If you haven't been to my website lately, then congratulations, that's one thing you're guaranteed to have not wasted valuable internet time doing. 

You may want to swing by for a moment and take a look, especially at the new masthead image I've put up. I start rehearsals for a play next week, and that shot is from our little publicity photo shoot. I apparently wear that wedding dress in the last scene of the play. You know me, I don't read scripts, so what do I know?

With the season finale of Break A Leg drawing near, and my shooting having been done for some time, it's basically like we're on hiatus. I may have mentioned before that one of the reasons I love working on this show is for that feeling of being involved in something, not just having to whore myself around from indie to indie just to try and fill up my spare time and still be able to call myself an actor. Well, hiatus is here now and I need something to do.

I tend to do roughly one play a year (can roughly really apply to the number one? I mean doing one thing a year is pretty precise, not a rough estimate at all). I hate rehearsing since it takes so much time away from my family, and then I hate performance since it takes so much time away from my family. Even though I hate both halves of the process roughly equally (there's a good roughly), I somehow end up loving the process as a whole. How does that work out?

I think it comes down to one thing: the audience. Some actors may tell you that they do it for the sake of art, or act because it's their calling, or because they don't know how else to live. That's bullshit, it all comes down to roughly one thing (just trying it again, no, "roughly one" doesn't work): ego. 

Now this is not bad ego I'm talking about, the kind that makes your head so big it won't fit through a door. This is more of the Freudian ego, the one that we all have. Ego is essential to psychological well-being, and it's the actor's ego that motivates their performances. It's not that we crave attention, though undoubtedly some of us do, but it's more that we crave the audience's input and feedback into our work. Actors who desire instant gratification and live energy gravitate towards theatre, those who don't mind waiting and love the "piecemeal" aspect of film gravitate to camera work.

I did have this one acting teacher who said he would dress up at home as King Richard and do monologues. Alone. For fun. That guy was just crazy.

Acting without an audience, no matter the nature of that audience, isn't acting. It's just pretending. Alone. It's those guys in that YouTube video playing "Dungeons & Dragons" live in the woods, with the one kid shouting "fireball" over and over again? It's really kind of pathetic, and it's certainly not art. Acting and performance art in general is unique in that the audience is required for you to be an artist, whether the audience is watching live or watching ten years from now.

I guess that's what I love about acting, and about theatre specifically. I know that there are people here right now that are enjoying this story we're telling, and they're going to go think about it and maybe talk about it later with some other people. It's also exciting that once the show's over, and especially once the play closes, the story is over, or at least our version of it. It can never exist again.

Break A Leg is exciting as well, since this newfangled internet thing allows our audience to give us almost instant feedback through comments and message boards. We get to hear and see and know that we have an audience at all, and that the story we're telling is being enjoyed and talked about and  thought about long after we've finished shooting and editing. The other thing the internet has done is of course made it available to the entire world, in perpetuity (or at least until The Beast turns off The Cloud and kicks us off the internet forever).

More people have seen me perform in Break A Leg... no, not even that. More people see me each and every week (more like within the first hour of the video hitting the site) than the largest community theatre audience I've ever performed in front of. More people have seen the most popular episodes of Break A Leg than have seen all of my theatrical and film performances ever, combined, ever. I'm leaving commercials out of this because that's just unfair.

Anyway, thanks for being a fan, thank you for watching, and thank you for always always being here on the site. We don't do this for ourselves: if it were up to us we would have probably quit ages ago. It's just too damn difficult, too damn tiring, and too damn thankless if it weren't for you guys watching and commenting every week. Don't get me wrong, it's fun as all hell, but so is Risk and I stopped playing that years ago.

Thanks for listening, and if you're in SF in late October/early November, come see March to November at the Phoenix Theater!