Becoming an artist - my way
Raised among farmers and truckers, I discovered theater during my junior year of college, when acting and stagecraft initiated a curiosity that soon became central to my artistic development, even as I was preparing to become an Agricultural Education teacher.
In fall 1971, something awakened in me, redirecting my education and life. Theater captivated me. By spring 1972, while completing my bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Education, I met E. Bonnie Lewis. A year later, while finishing my teaching credential, I committed to graduate study in Dramatic Art at UC Davis.
After seven quarters of undergraduate work at UCD, I realized I would finish my teaching credential as a practical “job,” but I was not committed to becoming an Ag Teacher.
In summer 1974, I took a road trip with E. Bonnie Lewis to visit Jack, the friend who had introduced us in Dramatic Art. After seeing him at Lava Beds National Monument, we went to Ashland, Oregon, for theater. There, I shared my “egg beater speech.”
I described my inner unrest and desire to explore myself through theater. I was entering a transformation—a truth about becoming an artist—though years passed before I recognized that I had always been an unexpressed artist.
During student teaching, I advised the Future Farmers of America and realized after one meeting that it could not be my career. The Dramatic Art chair admitted me to the master’s program if I took the GRE, which I did despite a low score.
After earning my MA, I left theater, became a husband and father, and kept searching for work that felt right. In 1986, Wendy Salkind sent me her original script for Air for One, inscribed, “With encouragement to your return to theatre. Good Luck., Love Wendy.” That year I began Reichian Therapy, turned inward, divorced within months, and raised my son as a single father.
Two years later, Bonnie returned into my life. We reconnected, remembered my eggbeater speech, and I began emerging from my creative and theatrical hiatus.
In 1991, on Bonnie’s dare, we staged Air for One in Pasadena. In 1993, we brought it to Santa Barbara’s Center Stage Theater and became Co-Artistic Directors, performing, directing, and producing. We were living as artists, though I did not fully claim the title until 1996. Since founding DramaDogs, our nonprofit theater company, we have produced more than 120 plays and nearly 30 performance projects.
Here I am, a theater artist, stepping into an absurd man: His Sound of Being Alone. At this point in my life, I honor the past fifty years as a requiem, returning to the stage to remount my original master’s thesis. Though I am now fifty years older than the characters I will portray, I remain the “Absurd” Man—the actor. I will revisit what it means to be an absurd man by embodying two of Camus’ characters: Caligula (defeated by his mortality) and Meursault (accepting his death).
“The ‘absurd’ man begins where the one “everyday’ man leaves off, where ceasing to admire the play, the mind wants to enter in. Entering into all these lives, experiencing them in their diversity, amounts to acting them out." (Camus, THE MYTH OF SYSIPHUS)
Here I am, a theater artist, stepping into an absurd man: His Sound of Being Alone.
