Acting Mad

Somewhat to my surprise, I find myself in the middle of a short stage run in which I relate the story of my alien abduction, complete with seven-foot bunraku (Japanese puppetry) aliens. My cast mates and I also tell tales of childhood mishaps, physical and substance abuse, hallucinations (physical and aural), and recovery.

In one piece I talk about suffering at the hands of peers, teachers, parents, a babysitter, a rapist; in another short play, I embody a hallucination tormenting a woman as I happily swig from a bottle of Jack Daniels.

And I thought, going into this, I was just going to do some simple readings!

Several years ago, it dawned on me that I probably wouldn’t be doing much theater acting anymore. I had appeared in an average of three to five plays a year since 2005.

But in a smaller market like Portland, you can do theater pretty much only if you have a day job … because stage productions pay too little to live on. Or you can do commercial film, video, and print modeling if you have an independent and/or free-lance source of income, or perhaps that rare job that allows you complete control of your time … because you need your weekdays free to audition and work those sparse opportunities. Commercial shoots tend to keep bankers’ hours.

As I’ve related here, I lost my day job in July 2009. Through a combination of unemployment and temp jobs, I gradually progressed to a point where I had the flexibility to do commercial auditions and assignments. Today I earn about 60 percent of my income from free-lance editing and proofreading for various Web companies (work I can do at home, on my own hours), and the rest comes from acting and modeling.

That includes everything from indie film shoots, industrial videos, and print modeling, to guiding downtown walking tours, standardized patient work at local teaching hospitals, my solo literature readings, and old-time-radio show readings with the Willamette Radio Workshop of “The Hobbit,” “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” and “Planet of Dinosaurs.” This year I got my first residual checks ever, for foreign broadcasts of the first-season Grimm episode I was in.

But I really can’t afford to do stage plays now. Less than a thousand dollars (often much less) for several hundred hours of rehearsals and performances probably pencils out to a couple dollars an hour for one’s time and talent, if that.

The only easy access to stage work that doesn’t demand too much is staged readings. I can participate in readings of new works and plays under construction because rehearsals and performances are few. Every January in Portland, the Fertile Ground festival is a great opportunity to do this. I typically participate in several readings for Fertile Ground; I think I have at least four coming up in two months.

But where do the seven-foot aliens come in?

Nearly three years ago a friend asked me to do a public reading of some short monologues that had been created by elderly writers (some of them inexperienced memoirists) under the guidance of a unique nonprofit called the Well Arts Institute.

Founded nearly 14 years ago by director Kate Hawkes and a collection of actors and audience members, Well Arts matches writers (“scribes”) with people in extreme situations, from old age and serious medical conditions (even terminal illnesses) to veterans with PTSD, survivors of abuse, recovering addicts, and Down syndrome families. The latter write their stories—real or creative—on their own or with the assistance of a scribe.

Over the years I’ve read a number of people’s stories in public, including those of a colon cancer survivor, a man with memory loss due to brain trauma, and people with substance abuse and anger issues.

Any kind of acting exposes you to lives you have not led, as well as parts of yourself you may not know very well. But as an actor or writer, you’re typically drawing on material from the past—your own, history, or folklore—and trying to “sell” it to an audience. You frame and present the story in a way that says, “this is really cool, you gotta hear this!”

But reading Well Arts stories by elderly and ailing people, I realized I could be reading about my future, not the past. Sooner or later, I or someone I love will be in a nursing home, will contract cancer or a form of dementia. Working on these scripts, I thought: “I gotta hear this! These readings may be preparing me for my future!”

The current show, “I Wander, It Calls,” comes out of Beautiful Minds, an ongoing writing workshop that Well Arts runs in partnership with the Washington County chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). The authors are people who have been diagnosed with mental illness: smart, sensitive, and troubled—either in the past or even today.

I was excited to get to present this material, but at the first rehearsal the director (Well Arts executive director Katy Liljeholm) proposed we do the show “off book”—meaning, totally memorized. I knew that’s where Well Arts needed to go; it was the next logical step in staging truly effective presentations of the material. But it was a bit of a shock for the cast: to memorize, block, and have ready for performance more than an hour’s worth of monologues and dialogue in barely three weeks!

We did our first two performances last weekend. The other actors have met many of the people who created the pieces they perform, both at rehearsals and after the shows. But I have yet to encounter any of the writers whose solo pieces I am performing. The word from the director is that they don’t even know how to locate the man who composed my alien abduction monologue. (I don’t mean that to be funny.)

The material is emotionally intense, obviously, but surprisingly amusing as well. It’s a privilege to perform such interesting and unique writing. Unlike the stories of elders I’ve performed in past years, I don’t expect to experience bipolar disorder or grapple with substance abuse. So embodying this material is a new experience for me, and one I (thankfully) will probably never face in reality.

I hope I get to meet my authors eventually. At the very least, I’d like them to see what I’ve done with their stories.

“I Wander, It Calls” will be performed three more times, this week: at 7:30 p.m. Friday and 2 p.m. Saturday at the Portland Actors Conservatory theater, which is a former fire station; and on Saturday night at 7 p.m. in the Hillsboro Artists’ Regional Theatre in Hillsboro, Oregon.

[Photos of “I Wander, It Calls” rehearsal courtesy of Michelle Kasian and Well Arts.]