From 1994 to 2008 I dropped out of the theater and went on honorable withdrawal from Actors Equity. I had become a single parent and was committed to giving my son all the time and resources he would need to be a bright, healthy and good natured human being. Which he turned out to be. During this fourteen year absence I still maintained my regimen of voice and speech exercises though at a less sustained level and my speech disfluency had virtually disappeared. My progress towards a rich and natural voice was decidedly upbeat and my goals were very near. I was still able to do TV, film, commercials and print work but only if it shot in the city and in the daytime. By 2008 my son was able to take care of himself so I found myself at a crossroads: do I continue on with acting and go back into the theater or try to get back into government service, hopefully, with HUD, The Department of Housing and Urban Development. Though I was intrigued with the question of how would I approach the stage now with a free and open voice. Would I be able to explore and develop a character the right way, the way every other actor approached the craft? Would the new experience make me truly fall in love with the theater and the acting profession? These looming questions were just too much to ignore so I decided to start auditioning again for stage work. Japanoir was the first play I booked. I played two characters that were exactly the opposite types. One was a blue collar worker in manner and speech. The other was a successful business executive with a long-winded self-important way of speaking. Rehearsals were going well. I didn’t do any of the over extensive script and biography work that I used to do in order to hide and distract myself from the collection of consonants, vowels and diphthongs that wanted to hurt me. I relished this new taste of a characters words coming off a page and building upon their logic and their view of the world. I was really starting to enjoy this acting profession. And then it happened.
I had gotten a call from home in California that my Dad had come down with pneumonia, was in intensive care and that I should come home as soon as possible. It was a week before tech but the Director said to take as long as I needed. Fortunately, when I arrived home my Dad had been removed from intensive care and his prospects for recovery were on the upside. I stayed an extra day because the whole family was there, I hadn’t been home in a while and I could take the red-eye back to New York. I normally don’t sleep well on airplanes no matter what time it is so when I landed at JFK I was really exhausted from the late night talks with family and now only a few hours sleep in flight. The logical thing to do would’ve been to go home, get some sleep and skip rehearsal. But I thought to myself, “I’m a New York City actor, I can do this”. WRONG. Pride is only useful if you can back it up. I went home, ate breakfast, showered and was on time for a 10am rehearsal. As I was sitting around waiting to rehearse my scenes the fatigue started to creep in. When our scene came up I did okay at first but then I stumbled on a word. And then I stumbled on another, and another – words that had not bothered me at all in rehearsal. Then I started to freeze on lines before rushing through them. That rehearsal could not end soon enough. The Director and fellow actors said not to worry about it because they reasoned I was just tired from my trip. But I knew better.
My understanding and experience with speech disfluency is that it lives in the head. Brain synapses of hesitancy and doubt start firing away as they remember words, consonants, vowels etc., that were unspeakable in the past. Will power has no control over them because the synapse of will power has been overcome by the synapses of dark. From that rehearsal forward it was a nightmare for me. By the time the run began I had whittled my problems down to one word and two lines – all by the bombastic businessman. I asked the Director, who knew I was struggling, for help. I asked to replace the word with another word with the same meaning and change some of the word order in the two lines. He agreed to change the word and the word order for the first line but not the second line because it would put innuendo in the meaning. The playwright was standing right beside him and objected to any changes in his script. The Director overruled him. The one word replacement worked and the word reorder in the first line helped but I ended up delivering it in a kind of monotone voice. The second line became the bane of my existence. It lived with me 24/7. Virtually every night after a performance I was apologizing to the two scene partners for either rushing through the line, saying it at a barely audible level, not saying it completely or on two occasions not saying it at all, which brought admonishments from the Stage Manager. At one particular performance, after a long day of anxiety and dread, the line came out as almost a grunt, a loud grunt. It surprised me and I reflexively looked out into the audience. My eyes zeroed in on a young woman in the front row with a deer-in-the-headlights look and mouth agape as if to say,
“What the fuck was that?” I hated the theater, I hated acting, I hated the playwright for writing such a pompous ass character and I hated myself for thinking my speech was free and clear.
After Japanoir closed I took a few weeks to try to assess what had happened. Was I living in an alternate universe and that fateful rehearsal brought me back to reality? Would I be living with the albatross of speech disfluency forever? Was I back to square one, 1979, in my journey East in search of my natural voice? I was raised with a pretty strong work ethic so if this experience meant I was going to have to start over again, so be it. It seemed the 14 year hiatus from theater hadn’t changed anything. I began auditioning again. But to my great surprise and relief I didn’t have any disfluency issues in any of the plays I’ve worked on since. So it was an outlier. To this day I’ve come to reason that what I went through with Japanoir was the hand of fate tapping me on the shoulder, pointing to me and with a steady gaze, saying, “Don’t forget where you came from”.
