Outlaw Midnights

College was an extreme reality check in the opposite direction.

As I said before, I was physically a bit of a late bloomer. I think one thing I experienced with that was a delayed onset of adolescent angst. I was moody and artistic in high school to some degree, but I was also a great deal more upbeat than most of my peers. My parents were kind and supportive, and we had little to no crises in the home or conflict. We were still close – in fact, after my sister left for college, we became closer than we’d been before.

Jeff Buckley drowned mysteriously in the Wolf River in Memphis, Tennessee. That was a sad note. My dad, who’d lost Hendrix at a young age, understood exactly what that sadness was like.

Emotionally speaking, college to me felt like the roller coaster of ups and downs that high school was supposed to have been. Courtney and I broke up the fall of my freshman year. She was my first real taste of genuine heartbreak. I was convinced we would be young newlyweds, like my parents had been. College had presented us with the possibility of going in different directions, but we’d both chosen Penn State. We’d even been assigned to the same dorm. I was going to live one floor away from my girlfriend. I even got cast in a decent role in a mainstage production of the PSU School of Theatre (unusual for freshmen), playing Malcolm in Macbeth. Fate had been kind.

Rehearsals for Macbeth took up my nights, and Courtney caught the eye of a fifth-year senior in Geography. I came home from rehearsal and found them hanging out. I knew it was trouble, but it took another two months of painful and awkward conflict between us before she finally broke it off. I was hurt, angry, heartbroken. For the first time in my life, I became depressed.

I kept making strides forward theatrically, but my teachers were demanding and not very encouraging. If we were majoring in theatre, then by God, they were going to give us a grounding in the brutal realities of the profession. We were told of the cutthroat scene in New York City, of 2% actor employment rates, of meager paychecks that don’t even cover the rent. Those of us who stayed and didn’t let the scare tactics shake us off found ourselves in grueling, emotion-laden acting and movement classes. It wasn’t uncommon to see a classmate lose control emotionally. We trained in the art of riding an emotional rollercoaster for the purpose of fictitiously entertaining or providing catharsis for an audience of observers. We learned to be raw and open. It was tremendously exhilarating and tremendously frightening at once. This wasn’t the acting I’d done in high school. That had been hard work, but a ton of fun. This was like a kind of monastic discipline. The work was the only reward, and the work was wholly ephemeral.

After my breakup, I bonded with a small group of classmates who took pity on me and let me into their little circle. They let me vent and they talked me through things. We lamented our “low people on the totem pole” status within the School of Theatre, where the hierarchy went from faculty to grad students, then BFA Musical theatre majors, and lastly us, the lowly undergrad BAs... From the beginning of my senior year of high school to the end of my freshman year of college, I went through some of the highest highs and lowest lows of my life.

Toward the end of my sophomore year at Penn State, the director of the Illinois Shakespeare Festival came to Penn State to look at grad students for summer roles in his company. A professor of ours had directed for him the summer before, and my best friend Bob and I, who shared a keen ambition to become actors, talked our way into auditioning as well. We ended up being the only two hired, as “acting interns.” We were paid nothing. We were housed, we played small roles (in Shakespeare they are sometimes called “spear carrier” roles, and sure enough, Bob and I stood stark still and held spears for a long scene in Richard III) and we understudied larger roles that we almost never performed. It sounds rough, but it was, along with my Governor’s School experience, the best summer of my life.

At Illinois I began to realize that because of the impossible nature of theatre as a profession and the inherent extremity of the life of the dramatic artist, a certain superhuman quality possessed those who really shone on the stage. I began to realize that no amount of hard work or discipline would make me a better actor if I wasn’t willing to be intensely, even insanely, courageous.

Back at Penn State, I played three completely different roles in the fall of my junior year. Each one was an extreme performance, and an extremely different one, and I began hearing some positive feedback from my once-cold teachers. I was starting to “get it.” I also no longer cared what the people watching thought. I was doing this for myself. The selfish nature of the actor began to take hold of me. The Christian school kid was at odds with this persona, and so I often felt like several distinctly different people. The person I was in class was quite different than the person I was onstage, and the person I was around friends was another, altogether different character.

The BA Theatre majors had one outlet that was mostly “theirs.” It was an unofficial club (not University sanctioned) called the Outlaws Playwright’s Workshop. Every week, Outlaws put up a student-written one-act play with a full cast and production. The actors memorized their lines in a matter of days, like Shakespeare’s actors once did in the Elizabethan era. Every week, Outlaws did the impossible. They performed at 11:15 pm on Thursday nights in a cramped black box rehearsal room, and crowds came out in surprising numbers. The energy was electric, the shows were uncensored and the vibe was rock ‘n roll all the way.

My last two and a half years at Penn State were spent producing Outlaws. The student producer team (usually three or four) made sure everything happened. It took up a lot of my time, but I still managed to get good grades, see people socially and be involved in more mainstage productions with the School of Theatre. It was routine for my friends and I to be juggling roles in two, three, four productions at once.