New Suit

I bought myself a new suit for the opening night of Angels in America recently, which is rapidly approaching.  A suit is never simply a sartorial decision, but this suit in particular carries with it a bit of symbolism.  Perhaps I should explain.

(Same suit, different colors; I eventually chose the charcoal suit on the left)

I’m on a hiatus from recording audiobooks; so many hours of reading started to wear on my voice.  So in the time between closing The Glass Menagerie and starting rehearsals for Angels I’ve done quite a variety of odd jobs.  The most interesting of those has been assisting a commercial casting director, who happens to be friends with my agent.  I facilitated auditions and ran the camera for several commercial sessions: an AT&T campaign, a LaBatt’s spot, and a promotion for Axe. If you happen to watch The Daily Show online, you probably saw this last commercial, as it was the featured ad for a period of time.  Employing double entendre and low brow humor that would have brought a smile to the bawdiest of Shakespeare’s groundlings, the spot features an Axe representative attempting to spin the PR of a new product called the “detailer,” basically a fancier iteration of the wash cloth, or the man’s answer to the loofah.  He frequently answers questions about what kinds of balls it could wash, oblivious to the double meanings.

Working from the other side of the table in a casting session is fascinating.  You learn a lot about auditioning, about actors, and about people in general.  I saw actors whom I have seen on stage and screen, as well as my peer set: young, talented, very well-trained actors.  I also saw many people who were models or comedians, people with a so-called “natural” presence, but no training.  And I saw a lot of people wearing old suits, borrowed suits, or mismatched suits.  The character in the commercial is a high powered businessman, and these actors were doing the best they could to approximate this on short notice.  Their agents probably called them the day before with their appointment times, and told them an idea of what to wear.  But aside from opening nights, weddings, and funerals, the average actor doesn’t have much use for a suit.  We don’t need to wear them to work, and when we do, it’s usually provided by a costume designer.  But it really unnerved me to see all of these young to middle aged actors wearing old clothes.

(Above is the extended online version of the commercial © Axe, 2010)

Even though we are in a recession, talking about money remains one of the few American taboos.  We try desperately to believe that we live in an egalitarian society, and so the class divisions that wealth creates are kept as invisible as possible. I’m about to talk about money, but try not to get nervous.  The cultural consciousness of actors usually includes the categories of the starving artist and the celebrity, without much understanding of the continuum in between.  Needless to say, the economics of being an artist are a little more complicated.  The primary difficulty is that the work is usually freelance.  If you have a new job with a different salary every few months, with periods of unemployment in between, it becomes very difficult to plan a budget.  Add to that the expense of living in New York, and student loans, and it gets more complicated.  Freddy Arsenault (whose portrait in the song cycle I’ve written is “Gretchen and Freddy Get Married Today”) recently started a Financial Support Group for actors who have gone through the NYU Graduate Acting Program, hoping to educate and help alum with their finances. I’ve heard another classmate of mine say, “I can’t afford to be an actor because I went to school to be an actor.”  If you don’t have a trust fund, balancing out your financial life as an artist and actor are not easy, especially if you want to eventually have things like a marriage, a family, and a mortgage.  Yet I refuse to believe that you have to choose between those things and your career.  I went to the first meeting of the FSG, which happened to be on the same day that I helped cast the Axe commercial.  When it was my turn to talk, I said my biggest fear was being an older actor who came into an audition wearing an old suit.

Since playing Prior in Angels in America is a significant role for me, I decided early on that I would buy myself a new suit.  But then my sublet fell through, and I thought maybe I shouldn’t.  Last week, I changed my mind.  I’m a frugal person, I try to be responsible with my finances, but I realized recently that over the past few years since grad school I’ve slowly stopped spending money on myself. Lesley, my girlfriend, has repeatedly told me that this is not the best idea either. She surprised me in North Carolina for my 30th birthday last week, and while she was here, we went shopping for a new suit.  I bought a beautiful suit from United Colors of Bennetton, a suit which fits me perfectly, an expensive suit that was on sale for half the original price.  This, Lesley told me, was not a coincidence. Life may be complicated, but sometimes, you have to buy yourself a new suit.

A Coffee Mug with My Name on It

A coffee mug with my name on it.  M. CARLSON.  Black letters on white tape, affixed by the stage manager (or more likely, the assistant stage manager).  The process is not very complicated, probably involving thirty seconds with a label maker.  But the first time, that very first time, it definitely made an impact.

(The coffee cup provided for me at PlayMakers Rep, as well as the text by Kushner)

I arrived at rehearsal to find a coffee mug with my name on it in late December of 2004, at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, CT.  Might seem like a small, even unimportant detail now, but at the time it was for me a very tangible acknowledgement of status, even success; somewhat like having your name on a director’s chair while on a film set, though to a lesser degree I suppose.  I had moved to New York immediately after graduating from Northwestern in 2003, which was not the easiest transition.  I slowly began to find my way in a city and a profession that both loomed large to someone on the outside looking in.  At long last, a small break for me came when I got the offer to do this play at the Long Wharf.  Now it was not exactly a glamorous job.  I didn’t have any lines, and I spent most of the play in a Nazi uniform moving furniture around the set during transitions.  But it was the Long Wharf, and it led to grad school and everything that followed.  Not to mention, I got a coffee mug with my name on it.

(The table where we’ve been working in rehearsal for Angels in America)

The New Year finds me in rehearsals for Angels in America at PlayMakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, NC.  We’re still at the table: slowly sifting through the plays, parsing through its dense and beautiful language, looking at research images and texts.  Near the end of Millennium Approaches, the first of the two plays that make up Angels in America, one of the characters says, “The twentieth century.  Oh dear, the world has gotten so terribly, terribly old.”  As we start another year of the twenty-first century (and as I find myself ever closer to 30), I’ve been thinking again about where I am and where I’ve been.  I filled my coffee cup at rehearsal the other day and realized how much I now take it for granted that someone puts my name on a mug before I arrive at the theater.  But it’s important to put your name to what is yours.  And it’s important to remember what you have.

(New Year’s Eve in Chapel Hill, NC with my girlfriend Lesley Shires)