6 in the Six: Wrestling with “Success”
Intermission is turning 6! Six exciting and unpredictable years of fostering connections between artists and audiences, of encouraging and curating discussions about the great landscape of Canadian theatre. To celebrate our journey, we’re bringing back our top six performing articles from the past six years, released monthly for the next six months, to remind our audiences of how far we’ve all come.
We’re starting things off with our top performing article of 2016 (and one of our top three articles of all time), written by Toronto-based artist Christine Horne.
The week of September 20, 2012, I was on the cover of NOW Magazine for their fall theatre preview. I was opening a play with Nightwood Theatre, starring in a new two-hander opposite one of my acting idols, the great Susan Coyne. I had recently closed Iceland, a sold-out SummerWorks hit that would later go on to win the playwright, Nicolas Billon, the Governor General’s Award. I also couldn’t pay my rent.
I look back on that week as a pretty perfect representation of my career and, I imagine, the careers of many others in the arts: looks pretty good from the outside, barely keeping it together on the inside. So much of what was going on for me professionally felt exciting and inspiring, and at the exact same time I felt like a complete failure. It made me wonder—and I still wonder, all the time—how exactly am I defining success? What is it to be a successful actor?
But first, I mean… Let’s be frank. That anyone pays me to act, ever, and that I can legitimately say that it’s how I make a living (tenuous though that living may be) makes me a successful actor. I am one of the lucky ones, and I know it. But even that gives me pause. I’m a “successful working actor,” and yet I constantly live with so much uncertainty and instability, so much anxiety, so much fear and doubt. I feel like I’m pretty much a wreck all the time, and yet I’m considered a success story?
I’ve started looking at my own success—and I’m not even entirely sure how I’m defining that word—in a number of different ways. The first is the good and pure and noble one: artistic success. For a long time this was the only one that mattered to me. Am I doing work that I’m proud of? Am I challenged by it, excited by it, will I grow from it? Are the people I’m working with good people, and good artists? Is it obsessing me? If I can answer yes to these questions, even if the thing is ultimately a disaster, I feel artistically successful. Andromache kicked my ass in every possible way—physically, intellectually, emotionally—and I loved every second of it. (Audiences and critics, on the other hand, were very divided as to whether any of it worked at all.) The Road to Paradise played to small houses but was the most vitally important story I’ve ever been a part of telling. As I’ve aged, though, the importance I place on that kind of success has shifted.
That week—that NOW cover/can’t-pay-my-rent week—marked a turning point. Maybe it was having turned thirty that year, maybe it was having recently moved in with my boyfriend (now my husband) and feeling like I needed to hold up my end of this partnership in a new way, but all of a sudden a different definition of success started emerging: financial. Artistic success now had a pretty fierce competitor.
Feeling like my financial stability was more important, more pressing than my artistic satisfaction was scary. It made me feel like I wasn’t an artist. Like I couldn’t hack it, like I should go get “a real job.” And I still have those thoughts every day. When I see a “Now Hiring” sign at the bakery down the street I think, “Maybe I should just do that…”
I don’t imagine I’m an exception when I say that the financial instability that comes with this profession stresses me right the fuck out. I don’t want to have to rely on my husband to float us because I have no work on the horizon. I want to be able to take a vacation without fearing we’ll regret it, and to be able to pay off my Visa bill. I want more security, less anxiety. When I feel financially stable—and those times are scarily few and far between—that’s when I feel like I’ve got my life together. That this little career of mine is going all right; that I have made some sort of success of myself, whether I’m doing satisfying artistic work or not.
But financial stability isn’t the only measure of success that has revealed itself to be hugely important in my life. I’m also somewhat appalled to admit just how much I measure my success by what other people think of me. Whether it’s fellow artists or critics or audience members, those opinions act as a barometer of sorts. And it’s far less a question of seeking positive reinforcement than it is of needing a simple acknowledgement that I exist. Is anyone aware of my work? Am I worth talking to after a performance? Worth following on Twitter? I am high for days if someone stops me on the streetcar to say they saw The Seagull. And I don’t read reviews during the run of a show, but I sure Google them afterwards and always note if I warranted a mention, be it good, bad, or indifferent. All of these tiny ways that I feel acknowledged, that my work is acknowledged, they’re important to me. And I can’t always tell how much of that is about wanting my work to make some sort of impact and how much is just my ego. I find it embarrassing and a bit shameful, but I can’t deny that it’s part of the myriad ways I can feel like a success or a failure on any given day.
Three and a half years after that NOW cover, I find myself in virtually the same spot. Two days after a swishy gala premiere at TIFF for a film I starred in, Hyena Road, I was back to what I’d spent most of my summer doing: reading at casting sessions. At the time of writing this article, I’d just been nominated for an ACTRA Award for that same film, yet I was also pacing around my apartment in a nervous sweat praying I get an audition for something—anything—because I had no work until the spring. See? Looks good on the internet, bit of a mess in the flesh.
I always wonder how everyone else feels. When I’m envious of another actor’s career, I’d love to know how they think about it themselves. Do they feel like a fraud the way I feel like a fraud? Do they worry they don’t live up to the idea other people might have of them? We have so many tools at our disposal to present the very best version of ourselves—the smartest, the most interesting, the most attractive. It is so easy to share our accomplishments with the world. It’s so easy to spy on what everyone else is doing, and then feel woefully inadequate. Maybe I will never feel “successful.” Maybe that doesn’t even exist, and I need to find new language for whatever this pursuit is. Satisfaction, maybe. Or contentment. Though maybe if I felt those things I wouldn’t feel the need to keep going with it. Because that pursuit, that struggle, is so much a part of living life as an artist, isn’t it? If we felt we’d achieved it, we could stop. So maybe the pursuit of the thing is the thing. And maybe someday I’ll make peace with that.
Christine Horne
Christine is an actor, bird-watcher, walk-taker, and new mother. Born and raised in Aurora, Ont., she now splits her time between Toronto and the Northumberland Hills.
LEARN MORE
iPhoto caption: Photo by Grace Mysak.
Want to see a magic show about race? Wait, what?
You’d be forgiven for the double-take. It’s a fairly common reaction when I tell folks about my work as a magician.
Why I’m tired of cripface in Toronto theatre
Cripface is when an able-bodied, or able-passing, person performs a disabled experience that isn’t their own. Local theatre companies large and small, indie and established, have engaged in this practice.
iPhoto caption: Writer and theatre artist Sophie Rivers in Yellowknife, N.W.T.
What can Toronto theatre learn from Yellowknife?
Growing up in Toronto, the Northwest Territories were always a distant idea, a place I knew only from colouring in elementary school maps. But over the summer, I came to see Yellowknife in a different light.
Cake, commuting, and conversation: Here’s what Canadian audiences value when they go to the theatre
This past spring, we invited a group of scholars, artists, and students to gather at the University of Toronto Mississauga to figure out what Canadian audiences want and need from their hosts.
George Bernard Shaw, Dungeons & Dragons, and me
I love George Bernard Shaw. This is my 11th season as an actor at his namesake festival. I think so much of what Shaw wrote could have been written yesterday. But some people aren’t interested in hearing what Shaw has to say to them 74 years after his death.
iPhoto caption: Kailin Brown in the Broadway National Tour of Chicago. Photo by Jeremy Daniel.
I’m not a woman, I just play one
“As a performer, my job is to play a character, and if that character is right for me it doesn’t matter what gender they are,” writes non-binary actor Kailin Brown. “What matters is that I can make a difference in someone’s life who can relate to the character, or to me as the actor.”
iPhoto caption: Marti Maraden through the years. From left: as Sonya in Uncle Vanya (1978, photo by Robert C. Ragsdale); headshot by V. Tony Hauser; as Manon in Forever Yours, Mary Lou (1990, photo by David Cooper).
Marti Maraden left behind a legacy of care, intelligence, and depth of thought
In the days and weeks following her passing, artists from across the country have shared their experiences and memories of Marti. She is universally remembered as kind, generous, talented, supportive, and in possession of a very sharp mind and a very sharp wit.
iPhoto caption: Photo by Gregory Lee.
It’s just interesting that the size of the theatre and the size of the budget is a deciding factor. Stratford has yet to have a woman lead the theatre in a solo fashion. And that day will come, I have no doubt.
iPhoto caption: Photo by Gregory Lee.
Martha never thought she would be a director. As far as experience had taught her, directors were men. There were a few female directors that she was aware of, but it wasn’t the norm [...] Directing jobs at The Grand and Tarragon followed, and Martha felt she always had to get over the initial hurdle of colleagues accustomed to only working with a male director. Technicians made fun of her if she asked what they felt was a stupid question, or ignored her if the question was smart
iPhoto caption: Photo by Gregory Lee.
Though feminism had of course been around for years, it had become a pressing topic for their generation at that time. And as women working in the theatre. “We were trying to establish ourselves as people in an industry that usually looked upon us as less than,” says Martha, “and as adjuncts, and as supporters, and subordinates.”
iPhoto caption: Tom Rooney in the National Arts Centre's 2004 production of Hamlet. Photo by David Cooper.
When Tom steps on stage, the atmosphere in the theatre changes. It’s palpable.
The week of September 20, 2012, I was on the cover of NOW Magazine. I also couldn't pay my rent.
Comments