by Rainn Wilson
I will never forget this one scene where the Widows of the War Heroes™ walked out in a strange procession, all in black, carrying the ashes of their dead war husbands in urns, singing a dirge. Once one of the widows tripped on our ridiculous set during a performance and SPILLED the ashes of her dead husband all over the stage. Everyone froze. No one was quite sure what to do. The widow, after an excruciating pause, slooooowly knelt down and began solemnly sweeping the remains of her ashy husband back into the urn with her hand while continuing her atonal chant. I have never laughed so hard in my life. Peter and I still chortle about it to this day. (Note: This production was FILMED, people, and is on file somewhere at the Lincoln Center library.)
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After I graduated from NYU, I went on tour with the Acting Company for over two years. The Acting Company is a prestigious theater troupe that was founded in 1972 by John Houseman out of the Juilliard School, specifically for young actors to cut their teeth in a traveling repertory company after graduation from actors’ training programs. There were many famous alums of the company from its early days, such as Patti LuPone, Kevin Kline, and Frances Conroy, as well as in its later days, including Keith David, Hamish Linklater, and Jesse L. Martin.
As I was sick of doing all my “shitty jobs” in NYC and had no agent, I signed up to go on the road, playing Peter in Romeo and Juliet (yeah, thought so. You’re racking your brains right now. You’ve never heard of him, have you? No one has. He’s the assistant to the nurse. One of the smallest parts in all of Shakespeare) and Speed the clown in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. After doing one incredibly difficult yearlong tour, I signed up for yet ANOTHER, playing Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream alongside the great Jeffrey Wright (Boardwalk Empire, The Hunger Games), who played Puck.
We lived on a bus that used to drive Reba McEntire’s band around filled with sixteen actors, and there was a semi with all the sets and props. We went to hundreds of venues in over forty states in that first year, performing Shakespeare in places where people had not only never seen Shakespeare before but had never seen a play before. Gillette, Wyoming; Terre Haute, Indiana; Stillwater, Oklahoma; Burlington, Vermont; Marquette, Michigan; Valdosta, Georgia; and Bozeman, Montana. I’ve played them all and dozens more. Sometimes we performed a ten a.m. student matinee in a combo auditorium/cafeteria and sometimes evening shows in beautiful, restored turn-of-the-century theaters. We acted in three-hundred-seat college theaters and college amphitheaters that sat two thousand.
Out of sheer boredom, we would often invent little games to get us through the tedium of doing our hundred and fifty-seventh matinee.
Withered Hand: We had to play a scene completely straight and with tremendous focus and passion . . . but with a withered, immobile hand at our side.
Bunny Hop: We had to hop like a big ol’ bunny rabbit at an exit of our choosing. (I always wonder what the audiences must have thought, watching Mercutio and Benvolio hopping offstage like kangaroos in period garb. Did they think it was a “theater thing”? A character choice? A figment of their imagination?)
Car Keys: At some point while onstage we had to search our Renaissance pants as if we were perplexedly looking for our car keys.
Pass the Battery: Someone would start the play with a battery in their hand and then, over the course of doing a scene, would pass it to someone else; that person would do the same thing, and so on until everyone in the company had held the battery in their hand.
And my personal favorite:
Mascot: We had to incorporate the name of the mascot of whatever school we were performing at into the play somehow. Everyone needed to say the word panther or patriot or cowboy or fighting Scotsmen as their character and have it perfectly scan into the iambic pentameter of the Shakespearean verse without drawing any attention to it.
—
There’s an entire book that could be written about those endless, tedious miles, the debauchery, shenanigans, and incredible amounts of laughter we shared as a company of twentysomething wannabe classical actors, but this isn’t it.
I’m grateful for those years. While most actors were waiting tables in New York, hoping for their big break, I was getting direct performance experience while logging thousands of miles in a stinky bus filled with a bunch of neurotic narcissists (myself included). It’s where I cut my teeth as a performer: snowball fights, poker games, late-night guitar jams, motels and crappy food, farmland and telephone poles, poetic language, and physical comedy. I felt, finally, like a professional actor.
—
One of the strangest theater adventures I ever had was doing the Oscar Wilde play Salome with Al Pacino. He had already performed it on Broadway for months, but it was a work he loved coming back to again and again. He was doing a remount a year later in Stamford, Connecticut, and I did a monthlong run as the Page of Herodias. It was a nice role of a boy/page who poured wine and fell in love with a soldier at the beginning. After my acting section was finished, my blocking was literally to kneel by the side of the stage with my ornate wine decanter in my short, sexy, ridiculous biblical robe and sandals and just stay put. I got to watch Al Pacino perform for an entire month from a distance of twenty feet and it was a master class. He played the role of mad King Herod, who was obsessed with Salome and brought her the head of John the Baptist on a tray. In the play, Herod speaks for page after page after page in grand gestures and tremendous, poetic Wilde-ian language. The fascinating thing was watching Al at work, as every night was completely and utterly different. Tickets were outrageously expensive ($125) and some nights he was an exploding volcano that put on the performance of a lifetime, finding nuance and passion and flourish in every line. On these nights, you literally had no idea what he was going to do next or how he was going to spin a line, and it was electric, dangerous, and riveting. Other nights, he was TERRIBLE. He seemed to be fumbling, internally focused, and lost in some kind of stutteringly boring inner exploration (making the ticket price a total waste of money). What I learned as a young actor is that no matter how many times you’ve played a role, every single performance is an excavation, a rehearsal in front of an audience, where you play, dig, explore, and unleash your spontaneity to bring a fresh vitality to the character and an unpredictable magic to every moment. Hopefully, the actor can temper this process, however, to allow the audience to get their money’s worth on a nightly basis. Also, some nights I would be covered in the manic spittle from Pacino’s endless monologues, which I imagined a kind of literal theatrical baptism.
—
One of the saddest, most tragic theater experiences I ever had was doing Long Day’s Journey into Night at the Arena Stage. I played the youngest son, Edmund, and my father was played by the bighearted Richard Kneeland. (My brother was played by Casey Biggs and the mom was played by the late actress Tana Hicken, who is one of the greatest actresses of the American stage. Her performance in this play was truly one for the ages.) Unbeknownst to us, Richard was a recovering alcoholic who, as the show progressed, relapsed and kept relapsing, deeper and deeper. Pretty soon he was getting drunk every day and showing up drunk to many of the shows. Doing a three-hour Eugene O’Neill play is hard enough. Doing a three-hour Eugene O’Neill play with a sloshy, surly, forgetful old drunk guy was sheer torture. During one performance he was doing the famous “unscrewing the lightbulbs to save money” scene and was so buzzed he started to fall off the dining room table he was standing on. He literally toppled backward. I ran over and (somewhat effortlessly, somehow) caught him, saving him from cracking his head open. I was pissed. We confronted him, cajoled, threatened, pleaded, begged him to go to meetings and get help, but he was too far gone. He controlled his drinking during the shows, giving a beautifully nuanced performance, but began getting stinking drunk in the final act and becoming smashed after them. He was found dead a few months later in his San Diego apartment, having fallen and hit his head. Alcoholism is a devastating disease that destroys liv
es and families. RIP, Richard. You were one of the greats.
—
This isn’t quite theater, but since it was a “live performance,” I’ll include it here. I was once a corporate shill for Nortel Networks at the Jacob Javits convention center. I remember getting paid $1,500 per day for three days’ work, and that was more money than I could have ever possibly imagined in those days. I had to memorize about five interminable pages of the worst technobabble, Internet bull crap mixed with IT jokes and “perform” this monologue every fifteen minutes for audiences of anywhere from zero to eighteen people in a cavernous convention center. I had one of those Madonna mics on the side of my head, and a black turtleneck, and my script was timed to go with various images on a wall of television screens. People would walk up and ask for free T-shirts and I would politely tell them that they would have to wait patiently and receive their priceless Nortel Networks T-shirt at the end of the presentation. They would sigh disgustedly and sit in the audience, willing to undergo a twelve-minute brain-numbing monologue in exchange for a cheap T-shirt. The opening line of the presentation is one that still haunts me for its brilliant horribleness.
Nortel Networks Script
[Narrator appears onstage from behind a wall of televisions. Photo of Charles Dickens is revealed on the myriad of screens. Narrator turns to the audience.]
Narrator: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. [points to screen] Charles Dickens. Now THERE’S a content provider. . . .
[Narrator smiles, waits for laughter. Silence. The laughter doesn’t come. Ever. Narrator shoots himself in the face. Blood on the dance floor. Lights go to black. A scream. The Internet explodes. Everyone is given a free T-shirt.]
Chapter 12
I BOMBED ON BROADWAY
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I’m not happy. Sorry, Pharrell.
Let’s flash our story forward to 1996. I’m thirty and I have everything I’ve ever wanted. I’ve been living the so-called bohemian lifestyle that I always dreamed of. I have a beautiful bohemian woman to share my life with in our beautiful bohemian apartment. I have been working with some of the greatest bohemian directors in the theater in some really interesting and challenging bohemian productions. I eat bohemian dinners with a bohemian fork (hand-whittled and wrapped with a hemp rope). I am (mostly, except for occasional Transcendent Moving Company jobs) making a meager but steady living as an actor. This is everything I ever wanted, right? When I went adolescently trembling into Suzanne Adams’s office in my senior year of high school to ask about the remotest possibility that I could ever someday be an actor, I never could have dreamed that twelve years later I would be where I was: in New York City working as a professional actor.
And yet . . . Why wasn’t I happy?! You set a goal, your life’s dream; you pursue it; and then you become happy. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?*
Well, there I was, not happy in Brooklyn. And I wasn’t exactly sure why. I would wake up in the middle of the night deeply, deeply sad. Alienated. Disconnected. Disconsolate. Then I would kick myself! “Why are you feeling this way?! I mean, look at the amazing woman asleep beside you. Think of all the incredible theater you’re doing. You have everything you’ve ever wanted, including a kick-ass van! Your dream has come true and yet you are not happy, jerk-face.” Remember the scene in Fight Club where Ed Norton beats the crap out of himself? That’s what I was doing to my heart, soul, and self-esteem on a daily basis. I was filled with stresses and it was uncomfortable to be in my body.
Perhaps all humans feel this way deep down inside. Maybe it’s a part of the human condition, occasionally feeling that we are isolated dots of consciousness in a meaningless universe that’s whirling around outside of us like sad fireworks. This was in the pre-smartphone era, after all, and maybe I was—we all were—a bit less simply distracted from what Louis C.K. would call “man’s essential aloneness,” and I was able to get more deeply in touch with my core existential angst without the presence of a tiny screen to check and double-check endlessly throughout the day. (For instance, while writing this last paragraph I checked Twitter twenty-eight times. Got mostly LOLs and one “YOU SUCK.”)
To quell the angst, I used something that ultimately gave me far more angst: alcohol. I drank a good amount every single day through those many New York years. I rarely passed out in pools of my own (or someone else’s) vomit, but I definitely used alcohol as a constant daily coping mechanism and leaned on it as a consistent emotional/social lubricant. The dizzying high from beer and spirits was a constant in my life throughout my twenties and early thirties. But you can only rely on being buzzed for so long before it starts to wear thin and the troubling noise you’ve been trying to blot out and force down starts echoing up through the cracks.
I had a thought that started sneaking up on me around this time. Perhaps, I thought to myself, the reason I’m not happy is that I don’t have meaning. I don’t have purpose. Or maybe it’s that my previous purpose—becoming a professional actor and doing life-changing plays—simply wasn’t a completely real or satisfying life course. Maybe I had thrown the baby out with the bathwater when I jettisoned my faith. (Not literally. I never got THAT drunk!) Maybe, just maybe, I should give more thought to this whole question of . . . oh boy, here we go . . . GOD.
I related to that great Catholic monk, writer, and mystic of the highest order Thomas Merton, who described himself as “loving God and yet hating him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers.” Was I living in hopeless self-contradictory hungers? Yikes!
I started fitfully asking my friends about God. (I greatly enjoy talking about topics that almost always clear the room, the dinner table, or a party. Topics like God, death, fate, Palestine, and Charlie Sheen.)
This is always a tricky conversation. It’s such a loaded word.*
To a person my bohemian friends had the same response to the whole God conversation. When I asked them if they believed in God they always said the same thing: “Ummmm . . . kind of.” They would say, “Well, I don’t believe in a judgmental old man on a cloud with a beard, but I kind of believe that there’s something out there, some loving, creative power in the universe. I have a sense of something more out there.”
“Kind of.” I got this same answer from just about everyone I spoke to.
This just didn’t sit right with me. How could there “kind of” be a God? I mean, you can’t “kind of” be pregnant, can you? You either are or you aren’t. I mean if Beyoncé responded with “kind of” when asked if she was pregnant, she’d be hounded to the ends of the earth for more specifics. But as for the presence of an all-encompassing deity, “kind of” is enough for people to say, “Cool, no more questions.”
I mean, either there IS an all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful creative force behind this universe and perhaps infinite other universes, or everything has always “just been,” and through an accident of random molecules somehow we humans ended up with consciousness. Either there is a meaning to the time we spend alive on this physical plane or the only meaning in this universe of stuff and energy is the meaning we create for ourselves. We’ve either been “created” and have eternal souls that will exist after we slough off our meat suits, OR everything in the universe is just random, beautiful matter bumping into itself and somehow we accidentally evolved from sea paste to monkeys to humans and there is no “divine” presence beyond us, and, when we die, it’s lights out, end of consciousness, end of story.
(Socrates [aka Plato] spoke of his lack of fear of death because it was either an eternal, blissful sleep of nothingness or a glorious transition of his eternal soul to another state of being.)
To quote the great Thomas Merton again: “A life is either all spiritual, or not spiritual at all.”
Am I missing something? It’s really two choices, right? There’s not a “kind of” option.
There certainly is the agnostic
option: to actively say that one just doesn’t know, or can’t ever know, if there’s a Creator. This option allows one to stay open to evidence of His existence. But that’s a little different from kind of believing there kind of could be a God.*
—
I moved from atheist to agnostic along this phase in my journey. But I was an agnostic who wasn’t going to passively wait for some evidence of God to be dropped in my lap. I was going to go on a MISSION, gosh darn it. A quest for God and for the truth about this miraculous, challenging, strange, and awesomely dazzling universe we are born into.
I started by working my way through many of the central holy books of the world religions. I started with the Bible, Old and New Testaments (a bit thick, but worth it); the Koran (same, only thicker); the Bhagavad Gita (action and adventure ancient Indian style!); the Vedas and Upanishads (mystical!); and the Dhammapada (the Buddha speaks). But it was when I started reading books on Native American spirituality that something clicked.
I read about Wakan Tanka, the title for the Creator in the Lakota Sioux tradition. Suddenly things started to make sense. Wakan Tanka translates as “the Great Mystery.” It/He/She is an all-loving, all-powerful essence that connects all things. It moves through nature. It is the wind and the light and the sun, and it binds us to the animal kingdom and plants and the leaves moving in the trees. Wakan Tanka courses through the seven directions: north, south, east, west, up, down, and INSIDE, toward our very hearts. Toward love itself. It connects us through time as well, to our ancestors, throughout the history of Earth, like the Force from Star Wars. (See? That made my nerdiest fans perk up!) Both ancient and imperishable. Running through and yet beyond every thing and every not-thing. Mysterious. Ultimately unknowable but everywhere.