Return to the Sublime

When you’re in acting school you are given the very best material to work with. You work on Chekov, Williams, Shakespeare, Shaw…and you bask in the glorious language and the deep multifaceted characters. It’s a wonderful time of idealism and nurturing, and then…there’s the real world. You dive into the rat race of professional acting; commercials, episodic television, bad TV. movies, and you begin to wonder, “Why did I want to do this?” And then, blessedly, there is Tony Kushner and the Salt Lake Acting Company. Faith is restored in your craft, in what it can offer the world and you as an artist.

Yes, I would put Mr. Kushner in the category of the great playwrights of the past. His language is the kind that gets into your most inner parts and insists that they expand and contract. His characters require you to look beyond what they appear to be into the very soul of what it is to be a human being. And, as in life, that search never ends. As an actor, you are taken back to the sublime days of being fed with only the best material, and you want it to never end. That said, I can’t describe the past few months as “fun”; it has been exhilarating, inspirational, stimulating, demanding, and exhausting…but a sweet exhaustion.

Many heartfelt thanks to SLAC and all those individuals who made this production possible. Thank you Kevin Myhre for being a gentle, insightful guide. Thank you to my fellow cast members for your passion, for putting your hearts into this work, and for your support of me as I try to do the same. Thanks to the crew for taking such good care of us and the show. It’s an amazing collaborative art form, theater is, which is why it is for me the most satisfying kind of work. And it isn’t complete until you share it, so thank you to our audiences for being engaged, responsive, and pointing things out to me I would never otherwise have seen.