Written for Narrow Way to Broadway by Annie Varberg
Acting, and more broadly, making theater, bring me the closest to what I know as pure joy and holy community. Acting challenges me to listen more intently, have more empathy towards others, and pay closer attention to the ways God moves in my life and the world around me.
I went to college with the intention of eventually becoming a full-time working actor. For many reasons, I didn’t go to a widely-known theater school. Instead, I ended up at a Christian liberal arts school in the suburbs of Chicago with a theater program called “Workout” that utterly rocked my world. Workout is ensemble-based, made up of an audition-only group of 40 some artists who meet weekly to study acting and build the relationships and honesty required of being a true ensemble. Each yearly season of shows is cast from this group, giving the cast an already formed foundation of trust and common vocabulary to work off of. Led by a beloved professor, Workout was designed to be a place where you can work out what it means to be an actor and a Christian (“...work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” Phil. 2:12).
Over the course of studying theater in college, I grew even more in love with acting than I thought possible. I lived and breathed my assignments - to create a 20-minute monologue using only words spoken by Katherine from “Taming of the Shrew” for Acting Shakespeare or to write a solo piece of theater based on an article I read in last Sunday’s newspaper for Acting II. It all made me feel so alive! It still does.
In February of my freshman year, I was cast as Babe in “Crimes of the Heart” by Beth Henley, directed by a visiting big-named director from Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. During the run of the show, the cast took him to dinner to pick his brain on how to hack it in the professional theater scene. As we leaned over our sandwiches to glean his wisdom, I heard this advice for the first time: “If you can do anything other than theater, do that.”
I almost spit out my food. Here was someone who made a living off of acting and directing at one of the most prestigious theaters in Chicago telling me to stay away from his same career at all costs. This was the last thing I expected to hear. But throughout my time in school, this advice slowly simmered in my head. Any time someone asked, “what do you plan to do after college?,” I hesitated to answer as I thought back to this director’s advice.
For better or worse, I am thoroughly “Type A,” a Myers-Brigg “J,” an Enneagram “3”, an oldest child. I am motivated by achievement and logical reasoning. “Responsibility” ranks high on my Clifton Strengthsfinder - I am wired to make choices that appear most practical. Take these in-born qualities and add the reality of student debt and you’ve got a very captive audience for the advice to “If you can do anything else...” It almost sounded like a dare. Well, of course I can. I am very capable of doing something other than acting or theater for my career if it’s more practical.
By my final year of college, I had a big decision to make about my next step. Rather than audition for MFA programs like some of my classmates, I stumbled my way into a career in advertising. I happened to see a poster outside our college cafeteria saying that an ad agency was coming to campus to conduct interviews. I figured marketing sounded somewhat creative, at least as far as the business world could go, and sent in my resume. Against all odds, or as I have come to believe, because God gives good gifts to His children, I received an offer to become an Associate Account Exec. at that agency in Chicago starting the summer after graduation.
There were other layers to my decision to walk away from a full-time theater career, of course. For one, I’ve never loved auditioning, mostly because I don’t love rejection (who does?). Plus, I heard plenty of stories from Workout alumni about “what the theater world was really like,” and frankly, it didn’t sound as compelling as the ensemble-based way of doing theater that I’d grown to love in college. Alumni spoke of getting parts in shows that felt hokey or poorly written, working with directors who didn’t care about their actors as people, and the strain of doing the same show every night for weeks on end. By the time I walked across my graduation stage, cap and gown in hand at 22 years old, I had talked myself into seeing the unknown theater world as an intimidating and altogether unfulfilling place to spend my time. Not that the corporate world of advertising seemed much better, but at least it offered dental insurance.
Strangely, my first two years of post-grad life included a good bit of theater. Chicago’s a good place for that. I played Hermia in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Shakespeare in the Park show, took several character study and scene study classes, and auditioned for a few more gigs. I was pleasantly surprised by the level of fulfillment I achieved by just doing theater “on the side” of my day job, though it meant a lot of late nights and tired mornings.
But after 2 years of this, I left Chicago. I married my husband and moved out to Berkeley, CA where he was part way through law school. I kept my advertising job, but theater rapidly fell by the wayside. I was adjusting to married life in a new city that was far away from the friendships and rhythms I had built in Chicago. The thought of learning a new theater scene on top of all the other newness felt like a pipe dream. So I put it to rest.
Over the next 5 years, my husband and I moved all over the country for his work, each move lasting anywhere from 3 months to a year. Berkeley to Chicago, back to Berkeley, to Houston, TX, to Minneapolis, MN, and then back to Chicago. Covid-19 happened in that time, too.
Anytime I found myself longing for the theater, a somewhat frequent occurrence, I remembered the advice: “If you can do anything else, do that.” On some level, the advice made me feel like if I knew I could do something else, then I didn’t love theater enough. It might sound strange, but I felt a sense of shame for not loving it “enough.” I blamed my bent toward practicality for preventing me from committing to the craft of acting. There was also the fact that we were constantly on the move. So I made every excuse to ignore reminders of the thing I love.
I spent this past year living in Chicago again, but still hadn’t entertained any thoughts of acting until this past July when I received a call asking me to return to the stage. I played Demetrius in another Shakespeare in the Park performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” alongside a host of generational Workout alumni.
And wow. Acting again felt like being woken from a long dream. But rather than wake to a feeling of disorientation, waking helped me find myself again. It helped me piece together parts of me that I was foolishly convinced would stay asleep forever. I felt the sensation of having just stepped out of a cold shower - alert, tingling, alive.
Since those performances, I’ve entered a season of reflection, asking myself why I left theater in the first place. Is pursuing theater hard? Yes! It's no secret that the career path of an artist can be a treacherous one - the “no’s” far outnumber the “yes’s” and the work is unreliable. Many of you reading this know these facts far better than I do. The theater will break your heart eventually, if it hasn’t already.
I can see a world where “do anything else” is useful advice for some to hear. But I’ve come to realize that that advice doesn’t fully account for my faith or what God might be calling me to. I firmly believe that my love for acting and storytelling is God-given. I know that I was created to create, just like my Creator. As a mentor recently said to me, if God wires you a certain way, you can trust that God will give you opportunities to use those strengths. But you’re not God. You don’t get to know when or how.
I’m almost 30 and choosing to reverse commute back into the theater at a time when many of my peers are just now choosing to leave it. In the words of Sondheim, I feel “excited and scared.” I know there will be future seasons when my actor-self will need to sleep again. But life is long. Just because I step away from something for a few years, doesn’t mean I can’t return to it. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. I don’t have to only do anything else.