years.
The first adjudicator cleared his throat. âIâd like to begin by discussing the playâs realism.â He looked down at his notes. âAs an example, letâs take the case of the butler. Played by . . . COOONEL?â He looked toward me. âItâs like heâs in an entirely different world. Letâs just take one specific moment where COOONEL is surprised by something, and he makes an Ooooohh sound, and then he turns around and says the same thing to the other side of the stage. No one would ever do that.â
The second judge spoke up. âI had an issue with the way people were talking to each other. Letâs just take, as an example,â he said, flipping through his notes, âKAANAL. I donât understand why heâs talking louder than everyone else. It just takes me out of this world.â
The third judge frowned, glancing down at his notes. âI, too, had a problem with the playâs realism. Just as one example . . . COOONEL. Iâm sorry to harp on you, butââ
And so it continued. The judges ripped the play and they shredded me to pieces. We filed out of the auditorium, and no one talked to me about the comments. No one accused me of botching the play, no one said they were upset with me, no one talked to me about my ârealism.â This is because no one talked to me, period. I was left alone. Everyone went out and partied and I returned to my hotel room.
Was I the reason we didnât advance to the finals? Itâs hard to say.Maybe my performance really was so awful that it handicapped our chances. Or maybe the judges hated pretty much everything about the play and Iâm only remembering the notes directed at me.
Over the years Iâve thought about this a lot, and about how, as an actor, there are so many things out of your control. For example, letâs just say youâre an actor and you book your dream TV role. Youâre about to show up for your first day of production, and then the executive producer, after googling you, sees that youâre thirty-two but they have cast you as a twenty-three-year-old. This puts a tiny poisonous thought in his head, and he makes a phone call to the studio head. The studio head says, âWho cares, he looks twenty-three and thatâs all that counts.â And then the studio head tells his wife about it at dinner while eating sushi, and the wife says, well, maybe the audience will find out that he really is thirty-two and that could lead to teenage girls finding him too old. That tiny poisonous thought has now worked its way from executive producer to studio head to his wifeâs head and back into the studio headâs head. And it is not such a tiny thought any longer. So when the studio head goes to sleep that night, he has a dream that the reviews for his new showâhis babyâare mostly positive, except the reviews all said the same thing: the actor is thirty-two, and this led to the audience becoming so outraged that they staged a protest and marched upon the studio, leading to the studio headâs downfall and eventual early demise.
So the next day . . . youâre fired, even though you really were great in the part and do look twenty-three.
Things have to align themselves so perfectly in our universe for actors to make a paycheck. Maybe this was how my Ring Around the Moon castmates feltâthat I wasthe wild card that cost them their ticket to the finals, that I was the one variable out of their control. I donât know.
What I do know is that once those notes finally sank in, once I internalized what had happened, I didnât feel bad for myself anymore. I didnât mope. I knew that a great deal of investment and sacrifice had gone into me coming to this country, and I simply just didnât have the luxury or the time to feel sorry for myself.
I accepted I was not a good actor.
And I resolved one thing: I need to
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