Don't Quit Your Night Job

“To Irelun I. Our sehparayted fortune shall keep us both the safer. Where we are… there’s daggers in them men’s smiles. The near’re in blood, but the nearer bloody-”

“STOP,” the director held up his hand and then brought it to his temple. His stage manager stared down at her notes, biting her lips to keep from laughing. The man onstage had given the performance of his life, but she didn’t see if it was much worth living. He had started the audition by refusing to take off his cowboy hat, saying that he felt it “added to the depth of his acting,”. He wouldn’t listen when the director told him this would be a classical rendition of Macbeth. Over the course of the past ten minutes, the director’s cheeks had started to puff out like tiny red balloons and now they were on the cusp of popping.

“I don’t… do you understand the motivation of the character?” The director asked, caught between his genuine curiosity and unbridled rage.

Carmichael wasn’t sure how to respond. Of course, he understood the motivation of the character. What had been unclear?

“Yeah, I just thought it would be good to add a little bit of dimension to it.”

The director said nothing. He propped the tips of his fingers together and stared at the stage with the intensity of a man trying to determine whether his left arm has always felt that numb. Carmichael tried again, “you know like, what if Donalbain was more of a rough and tumble kind of guy. So that, y’know he wasn’t running away but more like-”

Without another word, the director just raised his hand, ending Carmichael’s rambling incoherence.

He pushed himself out of his chair and began to pace through the aisles of the theatre. For such a small man, Carmichael thought to himself, he certainly has a long stride. Finally, after several minutes of uninterrupted silence besides the occasional swish of khaki pants, the director returned with his seat with a heavy sigh. He had to remind himself that low budget plays would bring low budget actors.

“Okay, I want to try this again. But this time, I want you to take the damn hat off, and really think about what’s happening here. Your father has just been murdered; you can only assume that you and your brother must also be targets.”

The director leaned forward in his seat, balancing his elbows against his knees and clasping his hands together.

“You have a multitude of emotions right now, right? Fear, anger, hate, and on top of all of that, loss. But you can’t show any of those things, because you have your duty to be a-a-a man’s man? Right? Surely, you understand that?”

Carmichael took his hat off and nodded. He begrudgingly set it on a seat down right and returned to center to try again. He looked up into the halogen lights and just before he started to speak, he heard the director say: “yeah, so let’s just try it a little less John Wayne this time.”

Carmichael’s jaw clenched shut like he’d run a wire through it. John Wayne? That fucking poser, that’s what the director got from his performance? He was pouring his heart and soul into this audition, and all the director could say was John Wayne? This bastard has the audacity to reduce his art form to a half assed caricature of cowboy culture?

He stood there for a few moments ranting to himself in a seething rage before the reality of his situation set in. He’d been acting for over twenty years and was still finding himself in run down theatres and nighttime park gigs. This was where he was always going to be, trapped in a never-ending cycle of auditions and half assed side gigs just to keep a roof over his head. How had it come to this? He had been on this Earth for over two lifetimes, and all he had to show for it was a middle aging man accusing him of trying to be John Wayne. He felt defeated. He felt broken.

In the silence of the theatre, he let out a deep sigh and began again.

“To Ireland I. Our separated fortune shall keep us both the safer. Where we are, there’s daggers in men’s smiles. The near in blood… but the nearer bloody”

Carmichael listened as his voice echoed against the walls. The director scribbled something on his clipboard and then turned to his stage manager. She nodded, looked at Carmichael and uttered the most dreaded words any actor could hear:

“Thank you for your time, we’ll get back to you.”

Tanya shut the fridge, “I don’t get why you’re so upset. They said they would call you.”

Carmichael had come home despondent, saying that he was stupid and that his dreams were also stupid. These statements had come with no context and getting an explanation from him had been like pulling teeth.

“No one calls when they say they’re going to call, Tanya,” he said laying back against the head rest of the couch.

Tanya pushed a piece of her mother’s leftover brisket in her mouth.

“Then why would they say they’re going to call?”

She walked into the living room and looked to everyone for backing; she found none.

“Right?”

Shane and Viola shared a confused glance while Carmichael sat with his existential crisis.

“Tanya, have you never told someone you’d call them and just… not?” Shane asked.

Tanya shook her head and flopped down on the couch beside Carmichael, “no.”

Even Viola was surprised, “So you’ve never been approached by someone in a bar, and told them you would call them just to get them to leave you alone?”

Tanya’s forehead wrinkled, “no, I just tell them to leave me alone and if they don’t, I yell at them until they do.”

Shane and Viola nodded. The pieces of the puzzle had fit together. Now, they looked for a way to explain. It came to Shane first.

“Okay so, has your mother ever made food you didn’t like?”

Tanya considered, then made a face, “her tiramisu is terrible. It’s super gritty and the cake part is always too dry.”

Viola saw where Shane had been going, and followed up, “would you tell her that?”

Tanya immediately shook her head.

“No, never, she would get upset and probably- oh…I’m sorry bro, that sucks.”

Carmichael pulled his head down to his chest.

“I just don’t really know what I’m doing wrong. I’m a good actor, right, guys?”

The room grew very tense. A hushed stillness fell over the room while Carmichael awaited his answer. His three roommates, and really the only friends he had had since life, all exchanged glances, unsure of what it was they were going to say. They all seemed to take turns using their eyes to declare: not it and who’s going to be the one to tell him. Carmichael looked between them trying to decipher their series of blinks.

“Why do you all just keep looking around?” He asked.

Shane coughed a few times and cleared his throat, “it’s not that you’re not a good actor, dude. It’s just that you… you’re just not going for the right parts.”

Shane stopped, patting himself on the back for what he felt was an excellent handling of the emotional bomb that was Carmichael’s ego. However, Carmichael’s ego could not be stopped that easily.

“What are the right parts then?” he asked.

Shane’s mouth folded in on itself as a heavy sight pushed through his lips, “um…”

The room relapsed into silence. Shane tossed his hands into the air and let them fall back into his lap as if to say: I’ve done my part. Now, the burden sat between Viola and Tanya. The strongest of wills versus the most stubborn of spirits. Who would win, and who would cave? It was only a matter of time.

“You know the silence doesn’t help me at all.” Carmichael said, interrupting their staring contest and breaking Tanya’s concentration. She snapped.

“Listen man,” she said, “you just… you scream Montana cowboy with everything you do.”

Carmichael was dumbfounded.

“What do you mean?”

At this point, Tanya had let the cat out of the bag, and it was running in circles around through the room. Everyone seemed to speak all at once.

“You literally wear the same cowboy hat to every audition you go to, KNOWING that they’re going to ask you to take it off,” she said.

Viola chimed in from her corner, “you do slip further into your accent the more you try to show off for… really anything.”

Shane ended the chain with, “you wear a lot of denim, dude. Like a lot. All the time. All the time denim.”

Carmichael sat in stunned silence. He looked down at his jeans and jean jacket. After a moment’s study, he looked to his friends and said in the most pitiful voice, “what’s wrong with denim?”

They all just stared at him, waiting to see if he would put two and two together. He would not.

Tanya sighed, “there’s nothing wrong with denim dude. But even I know you’re supposed to wear black to auditions.”

Carmichael dropped his head again and murmured, “I thought that was a suggestion.”

Tanya shook her head. It was not.

Carmichael chewed on the inside of his cheek, fighting the odd stinging sensation that was growing in the back of his eyes.

“Well… what’s so bad about Montana Cowboy?”

Viola shifted uncomfortably in her seat, briefly waking Otto who squeaked in protest.

“There’s nothing wrong with Montana Cowboy, Carmy,” she said, “but you… you set unrealistic expectations for yourself when you go into these auditions.”

Carmichael looked up at her. She was trying so hard to not upset him, but try as she may, it was just an upsetting thing to hear.

“You’re a good enough actor, but you get so caught up in being a cowboy first that it just kind of drags you down.” Tanya added on.

Shane nodded. He wanted to say something to help, but he knew that he wasn’t good at comforting people and that the best thing he could do would be to stay quiet. Tanya wasn’t good at comforting people either, in fact she was terrible at it, but she lacked Shane’s self-awareness.

What was he supposed to do? He had always been a cowboy. It wasn’t like he could just stop on a dime. Viola looked at his downcast face and knew what it was he was thinking.

“You don’t have to change who you are as a person, honey. You can be a cowboy all day long if you want, but you just have to be able to put that to the side when you go onstage,” she paused, “and if you don’t…people are going to think you’re trying to be another John Wayne.”

Carmichael rolled his eyes and readied himself to rant about the attention seeking jack ass that was John Wayne, but before he could she raised her hand and cut him off at the pass- so to speak.

“WE know that you aren’t, but they won’t.”

Tanya had gotten tired of the discussion and felt that what it needed was some tough love.

She turned to him and said, “listen, you’ve been doing this for a long time, right, and it hasn’t been working?”

Carmichael nodded.

“So clearly, you need to change what you’re doing. You don’t want to be compared to John Wayne? Then stop being John Wayne. Did you know he-” and with that Tanya went off on a tangent about the 1973’s Oscars.

Carmichael tuned out of the conversation until Tanya’s voice sounded like a Peanuts saxophone. He had been trying to make it as an actor since the nineties, moving around from place to place, theatre to theatre, and never getting noticed. It was hard for him to imagine that was solely because he liked to wear cowboy hats and spoke with a drawl. Even if it was, that was just who he was. That was who he had always been. Why should he start to change now? He stared into the dark screen of the television and wondered how things could be different when they’d been the same for so long…

Cast List

Three Witches, the Weïrd Sisters...............Savannah Gunderson, Myra Lovedo, Leila Thompkins

DUNCAN, king of Scotland………………………………………. Roger Willis

MALCOLM, his elder son…………………………………………Smithton Viggs

DONALBAIN, Duncan’s younger son………………………Carmichael Williams

MACBETH, thane of Glamis…………………………………….. Michael Oberon

LADY MACBETH…………………………………………………… Jessica Rhoades