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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The director gave me a look indicating that was crazy talk and offered to call the boyfriend and assuage his fears. I dialed the boyfriend's number and handed my cellphone to the director, who spent the next several minutes talking casually about the project, saying nice things about the audition video and the boyfriend's cameo, and inviting the boyfriend to call him anytime if he had any concerns.
When he hung up the phone, I realized I loved the director even more than if he'd thrown my legs up in the air and fucked me the minute I walked in the door.
Once everyone's fears were assuaged, I asked if I might ask JCM some questions on the record. The first thing I wanted to know was why he wasn't planning to act in the new movie.
"I hated directing myself." He paused and grinned, as if to say that was all there was to it. "It wasn't fun. I couldn't concentrate on one job or the other. The only fun I had was actually directing other people, and then I loved it. I'm burned out on acting -- I don't want to act for a while." He paused, then added: "I might put a cameo penis shot in there ..."
I wanted to know what had surprised him most in the audition videos people had submitted.
"The most common things we would hear in our audition tapes were, if they were gay guys, 'You know, I'd feel comfortable exploring sex with a woman for the first time in this safe environment,' or a woman saying 'I'd explore having something I haven't had in this environment.' Like it's a sex therapy camp. And I think people who are most attracted to this have some issue with sex that they want to work out -- oddly in this public way -- whether repression or abuse or just sharing the joy of sex."
And what about doing it in public made it therapeutic?
"Well, I certainly have worked out a lot of things through public -- through 'Hedwig,'" he replied. "Acting saved me from a slightly unexamined life; theater and being gay saved me from oblivion, or being a dangerous shut-in or something, you know, or a tenured academic -- I don't know what's worse.
"You work out things onstage. It's a safe place. It's like a church, a sacred space. You just do it there and then it can integrate into your life. So doing 'Hedwig,' for example, made me more comfortable about my feminine side, which was a huge thing, because it was a very natural part of me that was crushed by my Catholic military upbringing. Sex is multifarious, it has so many connections, like nerve endings, and that makes a lot more things you can work out in such a place. And since the plot will actually come from a workshop of things that interest them -- I want to encourage them to come up with story ideas from what are their imperatives, you know, so it's going to be very natural."
Suddenly I felt new fears surfacing in the place of those he'd just put to rest. First there was his jarring use of the third-person pronoun in discussing the workshop participants -- fair enough, since I'm only here on a callback audition -- but inevitably it brought me back to the point with which I started this diary. I am not an actor! Biting my nails bloody in pseudo-celebrity's waiting room, I mull two contradictory thoughts. One says that this audition will expose me, that they will realize that the videotape consisted of a chain of well-edited lies and lip-synching, that I am a fraud, a phony, someone incapable of "acting truly under the imaginary circumstances of the play" (as I was instructed at my evening division acting classes), because I am incapable of acting truly under the real circumstances of my own life. And the other voice is too high on Zoloft to even acknowledge this scold; it says, it sings: I have been discovered. They will see me for who I really am, and they will make me a star.
At the risk of stating the obvious, this second voice does not express the purest of artistic motives. It's a pleasant distraction, though, from that fear of fraudulence, because really, what is more terrifying about auditioning for John Cameron Mitchell's Sex Film Project? Exposing my genitals? Or exposing myself? They prefer people with acting experience but don't require it because -- how did they put it? -- they want the story to come largely from our own improvisations, from "people who feel comfortable playing a version of themselves onstage." How can I act in any style, much less this one, without what Virginia Woolf called, in spelling out to Vita what her writing lacked, that "central transparency" that breathes life into the work of a true artist? After a million words I'm still struggling to achieve even a moment of that clarity as a writer. Will I be able to summon it for John Cameron Mitchell's camera in one audition? For 90 minutes on film?
