Living a Dream Playing Erma Bombeck
March 8, 2018
Thirteen years ago, I officially hung up my acting shoes. I never thought I’d take the stage again. But then, Mark Cuddy showed up.
The Geva Theatre Center artistic director asked me to portray Erma Bombeck in a one-woman play, At Wit’s End. Of course, I said no. And the…I decided to take a leap and say yes. Even though I wasn’t sure I even remembered how to act. Even though I was terrified.
I was terrified because acting was something I took seriously. I once had a great acting teacher who quoted Goethe to explain the pressure of being an actor: “I wish the stage were as narrow as the wire of a tightrope dancer so that no incompetent would dare step upon it.”
That humbling notion has always provided perspective to me about what it really means to be an artist. But it’s also a way of thinking that has worked for most of the rest of my life, too. It has led me to always try to be curious, diligent, studious and to seek excellence in whatever I might attempt.
Of course, I always knew I needed to study hard if I wanted to become an actor. I started taking acting classes all the way back in the second grade. Growing up on Staten Island so close to Manhattan, my acting teachers in middle school and high school included amazing young actors who eventually became Broadway stars. (For the theater geeks reading this, the list included Betsy Joslyn and Randy Graff.)
In college, while majoring in International Relations, I would sneak in a theater class every semester. “Tap dancing is totally the same as diplomacy!” I argued to my college advisor.
Somehow I ended up with a second major in theater. Even as a young law student, I took classes in New York with the famed William Hickey at HB Studio.
But after that last class, I decided to cut theater out of my life. I thought I had to focus on my studies and career as a lawyer. When I made that decision, I found myself unable to even enter a theater as a spectator. It just made me sad to do so.
After I started practicing law in Washington, D.C., my stage dreams kept knocking on the inside of my head. One day, my former acting professor at American University asked me to return to my alma mater to play Amanda in The Glass Menagerie. I was honored to be asked, but I said no. I couldn’t possibly do it. I was a lawyer. There was no time to do what I actually loved. So she tried another tactic, asking me to join her at rehearsals and work with her to help coach the students in the play.
And that’s when the floodgates opened. I knew I couldn’t continue to cut theater out of my life, and I knew I needed to act again. So I started working on it after work, taking classes at the Shakespeare Theatre Company with one of my greatest teachers, Ed Gero.
I had to juggle working as both an actor and a lawyer. I had to run from deposition to audition, hoping that I’d make it back to the office in time to file briefs in court for my clients.
Eventually, the learning from the acting classroom, the audition room, the rehearsal hall and even on film sets started to seep into my lawyer's life. Perhaps it made me a more fearless lawyer. After all, it’s hard to worry too much about terrible opposing counsel when you’ve got to get across town to play Mary Todd Lincoln in full hoop skirt and wig.
Finally, after my law firm went out of business (maybe because the associates were doing too many other things?), I left the practice of law and plunged into full-time acting. But even then, I was afraid to tread upon the stage without learning more.
I took off each summer to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and at the British American Drama Academy at Oxford. Still, some of my best learning came from doing: from auditioning; from being rejected; and from being cast on the stage, on film and working among my community of artists.
That same acting teacher who had given us the dire warning about treading upon the stage once told me he believed the best actors live their lives fully, and he wished all actors could just do that—experience life to the fullest—as our training.
So I’ve tried to do that. I’ve lived life to the fullest.
But I was still terrified about getting back on stage—despite all that training.
As I write this, I’m in the middle of my run in the one-woman show. And I’m still terrified, every time I take the stage, but slightly less than before. And returning to the stage at this stage of my life, I’m learning so much about art, acting and life.
Mostly I’ve learned that returning to something you know so well isn’t like riding a bike—it’s like learning all over again. I’m so very grateful for this project to remind me what it means to be truly present; to work from the heart and not the head; how to listen, really listen; and how to walk and talk at the same time.
We only had two weeks in a rehearsal room. In those two weeks we broke down the script moment by moment, comma by period, beat by beat. I have such gratitude for the incredible gift of being able to focus for five hours a day on just one thing: being Erma.
In the process, I learned how different we really are. In rhythm, tone and, well, in every way. Her work as a writer may have made my writer’s voice a possibility in the world, but her “actual” voice was very different from mine, both metaphorically and literally.
In my behind-the-scenes indoctrination, I learned how lucky we are to have an institution like Geva in our community. One that takes care of artists cultivates new talent and, most of all, employ so many people each season. Mark Cuddy’s leadership has made it all happen.
This experience has also taught me that your childhood dreams can reemerge, even later in life. Mark and everyone at Geva gave me the opportunity to live my dream again. Perhaps that’s the greatest lesson I’ve learned. If you’re scared of something but it’s one of your core dreams, trust you’ve got the chops, the training and all that living to help you do it.
Here’s a quote for this time of my life: “It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold them up and say, ‘How good or how bad am I?’ That’s where courage comes in.” Yes, of course, Erma Bombeck said that.
As first published in the Democrat + Chronicle and on the USA Today Network