Even as a high school senior, you knew that acting doesn’t offer great career stability. You also really liked the department chair and watching some theatre classes when you visited Towson, so you head to Maryland for college on a full scholarship. You double major in Theatre (acting concentration) and English (fiction writing). By your junior year it is wildly clear to you that though language is awesome and you will always love writing, you absolutely want to be IN the story. You don’t want to write it, you want to experience it.
At 18, you know yourself well enough to worry that living with another actor could make you insecure and competitive, so for your freshman year you request that your roommate be from any major other than theatre. So you live across campus from the arts buildings and are very rarely home in your dorm. Your roommate comes to the first concert you’re in and gives you a card that reads “Those who hear not the music, think the dancers mad.” (you frame it and still have it 25 years later) She thought that a theatre major would be a party girl, but watched you get up early for movement classes every day, take heaps of credits, and go rehearse all the time. She’s the first of many people who will learn, through you, that actors are smart, organized, hard-working people.
You audition for all the school shows you could be right for… and in 4.5 years (double major, plus dance classes, plus voice lessons…) you do two mainstage shows. You do a bunch of student-run performances in the black box… and you also audition for non-union theatre in Baltimore and get acting work outside of school.
Thanks to your first really serious boyfriend, a lighting design major, you learn about SETC (an audition conference), and get a last-minute appointment after being waitlisted from the screening auditions. You get 12 callbacks, even though you’re sick enough to be drinking dayquil from the bottle in the bathroom that day. The Barter Theatre offers you a spot in their summer intern company. So, you spend the summer in southwestern Virginia, playing children’s theatre roles, running crew for the mainstage and understudying, and you learn the foundational skills to being a working actor - yes, sending postcards and writing cover letters, but even more than that, how to show up “on the page” and skip “arm flapping” in favor of problem solving.
20 years later, you do an EPA Shakespeare audition in front of John Hardy, who ran the company that summer, and knowing he liked your 2 minute speech that day still makes you feel truly accomplished.
After you graduate, you get a temp job and stay in Baltimore (you live downtown with friends, right on the edge of where things get sketchy) and perform in “The Taming of the Shrew.” You help run a small company in Baltimore with friends for a while, in a third floor walk up space where all the seating is couches. You do some good shows, but you are still hoping to work more professionally. You audition at a conference in Memphis and have a handful of callbacks, including one from a company called Shenandoah Shakespeare and another, The Theater at Monmouth. Monmouth makes an offer to hire you as an actor/stitcher, so you spend the summer in Maine making costumes and performing in “Henry V” and “Robin Hood.” That "Henry V” remains a favorite performance - the show was such an ensemble event, with everyone playing supporting roles for all the action… Also that summer, you meet Steve, who will be a dear friend, colleague, and cheerleader, and who introduces you to “Songs for a New World,” “The Last Five Years,” and the joy of hanging out with an accomplished musician around a piano and singing together for hours.
While working in Maine, you get a call from the Barter, offering you the opportunity to play a nurse in their production of “South Pacific.” The show would conflict with a contract for a short touring job you’ve already accepted.
What do you do?
Honor the contract you accepted?
Say yes to Barter, since it is an objectively better gig?