Chapter 7 #2
On the other hand, though, my career couldn’t have been further from my mind.
It was theatre that had brought me to acting in the first place.
Sure, it’d been a grade school production of Alice in Wonderland and then leading roles all four years of high school.
It had been my drama teacher Ms. Hutchinson who’d pulled me aside one day during junior year and asked what my college plans were.
At that point Andy was a senior and struggling with his SAT scores and applications, the first one in our immediate family to apply to college.
I knew if he couldn’t get into a good undergrad program that there was no hope of my parents letting me head off to New York or New Haven or Pittsburgh, so I asked if Ms. Hutchinson could help both of us.
Andy got into Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, only an hour drive and not terrifying to my parents, and a year after him I was off to Juilliard, a two-and-a-half-hour flight and a lot more terrifying, but they didn’t stop me. Back then, nothing could stop me.
I’d moved to LA because I thought booking film or TV might be the only way I’d pay back my massive student loans.
Like Andy’s post-college strategy, it was embarrassingly na?ve, except that, like Andy’s plan, it had worked.
I’d assumed I’d still do theatre, but that wasn’t the path my career took.
Now, in this rehearsal space, blue spike tape outlining the stage on the floor, I could have burst into tears that I’d found my way back.
“I have thoughts on how I’d like to begin,” Rebecca said, standing in the middle of the circle of actors. “But I really want this to be collaborative. If you have an impulse to try something, please just try it. If what I’m asking you to do feels wrong, tell me.”
“If I may,” Michael said, of course. “Sometimes—”
“Let’s keep moving for now,” Rebecca said. “I want to work through the whole script. We’ll start pulling out pieces eventually, but for now I’m excited to barrel through.”
Rebecca gestured to me. “Gardner, it’s you alone onstage when the curtain rises.
I know we both feel that Casey starts the show with a feeling of strength, determination, the satisfaction of a plan coming together.
Let’s have you front and center, facing the audience.
Michael, Kathleen, Henry, Ashlee, I want to keep you offstage, until she finishes her monologue, then from—let’s say stage left—move with purpose toward her.
The word I keep coming back to is swarm.
This is an invasion of her space. Right away let’s feel how you’ve undercut her, even if we’re not there yet story-wise. ”
I found my place and squared back my shoulders, letting my body find where I ended and Casey began.
It would have been a lot easier to let go of myself if Rebecca hadn’t called me Gardner, but I knew that well-adjusted people didn’t internally fall to pieces because their ex-girlfriend was nearby, was effortlessly competent, was upsettingly attractive.
“Here, do you mind …?” Rebecca stepped up behind me, gently guided me closer to the imaginary front of the stage. I employed every acting method I’d ever learned to ensure that I didn’t physically react to the light touch of her hand on my upper arm. “Great. Whenever you’re ready.”
“I can’t believe they’re all right outside this door. I can’t believe I invited them.”
“You’re a little quiet,” Rebecca said.
“Film actors are always too quiet,” Michael said. “And TV. When I did Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with—”
“OK,” Rebecca said, which somehow stopped him. If I’d felt less like an idiot I would have made pointed eye contact at Kathleen. I had no idea how I’d been too loud at the table read and why my voice now disappeared into the same room.
I took a breath and looked to Rebecca. “Should I start over?”
“No, keep going,” she said with a smile I chose to read as encouraging. “I like where you’re starting. Just get louder.”
So I did, and before long my short monologue was over and the rest of the cast had joined me in the outline of our stage.
Hometown was about confronting your past, shaking loose the pieces that you tried to walk away from but couldn’t let go of, the power that trauma could hold over generations.
But unlike so many of the family-confrontation-around-a-kitchen-table plays I’d seen, Hometown was sharply, endearingly, painfully funny.
I’d never know Geoffrey Gordan’s true motives for casting me, but it was impossible he’d been aware that I’d left my small town and most of my family behind, too.
Casey might have been working through the aftermath of a place’s shared trauma—which made whatever I was running from seem small-stakes—but, god, I felt it.
Also, obviously, I felt it more because Rebecca was here, because Applewoods had never felt so close, because speaking words about acknowledging unspoken truths made me acutely aware of everything I never said, everything I never would.
“That was good,” Rebecca said when we’d gotten through the first scene.
“Do we think we can get all of you in the kitchen? The designers will be back tomorrow, we can give them a slightly less chaotic full run-through. I have a feeling decisions made by people before I was involved might give us some logistical problems, but let’s find out. ”
We filed into the smaller taped-off area and laughed.
“Wow,” Kathleen said. “Look at how close we’re all getting.”
“Do you hate this?” Rebecca asked us. She glanced at Kevin. “Honestly, I love the visual of Casey literally trapped in the middle of her family.”
“It feels like every time my parents come to visit me in my studio,” Kevin said, and Rebecca nodded emphatically.
“Exactly. If you’re all good being up in each other’s space to this degree, let’s see how it goes.”
Michael spoke his lines directly into the back of my head, which was honestly so funny that I nearly broke immediately.
If he was an asshole, at least I could admit he was a talented one.
And I sensed how we all felt it—well, not that Michael was an asshole, Kathleen was definitely on my side there but I couldn’t read Henry or Ashlee.
But there was an energy between us, moving together as these characters—as this family.
Rebecca’s presence, too—watchful, but I’d stopped fearing her judgment. As far as the play went, at least.
We rarely got real rehearsals on set, and so often we were being plucked from our separate trailers.
Thanks to CGI we might not even be in the same space!
To be in this room, even with Michael’s breath on the back of my head, even with my every movement under Rebecca’s focused gaze, I remembered more and more why this was special.
When we broke for lunch, the whole cast crowded into two tables next to each other, and I felt the satisfaction of getting through the whole play permeating the air.
“Are you eating the same thing again?” Henry asked me, which made me laugh.
“You can’t comment on what people eat,” Ashlee said, with a worried glance in my direction. Ashlee was definitely in the group of people who did not plan on making eye contact with me unless the work entailed it.
“Look,” I said, and laughed some more. Look again? Good thing to know that when I let my walls down a little I got saltier. “I didn’t make a giant piece of salmon not to have leftovers all week.”
“You sound like my mother,” Henry said.
“Ouch,” Kathleen and I said together.
“Not age-wise,” he said quickly. “Leftovers-wise.”
“No personal chef?” Michael asked, because of course he did.
“Only when I’m getting ready to become Princess Platinum,” I admitted. “And they’re less of a chef and more of a nutritional expert who works with my trainer to make sure I’m having enough protein and skipping carbs.”
“I’m not sure I’d do any of it if it meant skipping carbs,” Kathleen said.
“They don’t put the carbs part in the contract,” I said.
“Actually, before the first movie—the night before my first training session, I’d completely forgotten about this—my brother and best friend took me out for a carbs crawl, you know, like a pub crawl but in search of carbs instead of drinks.
Though obviously we did that too. Fries, garlic bread, potato pancakes.
It had bachelorette party vibes except that I wasn’t committing to one person, just protein. ”
“Honestly, that’s a much scarier commitment,” Kathleen said. “And that’s coming from a divorced person!”
“I was going to say,” Michael said, deadpan, and we burst into shocked laughter. Mine, at least, was shocked. Still, I’d take it. I’d take all of this. Maybe somehow I’d come home after all.