to separate me from the pack of petite brunettes. I went to so many auditions and knew the second the single blonde girl walked in that she was going to get the part, and she almost always did.
What was fun about acting with my friends was that we could do whatever we wanted—and I could play the parts I was actually good at and interested in, things I’d never be cast as out in the real world. Prince Hal, Berowne, Aumerle, even a very drunk Desdemona, which is a part I could probably actually have gotten but not if I approached it the way that I did. The turning point was when, in one of these passion projects we did in a bar or basement, I actually got typecast. I played Cordelia, and I absolutely hated it. I hated knowing that my body—my smallness, my thinness, my whiteness—was doing all the work for me. That it barely mattered what character choices I made or how I interpreted the lines, because at the end of the play I was going to be nothing more than a dead body carried around onstage for people to look at and talk about and be sad that someone small and white and pretty was dead.
Last week, I acted again for the first time in ten years, much of that spent really believing that I would never do it again. I had so much fun, as I’ve discussed. But as I’ve continued to reflect afterwards, I found myself thinking about the things I’ve just been writing about, and a small moment at the beginning of the stream that jumped out at me even at the time.
As is usually the case, one of the first things we each did was describe our characters physically, and I had this moment of complete delight as I realised that the way I look is completely irrelevant. Especially in a streaming format, where we’re just heads on a screen. Nobody’s going to think it’s a joke that I describe my character as super tall, because they have no idea that I’m not. If I decide to play a man, nobody’s going to expect some kind of explanation within the story or the production concept. If I play a dainty femme girl, it’s because I’ve decided that’s who the character should be, not because that’s the only thing a casting director will let me play.
I’m not naïve, of course. Especially in streaming and other filmed contexts, people are still cast for their looks (or, probably more often, not cast because of their looks) or for other qualities outside of their control. Only certain people are invited to the table to partake in this liberation from typecasting, and the acceptable range for women is, as ever, especially narrow. This also isn’t a suggestion for white people to play whatever race they want, or for people to just make up characters outside their lived experience rather than inviting those people to the table. However, even with this inescapable cultural baggage, there is freedom in this space that exists in very few other forms.
Setting aside, as before, all the caveats about competition and talent and making it—it’s the first time I’ve been able to imagine myself seriously wanting to act again since giving it up. It’s an art form I’ve always loved, and this format gives me so many of the things—agency over my characters and my performance, intellectual as well as emotional challenge, a feeling of being a genuine collaborator rather than a piece of a director’s vision—that I eventually decided it would be impossible to get outside of putting on plays for no money with people I loved. Most of them are professionals now; though I got out of the game a little before that transition, but there was really only another year or two left when people were still regularly working for free and casting their friends. There’s a time in your artistic life when just showing up and doing your best is the only qualification you need, when just making things is the only goal, and that time is long gone for the people I worked with back then.
I don’t know what will happen, of course, what my future in this space could possibly be. There are people who have been working a lot longer and harder than I have. So for now, I’m not trying to think about anything except the fact that I’ve found a way to return to, and to rekindle my passion for, something I’ve always loved.