In the past few days, I have found myself embroiled in a bit of a controversy with the production of The Glass Menagerie at the 6th Street Playhouse in which I am playing Tom Wingfield. I have never been one to gossip about people and I make a real effort to encourage everyone in our creative field to be positive and not focus on negativity. It's a pretty simple equation to me. Negativity and gossip are destructive forces and have no place in trying to create. Unfortunately, my influence seems to mean little to some of the people around me who would call themselves my friends.

    When I moved to this area, I fell in love with the amount of support there seemed to be within the local theatre community. A few of my friends and I came up to do a benefit concert for a state park and were greeted with lots of assistance from the likes of Samantha Kimpel, David Templeton at the Glaser Center, Vicki Suemnicht at The Dance Center and Craig Miller at the 6th Street playhouse. After my coworker suddenly lost her husband, the people of this theatre community converged and supported and continue to support her in recovering from such a horrible turn of fate. My group of friends decided to stay in Sonoma County and try to help build up this local theatre scene, which already has a great foundation, into a regional theatre hotspot.

    I was fortunate enough to find a part time artistic home at the 6th Street Playhouse doing good work that I really believe in. It is not always great work, but it is always solid and artistically autonomous. This is not a place with a large budget and I spend more money on a production than I get paid, but I am happy to sacrifice time with my loved ones for the opportunity to bring some real stories to the people of our community. That is the only reason I do this kind of work at this level. I love the process of creating a character and telling a story through my art that has an affect on people. I have loved telling the stories of laid off factory workers in The Full Monty, the misunderstood patients in a mental institution in the 1960's in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and, perhaps what is closest to my heart, the destructive pain of a passionate artist who just can't seem to figure out how to fit in with the world in the way he feels he is expected to, and is tortured by his past decisions, in The Glass Menagerie.

    I think it was May of 2014 when Craig first said something to me about the possibility of playing Tom in this production. I was floored because of how long I have wanted to play it and how I had left that thought to the past because of my age and how it is typically staged. From the moment I picked up the script again, I started to think about all of the things I was taught in school to think about when Creating A Character. I have a very distinct process which includes NOT taking in anything that I should compare myself to. I don't watch the movie of a play I am doing until I am done performing it and I don't research other productions and try to take pointers from what others have done. My character work is mine and my director's and I do not want influences from how anyone may have done it before. It is an organic process which I believe has led me to the place in my career that I am at where I am very proud of the work I put in front of people.

  My facial hair is always a big part of any role I take on. My family will attest to the fact that I change my look all the time and am even willing to look ridiculous in my regular life instead of putting something fake on my face. I am into making the audience believe that this world is as real as it can be while still being on stage. I even went for a couple of weeks with a "Chaplin" or "Hitler" style mustache when I played Herman in Sweet Charity at the University of Vermont. Who does that?! This fool over here! I like wearing a beard usually, so I already had a bit of a beard when I started thinking about the role and continued to let it grow out to be as shaggy as possible to show people just how much my character is focusing on his tragic loss and has given up worrying about his appearance. Even as my wife begged me to shave my cheek and neck hair, I grew it out to look as much the part as I could.

   I bring up the beard, because I am hearing a lot of people talk about the similarities between our show and another one in Chicago and when I look at the pictures online, the main similarity I see is the appearance of me and the Tom in their production. Of course he looks a lot more like a model than I do with my receding hairline and gray in my beard, but we both have similar brown beards. In all honesty, my beard has a lot more gray in it than can be seen in our production photos, because I didn't like the way it looked when we did our video promo months ago and put a little Just for Men in it to balance the color of my chin hair with my jaw hair. But until yesterday, I had never seen a picture of this other production. This choice was made all on my own, with out input from any stylists from the show. I did it in the bathroom of my trailer (where I live, not like a movie star's trailer) and the first time I did the Light/Medium Brown M-30, I left it in waaaaaay too long and it almost turned black. I felt like a Brian Wilson wannabe (the pitcher not the Beach Boy) and finally was able to give it a better balance after a couple of weeks of washing the color out on a regular basis.

   Another similarity is my trench coat. I said in one of the first rehearsals that I imagine that Tom has lots of paper in lots of pockets which are the writings of his memory play which is being performed and he is still working on. When I worked as a guard in prison, I saw guys sewing extra pockets onto their clothing and thought of Tom doing the same thing. I still have no idea if that is even an aspect of the other production, so I definitely did not steal the idea. A trench coat worked better than the usual pea coat which is worn by Tom, because of the size of the sheets of paper that I have in bunches in all of the different pockets. Our costume designer did a great job sewing the pockets on and distressing the coat to make it look well worn in Tom's world. I use these pages throughout the show and I was given the freedom of finding places to use them. The device may not work or it may seem a bit odd at times, but I take full responsibility for it. There was only one time when it was affected by a note which was to get rid of using it in one scene, which I think made the scene cleaner and had no complaints about the direction.

    At no point in the rehearsal process or the pre-production did I ever hear of this other production from Craig or had I seen any pictures from it. There are ideas that we use which they didn't. The director of the other production put the hashtag on his FB page of #thisassholestolemyplaybutnosweatcauseitdidntlookgood, without considering that the productions look completely different because they came from completely different points of view. Except for the look of yours truly, which as I stated is very similar to their Tom. Let's speak about that hashtag for a moment. This guy says "stolemyplay," which seems to me that he has lost all respect for the author of the play, Tennessee Williams. When did The Glass Menagerie become the property of this man? He can't quite figure that out, but it seems to me that he has quite the ego and thinks that everything he does is gold and should be known worldwide.

    I think that leads me to my last point in what has become a much longer post than I intended. To what end would we want to steal an artistic concept? Apparently, the director of the other production has Waiting for Guffman type dreams of "going to BROAD-WAY!" We at the 6th Street Playhouse have no such ambitions. We do this to serve the community in which we live. We want people to think differently about the homeless in our community and create a conversation about mental illness that is sorely lacking in the United States. We do not make money off of producing and performing in these works of art, we just do it for the love of the art itself. I believe that theatre has a certain power that we need to embrace for the good of our society. Let's get people back to thinking critically about issues instead of regurgitating what they hear on Television and taking a side like they are cheering for the A's or the White Sox.

I'll repeat what I posted on Facebook the day we started getting attacked by the Chicago crowd:
'Let's change the narrative of this conversation. This is our daily reality in the West End of Santa Rosa. Homelessness is not only a problem in big cities. There is plenty of inspiration for Craig A. Miller's The Glass Menagerie right outside our theatre walls. There are nearly 10,000 homeless individuals in Sonoma County. Thanks to Waverly and Matthew for talking to me about their lives and allowing me to share their pics with the internet.'

    Like I said before, we in the theatre community should build each other up and not tear each other down. I had a dance teacher in college who said, "Shit never turned a double pirouette." Negativity, gossip and put downs are not good tools for creators to use.  Imagine the beauty of the art we could create if we only encourage others to be the best they can be with the support of the entire theatre community. Theatre is an art form that has existed for thousands of years and I am proud to be a tiny part of the lineage of this art form. I believe in the power of theatre to change lives. I believe this is a superior art form to television and film because it is such a collaborative process which includes the feedback we get from each individual audience and our immediate surroundings. That community feedback is what makes theatre so addictive. I have done film and television, but do not feel the connection to those art forms like I do to performing live in front of my neighbors. I may be feeling shattered by all of the bad feelings coming my way, but I believe that the power of theatre will make me feel better once I get on stage again. I am looking forward to sharing our work with my community, friends and family, a few more times this weekend. I will continue do the good work that I am proud of and encourage others to do the same.

It's hard to tell why some kickstarter campaigns get funded and some fail. This one seems like a perfectly reasonable ask for a modest amount of money that is going to benefit an entire community for years to come, but they are in danger of not making their goal going into the final week of their month long fundraising drive.
I was talking to Craig Miller, the Artistic Director of 6th Street Playhouse, about this conundrum last night over a drink. I wondered why things that are only theoretical get funded for over a hundred thousand dollars and more than 1200% of their goal, but something as simple and tangible as a light board for $5,000 struggles to get kick started?
Don't get me wrong, I'm a science fiction nerd and would love to see a future where we have mastered the art of tethered space travel, but I know people will enjoy the lights at this playhouse within a month of the goal being accomplished and liftport may never get a space elevator built! No offense, liftport. I'm a big fan, but you know what I mean. Maybe you could slide a couple of thou to Craig and help turn on the lights!