Why do I work in the theatre? Yes, I love the thrum of immediate, live, audience response. But tonight, again, I wondered if maybe it isn’t the actors who keep me coming back. The good, competent, skilled, professional, incredibly talented actors who are fun to work with because they have incredible passion for what they do and because they can channel up human expression and the depths of our experience and present it to us in ways that are eerily true and unexpected.

Case in point:  this guy, my friend Brian Newkirk.

A little background:

I have known and worked with Brian Newkirk for about 12 years. I don’t know how many plays we’ve done together now with me serving as director or producer, and he may have been in one or two of the plays I’ve written as well and I’ve honestly forgotten, and if so, I apologize, but it just seems that we’ve done countless projects together. For all 12 years, Brian has been the consummate pro. I know that people who don’t work with actors all the time have this stereotype that actors are flakes. Neurotic, drooling, pampered, skittish, impossible flakes. No — those are stars (and just some of them). Actors — real actors — do things like show up on time, and know their lines, and give their all, and will do anything for a good part, and ask for little in return except maybe that you respect their craft. Sometimes you get a person who is both actor and star; I did three gigs with Alfred Molina, and I can tell you, he is a star and an actor. There are plenty of other examples, too. But to do theatre, you’d better be an actor. There’s no one there to bail you out, and there’s nobody who’s going to yell, “Cut,” and there’s no fixing your performance in post.

Which brings me back to Brian Newkirk. During the rehearsal of “The Incident Report,” a world-premiere play by EM Lewis that I’m directing, one of my actors took ill. Throughout the weeks of rehearsal, he kept going to doctors and hospitals and labs and getting every test known to man — and still made it to rehearsals and even made it to opening night before, finally, two days ago, he was hospitalized with, wait for it, a heart infection. Yes, an infection in his heart. And he still came to opening night and blew me and everybody else away, before he finally got diagnosed with something so serious that there are miles of tubes and other artificial plumbing now running in and out of his chest in a hospital at UCLA. So, Monday, two nights before the next performance, enter Brian Newkirk, who nobly agreed to go on in this other actor’s stead. How many rehearsals did Brian get with me? None — unless you count the “rehearsal” we did today over the phone.  Yes, I have now done everything one can do as a stage director on behalf of “the show must go on,” because I have now rehearsed an understudy over the phone. And by “rehearsed,” I mean we discussed his character arc and his intentions and an approach to the character, in about 15 minutes. And tonight, two days after getting tapped to go on for the rest of this run, and with one linethrough with his fellow actors yesterday and 15 minutes on the phone with me today, Brian Newkirk went on tonight. No script in hand, all of his lines and his blocking committed to memory. And he was fantastic.

I love this story. Don’t  you love this story? Because don’t we all like to believe that if you just put your back into it and your heart and soul, you can do amazing things?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 10:48 pm and is filed under Theatre, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.