Creating Families

The life of an actor is hard. It’s hard for many reasons: the audition process is brutal, the craft itself is extremely challenging and many skirt the poverty line while waiting for their next job, which can get old pretty fast. Of course, the profession is rewarding, and the opening night applause is almost narcotically addictive. But in recently closing Heidi, the play I was in for eight weeks at Imagination Stage, I was reminded of yet another reason why this life is so difficult - I have to say goodbye to my new family.

It is incredible how close you get to the people you share the stage with, and how easy it is to become a best friend with everyone backstage. It’s no wonder that the theater community is so small, that people on the outside look at it like a high-school clique. We genuinely love one another. And actors are peerless; it doesn’t matter if you are 75 or 17. We all become brothers and sisters through the process, and we are family forever when the process ends.

I still keep in regular contact with people that I worked with for one or two months six years ago. We call one another, we check up on each others’ lives, We see each other’s shows, and it’s special. Wherever I go, I make new family members.

In Heidi, I worked with seven actors, five of whom I have never worked with before, and was blessed with three terrific backstage technicians, two of whom are just beginning their own theatrical journeys. I have shared advice and received it, told stories and listened to them, and gotten to know, in incredible detail, the people who I have walked the boards with all this time. Some of them I didn’t think would become my friends, some I had weird first impressions of, but every single member of our company has become so dear to me that I truly loathed the moment I had to say goodbye to seeing them every day.

I am grateful to them for making this process one of the best I’ve ever been a part of. I am grateful that they were as generous with their time, advice, and compassion as I could have hoped cast members would be and I hope that we all get to work together on a project in the future. But if we don’t, I’ll be checking their Facebook pages, reading their blogs, inviting them to parties and shows and calling each and every one of them to talk about life and art. Because that’s what family does, and in theatre, we create families wherever we go.