XII. what did I do to die today

on Billy Shakes and millennial pink

Two of my best friends have recently moved very far, Iowa and California, to pursue their next degrees. I have been away from most of my friends this year, but the thought of them moving seems unfair, like coming home to a gutted house. I have just started a new contract, on the East Coast this time, but still removed from everyone I know and the majority of my wardrobe. Waterbury, Connecticut reminds me of Rock Springs, Wyoming—a kind of forgotten place. Left alone it could be buried under so much sediment and serve as a striated time stamp for future historians. Here were the Radium Girls. Here was the bustling 19th century brass industry, the remnants of which are an abundance of clocktowers and faded Timex nameplates. There is an undercurrent of old New England charm; returning cast members have said it’s finally coming back.

I have been considering the Girlboss lately. Girlboss or girlbossing stems from a (white) feminist movement in the 2010s heralded by Sheryl Sandberg, Sophia Amoruso, and other corporate women Leaning In in the workplace.

from the Girlboss website

From my vantage point, that movement in its original iteration has died, and only the ironic internet dregs of loopy font remain. I use girlboss in one of two ways:

1. Girlboss (verb): working in a focused burst to accomplish specific career goals. “I can’t go to lunch, I need to girlboss.”

2. Girlboss (noun): someone who has a very online presence where they appear to be organized, confident, and making things happen, but do not reveal what they actually do. “I have no idea what their job is, they’re a girlboss.”

My friends and I are all in interesting places career-wise. Two years out of college, half of my friends have had one or two jobs that they either started at a high level, or have advanced in quickly, and now are trying to decide if they stick with those impressive jobs to their natural end (world domination) or if they switch to something that might otherwise fulfill them (happiness); and half of my friends are gaining traction on their dream pursuits in ways that make all our conversations giddy and buzzy and tinged with mania (what if we all get everything we want? what if only some of us do and then it gets so sad and weird in seven years?). For me, the work of acting has never been more thrilling, and the business has never been more demoralizing.

In a recent girlboss strategy session with my manager we reviewed my headshots, reel, and select tapes. She wanted me to upload some of my Shakespeare material and told me she loved the one where I’m “in the gray top.” It’s the Lady Percy monologue from Henry IV Part 2—a monologue I had been assigned in my first and only Shakespeare class senior year of college. I never quite got it in class. I was on crutches, embarrassed to be physically vulnerable, embarrassed to be acting at all, painfully aware that I did not rank high in the unspoken peer review of who was really good. My teacher had me do it operatically to break my rigid speech pattern, then do it as a panther to get some of leonine grace that the newly widowed Lady Percy must’ve had to confront her father-in-law so aggressively. I probably just ended up doing it louder. Revisiting the monologue a year later with the direction of a friend, I unlocked it. My first good self-tape. My manager advised me to start about a minute in. “I love this part, “Oh him,”” she mimicked my starry look and we laughed. Then, “there’s a great moment where you open your arms and we see your nice thin arms and your boobs, your body looks great. The end is a little overacted, but I don’t think anyone will care.”

Girlbossing, as it has become synonymous with an aesthetic, is something to sell. It’s a lifestyle, a cream-pink-gold curated Instagram feed. When I am a girlboss, I am doing something I don’t want to do in the name of advancement—whether that be organizing my IMDb, Actors Access and resume to all say the same thing in the same order, or uploading a video partly because I’m proud of it and partly because my manager thinks I look physically marketable. I think most new actors would agree that the most frustrating and time-consuming part of the job is getting the opportunity to act.

I’ve written before about the job of performing and why I find it so dreamy, but it’s Shakespeare in particular that scratches an itch. I find it equalizing. I’m sure on bigger stages or film adaptations it can be a beauty or popularity contest, but in my limited experience, it’s purely work. It’s about the language: are you in the heartbeat of the verse and can you bring an entire audience into that heartbeat with you? It is a commitment to solving a puzzle that has right answers in a unique way. A friend of a friend at a bar asked me if I thought theater would last. I told him I thought Broadway probably wouldn’t, but of course theater would. Theater has been around since people have; as long as there are stories and someone to tell them, the medium lives.

In thirteen days we will open A Midsummer Night’s Dream on a three-tiered outdoor stage with the woods at sunset as our background. Midsummer is one of the most produced plays in Shakespeare’s canon. It’s not hard to imagine why; there are fairies and love-potioned lovers and a play within the play described as “a very tragical mirth.” It can be silly and magical, but also serves as a kind of treatise on theater. In the fifth act, Theseus and Hippolyta reflect on the lovers’ story of their shared dream in the woods. Hippolyta says, “‘Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lover speak of.” He responds, “More strange than true,” and then goes on to dismiss the lovers and their fairy stories. Hippolyta pushes back:

But all the story of the night told over,

And all their minds transfigured so together,

More wittnesseth than fancy’s images

And grows to something of great constancy,

But, howsoever, strange and admirable.

Our dramaturg, Ann McDonald connects Hippolyta’s argument to theater at large:

All those stories told over and over—even from antiquity—for the millennia that mankind has engaged in “theater,” and all those audiences for all those years—whose minds have been transfigured together with each other—add up to way more than just make believe or “fairy toys” or “airy nothing...”

While each individual “revel” (play) on each individual stage on any individual night “leave[s] not a rack behind,” as Prospero says, the theater is forever, and the transfigurations of our minds in the audience—that alchemy among the actors and the audiences and everyone’s imaginations together—has grown, and continues to grow today, to a thing of “great constancy” and timeless value.

For a moment, during the play within the play, I forget that I am onstage. I shift into the role of audience member, transported to the moment of Pyramus’ grief with everyone else, suspended in a just-imagined reality. To me that feeling has timeless value. It happens with books, movies, paintings—all art has the ability to sweep you up into another realm. I love the communal immediacy of theater, the bodies in space together. If I’m allowed that, I’ll girlboss with the best of them.