Inferiority Complex

 

Inferiority Complex 

Miss Cratchit: "But New York is the center of everything."
Mama Rose: "New York is the center of New York!"

I make my home in New York City, but I work all over the country.   I have worked at regional theaters (a pejorative term to some) with locals (likewise pejorative) who are as good as anything we have working today on Broadway.  And these are not aberrations.  There are fabulous actors who do not see it as the only goal in an artist's life to work on Broadway.  Washington-Baltimore, Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Francisco Bay Area - these are all vibrant artistic communities where people make their living as theatre artists.  They are not making the best of it in a secondary or tertiary (or quaternary) town because of a sick parent or a divorce or because they couldn't make it New York (or L.A. or Chicago, etc. - fill in your own epitome of The Big Time)

I am acquainted with an artistic director called Spiro Veloudos who runs the Lyric Stage Company in Boston, Massachusetts.  At a post show booze-up one evening some years ago, he told me about his local hiring policy.  For the most part, Spiro uses Boston area actors.  This is not due to parsimony or lack of actor housing.  He finds that he can fulfill his artistic goals within the very rich theatre community in and around the Shawmut peninsula. And stage managers and actors actually make a living full-time as theatre professionals.  Some a very good living, indeed.

Despite seemingly having it all, when I find myself among them, I detect in my regional brethren and sistren, a decided feeling of not being good enough; not making the grade; being less than.  Of course, this serves me very well when I walk into an audition in a community other than my own.  I am the New York guy. I intimidate the competition.  I have an edge before I walk in the room.  Although New York City arguably has some of the best actors in the world living in working there and more of them, we also have more of the lousiest.  We have more lousy actors than Boston, Washington-Baltimore and Atlanta combined.  This edge that regional actors and stage managers (i.e. non-New Yorkers) perceive is but a myth.  Their very consideration and reverence of this island on the Hudson river only increases this myth's power.  In reality, it is an even playing field.  Its evenness can vary depending on ones feeling of self-worth.

The other measures that we often use to separate ourselves out and place ourselves on either end of the superiority-inferiority continuum, are income and totality of employment.   Generally, AEA members in the New York City area earn more than their counterparts in other areas of the country.  Of all things that theatre artists should use least as criterion for comparison to their fellows the main one is income.  I don't know anyone who went into the theatre with money as the main goal.  It has always been difficult to make a living of any kind in show business.  Only with the advent the modern era has it been possible for there to be an actor middle class of any kind.  There many actor who earn more than I do.  Donald Trump also makes more than I do.  The Donald has nothing that I covet either personally nor materially.  Some actors lack good business skills and so are poor.  Many of these are ones that I admire deeply.

Having no other job seems to be another seperator.  An actor who only has W2s from theatrical producing organizations is only someone who has managed to have a good employment year.  There are great actors who also drive taxicabs part-time, or do data entry on the graveyard shift or do a couple of lunch shifts waiting tables.  What does that have to do with how good an actor they might be?  If there were kharmic justice, theatre artists would be billionaires and the aforementioned billionaire would be my bootblack (apologies to my bootblack friends)  I have colleagues who have marveled at my having no other job but acting.  (This doesn't mean that I couldn't use another job - only that I don't have one)  Totality of employment as an indicator of your worth as a theatre artist is likewise a false construct.

"It's an inside job," as they say in the self-help industry.  When I was first starting out, lacking experience and street smarts I had to fake it to make it.  As my career developed a bit of traction, I had to fake it less, and that false bravado and chutzpa morphed into confidence.  This is just as possible to do if one lives in Missoula, Montana as it is if you are from the Upper West Side.  More and more, AEA members all over America are creating their own work and taking the reins of their own careers in hand.

The main edge I have, by virtue of my zip code is, to use an indelicate term: Balls.  So much of our career is self-motivated and self-realized.  We are our own bosses, press agents and employees.  The best production of Shakespeare's TWELFTH NIGHT I have ever seen was a couple of decades ago at The Source Theatre in Washington, DC.  To this day, it is the production against which I measure all others.  The cast?  Locals all.  It was not necessary that the show "move" to be successful.  It was a smash in its own right.  When Steppenwolf came onto the scene a couple of decades ago, there was a pitched change in how Chicago actors were perceived.  Being from the "Second City" became a badge of honor, connoting ones being from a place where they try harder; a lean and mean theatrical community of high quality.

Won't it be something when an actor walks into an audition waiting room in New York and it comes out that she is from Austin, Texas, and a chill of fear goes through the room.