Nicholas Thurkettle

On my first day of my first acting class in my first year as a theatre major, the teacher arranged us in a circle on the floor; and, one-by-one, we had to leap to our feet, brandish an imaginary spear, and shout: “I will dare to fail gloriously!” The point is that in the theatre, there is no going back and there is no room for apologies. If you are going to screw up, screw up big.

I have always loved this philosophy because it incorporates the idea that mistakes will happen no matter how much you prepare. The imperfections are as much a part of the music as Jackson Pollock’s cigarette ashes are part of his paintings. Every night, the audience gets a version of the show that will never be done again, because of the hundred little accidents, deviations, and discoveries.

This spontaneity is part of the reason I moved away from acting – I have a hard time with trust and letting go in the moment, and my best idea usually only comes after rumination and calculation. It’s why I’m better as a writer than a performer – I get a chance to think rather than just react.

But even though since college I have rarely sought out opportunities to perform on stage, I have developed this strange pattern over the years of ending up on a stage anyway. It started in high school. A community children’s theatre group I had performed with in the past needed someone to fill in on tech – and on our budget, by “tech” I mean flipping a light switch and operating a CD changer in the back of a cafeteria. So I showed up for one rehearsal, watched the show, and noted all my tasks.

On opening day, at one o’clock, the director called and said: “Hey, I’ve got a crazy idea. Want to act in the play?” One of the cast (and strangely enough, he might be reading this post right now) had twisted his ankle after the last rehearsal and couldn’t perform. The director needed someone who could memorize the part in six hours.

Now this part I do well. I’ve done Shakespeare and Tom Stoppard and I adore words, so I have the skill for recording language in my brain on short-notice. I will freely say I am not all that good an actor, and I’m tricky to cast – I can’t dance, my singing is so-so, I’m too odd-looking for the leading man roles, too tall and soft for the energetic character roles, too cerebral for the boisterous roles, too rubber-faced for serious roles, too unthreatening for the macho roles, and too young for the old crafty roles. But I understand stagecraft and discipline enough that people I work with can trust that they don’t have to start from square one. I can be plugged in on an emergency basis and they won’t have to worry I’m going to crash the show.

It happened again when my sister was helping produce her fiancée’s musical. They needed an extra set of backstage hands and someone who could walk on to do two lines at the end. And with one rehearsal, that’s exactly what I did. Auntie Mame happened a few years later because of my brother. He had kept doing community theatre as an occasional hobby, and when a production needed to fill a supporting role eleven days from opening, a friend of his in the cast dropped his name. He wasn’t available for the whole run, so I got brought along as part of the family package for half of the performances.

After that, when I was directing my 10-minute play for Sacred Fools in LA, and my lead dropped out three days before the show, my good friend Mishka the Hairy Russian, who I had also cast and have known since college, was the one who convinced me that searching for a new actor on such short notice was foolish when we already had a perfectly capable one who knew the script available – by which he meant me.

I auditioned for one play a year or so ago, but didn’t prepare, mumbled my way through it and didn’t have a serious chance at a part. I have never been that good at auditioning and it wasn’t a show for which I was actually appropriate, in hindsight.

But Norma Jean, one of my castmates from Auntie Mame, remembered my ability to swing in at the last minute (and actually has a far higher opinion of my abilities than I do), and on Saturday night she dropped me a Facebook message which is the reason why I haven’t been able to post, or really even think much, since then.
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