In addition to our fantastic review in Backstage, Space Captain: Captain of Space has been getting some great reviews and press from Theatrical publications far and wide.
Best Friend Cate sent me a text the other day to inform me that she was flipping through an issue of Time Out New York and saw our show featured in that week's "Best Bets" section.
Last night as we warmed up, Lindsey discovered that our show was the lead story on NYTheatre.com's homepage. (Which as of right now, we still are) And the reviews we've gotten have been pretty awesome. Here are a few quotes:
And the show was also featured on the "Go See a Show" podcast, which came to do an interview with Jeff and Lindsey after our opening performance. You can listen to the podcast here.
About a month and a half into living as a working actress, making a couple of hundred dollars a week and letting my boyfriend support me financially, I finally break down.
There are a lot of things about life as a working actor that break people down. For most people, it's the rejection. It's constantly feeling like you're not good enough. For some people, it's the frustration of knowing that you are good enough, and nobody gives a shit.
I can deal with both those things. What finally got me last night was something different entirely.
In February The Boyfriend and I moved into a gorgeous one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. My half of the rent is more than I was paying for my Queens studio apartment, but in February I had a steady job, making enough money to pay rent and keep up with my student loans, and still have money to put away in savings. Good for me.
But now, in this performance job that I ADORE, I'm barely making enough money to pay the rent. It's only thanks to my generous parents, a NY Lottery commercial and the payout from a class-action lawsuit that i forgot to opt out of that I've made it through July.
The Boyfriend, however, cheerfully tells me, "Don't worry about it, baby. I get paid tomorrow." And I love him, but the fact that HE has enough money to pay OUR rent does not make me feel better. WE should have enough money to pay OUR rent.
Nobody ever told me that the hardest shit to deal with in this life was going to be the Financial Aspect of it, and I call Shenanigans.
Why isn't that ever on an episode of Smash? Huh, Telsey? Why doesn't Karen Carpenter have her credit card declined trying to buy macaroni and cheese at a Duane Reade at 2 o'clock in the morning?
So last night I spilled fucking water on my fucking iPhone again. I am the biggest dick on the planet, and no one should ever give me anything worth over $50, because I will ruin it. Spoiler Alert: my phone is fine, I got it in rice right away and it only had a little bit spilled on it in the first place. But in my haste to rip open the rice bag, it exploded potato-chip-style all over the floor of the kitchen, and then I spent the next hour and a half crying. Like, snot-pouring-down-the-front-of-my-face, Irish-funeral-keening. The Boyfriend hugged me as I hyperventilated, and once I'd calmed down I went into the living room and fired off an email to Best Friend Cate.
As previously mentioned, Best Friend Cate is an incredibly talented writer, who moved to Poughkeepsie when her boyfriend got a teaching job there. And she spent the first six months there living much like I am living now. Shitty job, not enough money, being supported by someone else, all the while with all this talent inside her, just waiting to be discovered.
To say her response made me feel better would be underselling it completely.
"You're doing everything you're supposed to be doing," she said, "and shit--you're only in the financial situation you're in because you took a chance on a job that is going to move your REAL career forward... You chose to work in a field where nobody gives a shit about you... You chose this--years of people not giving a shit, and having to balance the non-shit-giving with paychecks so that you can survive until people do give a shit... It's slow. It's called our twenties. We can't all be Lena Dunham.
"BUT look at Christina Hendricks. Maybe I'm biased, since she's the first woman I've ever wanted to motorboat, Vince-Vaughan-style, but she's in her mid-thirties and her career is only now taking off... Total nerd girl, too. She paid her dues. Am I saying it will take you another 8 years to get there? No. But it might.
"I love you. Hang in there. Remember that a big part of this is the transition period. It pulls you under."
Seriously everybody is being so fucking supportive it makes me want to throw up. In a good way.
So here is the part where I try to turn this incredibly depressing blog entry into an inspirational cry to action, whoopie. Perhaps I should include some quote about perseverance or never giving up or whatever. But instead I think I'll end with a message to myself.
Dear McNally,
Calm the fuck down. It's hard. It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't, everyone would do it.
And yes, that was paraphrased from A League of Their Own.
Stop whining. If you're so worried about money, get a second job already.
Week one of my lack of a Day Job is over, and though I have a start date for the New Job, I have spent the entire week at home, staring at the walls.
Most of the days have been productive. I've been submitting for background work everywhere I see a listing, and working on my website and my reel and my resume and all sorts of productive things. I put up a new Wall of Inspiration, like the collage I had up in my old apartment and managed to save most of.
I've made myself a sizable To-Do list and I've been ticking things off one by one. I've started putting together a database of Casting Directors of projects that I enjoy and would like to be a part of, so that I can start becoming more familiar with the names I see popping up in Backstage and Playbill.com.
I cleaned the CRAP out of the apartment.
I made a list of Open-Mics around the city.
I feel good. Except for at night, after The Boyfriend has drifted off to sleep and I can see my swiftly dwindling bank-account projected onto the ceiling above my bed.
A couple of the days have been bad. My super-supportive Dad, who has been self-employed and working out of a home office since I was in second grade, sent me an email with all the guidelines on How to be Successfully Self-Employed. Number One on the list is: Get Dressed.
Some days I did not get dressed.
I am far too much of an ambitious freak to enjoy a "vacation" of any kind. I've come to terms with this.
BUT today is a GOOD DAY.
Today I know when my first rehearsal is for the New Job, and today I booked background work for tomorrow! And even as I was text messaging Best Friend Jen to tell her I wouldn't be able to come with her to IKEA, I got a phone call and booked ANOTHER background job for Tuesday.
The Event was called Bertha's Funeral, named for a sculpture in a sculpture park off of Main St. The town of Poughkeepsie has recently decided to remove the sculptures, which have fallen into disrepair. Some of them are covered in poison oak, all the benches have most of their wooden slats missing, and there's a mural that's become covered in ivy. The grass is long and uncut, and it looks very much like a forgotten space.
Cate, along with Sovereign Nation and the Dutchess County Arts Council put together a farewell event, to honor the sculptures, to show the city that the park is a great, versatile space that can be used for more than just cutting across to get to the ice cream store faster, and to help establish the strong artistic presence in the town.
When Best Friend Cate first moved to Poughkeepsie (just across the river from our college town of New Paltz- weird in a never-thought-this-would-happen sort of way) she told me that while she was there she wanted to be instrumental in making P-Town more of an arts town. I'm super proud of her for kicking so much ass already.
We headed up Road-Trip style in my mother's car on Sunday morning and emerged starving (there are no rest stops on the Taconic State Parkway, I know that now) into the waiting arms of Cate and her partner Aaron who thankfully always have fresh fruit in their apartment. We ate, filled up some water bottles and then headed to the park to rehearse.
At high noon.
Cate earns my eternal gratitude for bringing sunscreen, and lending me a shirt to change into after rehearsal while mine dried out. Holy balls it was hot.
We figured out some blocking for the two short plays, identified all the poison oak, ran through a few times, and then Best Friend Cate,Best Friend Jen, The Boyfriend and I headed back to Cate and Aaron's apartment where Jen's Fiance Jared was working on a set design, had lunch, and promptly fell asleep wherever we fell.
We awoke just before 5 and headed down to practice transitions with the other performers who would be reading fiction and poetry. Cate's pieces were the only plays, and were the first and last performances of the evening. Each performance took place at a different sculpture in the park, so at the end of each piece, the audience had to pick up their chairs and go to the next space. Since we knew where that would be, it was our job to kind of lead the way. It helped that we had Aaron and Jared in the audience as plants.
The turnout was fantastic, better than Cate had expected. When we were setting up the folding chairs for the audience, we walked past an apartment where two young men sat on the stoop drinking beers, and one asked us what we were doing. Cate struck up a conversation with him (an amateur filmmaker) and invited him to come. He showed up about halfway through with a camera. Cate was over the moon.
Cate's pieces were so beautiful, and it was great to act with Best Friend Jen again, though we didn't really interact much. In Cate's first play, Jen and I played the same girl at different ages.
The second play was an emotional roller-coaster alongside The Boyfriend, which ended in a kiss that we got a few compliments on until people realized we were an actual couple. I fully intend to use a monologue from it as my new contemporary dramatic audition piece.
After the performance, as the sun was going down, we headed back to Cate's apartment building, which had a pop-up gallery exhibit set up throughout the hallways. We drank wine and ate veggies and dip and looked at some great local art (including some Best Friend Cate originals, in the same style as the mural she'd done for me at my old apartment:)
All in all, it was an amazing day and everyone involved should be very proud of themselves!
So far, the results of my "Musical Mission: A Quest to be Cast in a Musical in the Next Year" has yielded equal parts good and super awkward auditions, leaving me with the conclusion that I should look into some voice lessons in the future, because I am seriously out of practice.
However, my musical mission must be put on hold for a while, but it's for a very good reason: I am working like a dawg.
The Play:
I am thrilled to announce that I have been cast in No Tea Productions' next show, "Space Captain: Captain of Space"!
The show is written by Jeff, co-artistic director of No Tea, and it is a Flash-Gordon-esque, 1930s space serial. This marks my fourth full production with No Tea and I couldn't be more thrilled to work with them again! I've been sporadically attending No Tea's writer's meetings since finishing Work: A Play, and I even wrote a short piece for the most recent Reading Series that we did in March. So I've been lucky enough to read the play as it was being developed and it is going to ROCK.
I play Princess Astra, daughter of the Evil King Xayno.
The show is multi-media, so it doesn't actually go up until August-September. Our first read-through is tonight, but we won't actually start rehearsals for the live-action stuff for at least a month. The majority of May and June are going to be used for filming all the video segments.
I am so FREAKING excited.
The Webseries: Recently I was contacted by a fellow graduate of SUNY New Paltz, who was working on a webseries called, "Sherwood." It's based on the Robin Hood myths, and he wanted me to play Maid Marian.
After a very successful IndieGoGo campaign during which we raised over $3,000 to fund the first season, we filmed the pilot in Upstate New York a couple of weeks ago.
I get to work with a couple of guys that I haven't seen since school, as well as some very talented new blood, and one of my former professors. And I get to use a kick-ass British accent.
The Boyfriend drove up with me, along with Best Friend Jen and Fiance Jared, who were getting their engagement photos taken in New Paltz. We all stayed the night in Poughkeepsie with Best Friend Cate and her Bearded Man, and the next morning we went into New Paltz, had brunch at the Bistro (across the street from the apartment I lived in with Cate senior year) and then we all went to New Paltz to see the closing performance of Cabaret.
I got to show The Boyfriend the campus, bought some $1 LPs at Rhino Records, and caught up with my Voice and Speech teacher, Nancy.
It was nice to go back up to school and be able to answer the "What are you up to" question with something other than, "Oh... auditioning, waiting tables, you know, making money..."
Suck it New Paltz, I'm working!
The Reading
Next weekend I am taking the train up to Poughkeepsie to be in an outdoor reading of two plays written by Best Friend Cate as part of her ongoing mission to make P-Town into more of an artist community.
The Short Film
Though I know I'm booked for the next couple of months, I still happened to come across an audition for a short film on Actor's Access.
We held auditions for Space Captain at Shetler Studios on a Sunday morning, and I came in to read with the actors. The audition for the film, "Broken Identity" was the next day, in the same studio and in the same room.
And after sitting on the other side of auditions for the first time since college, I was filled with a new level of confidence, mainly because my headshots actually LOOK LIKE ME. I couldn't believe how many people walked into the room looking NOTHING like the photo they submitted.
Also, it is never a good idea to send a naked picture out for an audition. You'd think that wouldn't need to be said. You'd THINK.
So I went to the audition feeling quietly confident. I was the first to arrive, and the first to audition. The role is small, and the script is still being developed, so in addition to my monologue, they only had one line for me to read. So I read the line, took an adjustment and read it again, and then I went home and cooked my Boyfriend dinner.
And two days later I found out that I booked the role.
Booyah.
So hopefully there shall be much more to blog about in the coming months than awkward musical theatre auditions.
Best Friend Cate and I met at undergrad, in the Theatre Department at New Paltz, but during our four years at school she decided that Theatre wasn't for her. She started focusing on writing, went off to grad school, and now she's a fantastic writer with a blog that will make you laugh, and make you think. Mostly it makes you think "Fuck, I need to read more," because she's so intelligent it makes me want to throw up.
Recently she wrote a review of the novel, "Deathless" by Catherynne Valente that was retweeted by the author on Twitter. And if that wasn't exciting enough, I'm thrilled to announce that Best Friend Cate is having her first story published! Her short story, "Fox and Girl: A Bestial Romance" has won the 2012 Wabash Prize for Fiction! The second place winner is a published author. Suck it, guy.
(*Actor With a Business Card would like to note that the guy who won second place is probably also a really good author, and he should be really proud of his accomplishment, but she's just really happy for her friend so he can suck it.)
Guest Judge Aimee Bender, author of "The Girl in the Flammable Skirt" said, "First off, this story charmed me completely, gloriously. The author has a
beautiful sense of the visual; each time I could picture perfectly the
scene described, as if it were an illustration by an artist of a
children’s book that is really not at all a children’s book. But the
writing is sly, like a fox, because yes, it’s full of wonder and charm
and delight, but underneath there’s real depth here, and a genuine
exploration of a relationship and the two struggling characters in it.
Both Fox and Girl, iconic as they are, feel real, dimensional,
sympathetic, flawed. So it’s utterly freshly told, but never sacrifices
substance. What a pleasure to read!”
HOORAY FOR CATE!!!
And in the Theatre world, one of my other friends is kicking ass and taking names! The lovely Harmony Stempel, one of my good friends and colleagues (and coincidentally Best Friend Cate's cousin) has been working on a solo show for the past couple of years called Human Fruit Bowl. It's an experimental show that examines the relationships between artists and their models.
Last year it went to the Prague Fringe Festival, where it won the Kreativni cena (Creative Award), and was dubbed "Best of the Prague Fringe" by the Amsterdam Fringe. She was even invited to perform at the Amsterdam Fringe and the Hong Kong Microfest. And finally, FINALLY it is getting produced in New York:
The next time you're on Pandora, type in "Sunny Came Home" by Shawn Colvin. Almost every song that comes up on this station is guaranteed to make you go "Oh YEAH!" and regress to sitting in your room flipping through your CD collection while putting off doing your Social Studies homework. Some favorites so far have been "Sex and Candy," "She's So High," "Story of a Girl," "One Headlight" and "The Way" by Fastball (you know this one, trust me).
It's doing its job right now, which is to distract me from what I believe to be a rejection from a headshot photographer.
What happened: I went to a wonderful workshop recently with a Commercial casting director who gave me some wonderful feedback. Among that feedback was the fact that I need new headshots.
For one thing, my hair is much different. It's about twice as long and I think I'm going to keep the length in hopes of doing a sexy, Sophia Vergara kind of thing. But also I only have one shot, and she asked me, "Is this your commercial or legit headshot?"
I believe my exact reply was, "Huggghhhn."
SO I've decided that this time around, I'm going to get at least five different pictures to be mixed and matched according to the role I'm submitting for, and lucky for me, she recommended a photographer.
I reached out, and we started talking about when we could shoot. He wanted to go right away, but I wanted a little more time. For one thing, I need a hair cut. Right now it's looking less like Sophia Vergara and more like I haven't had a spare $30 to get a trim in the last year and a half. For another thing, though I was getting a HUGE discount due to my referral I still needed about a week to pick up the dinner shifts at The Restaurant that would give me the available funds.
SIDE NOTE: Jewel's "Foolish Games" just game on. This Pandora station is like a Highlander flashback.
So though he suggested that we shoot Monday, I sent him back an email saying, "This Monday is actually not good for me." Which was very true, since I had tickets to go see an Andrew Bird concert in Poughkeepsie with Best Friend Cate. "How does next Monday work for you?"
He'd suggested Monday on Thursday the 13th. I sent my response on Friday the 14th. I didn't receive a reply until that Monday the 17th, which was the day he'd wanted to shoot:
And that was it.
So, I sent one more reply, starting with the phrase, "Ha ha," as if the snarkiness was all in good fun, and offered a few more days that would work for me and thanking him for his patience with my scheduling issues, but I have heard nothing from him since.
Now, in response to the headshot drama, I've found a new photographer who is fabulous and much more patient. As soon as I shoot with her I'll post links to her stuff and our photos. Also she's much cheaper so suck it "professional" photographer who shall not be named.
Now, I haven't posted any names but I still had a lot of trouble deciding whether or not to post this entry. I'm hesitant to defame or "call someone out" on this blog. But let me just say, almost everyone now has a blog or a Twitter or a LinkedIn profile or what have you. Not all of us are lucky enough to have an assistant editor of the New York Times who was once quoted using a homophobic slur to camouflage them in a Google search (thanks Michele McNally!) So my feeling is, Don't Be a Dick. Because if you are, chances are someone is going to blog about it. And next time they might not be nice enough to not use your name.
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In addition to our fantastic review in Backstage, Space Captain: Captain of Space has been getting some great reviews and press from Theatrical publications far and wide.
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