The Island of Lost Chorus Boys
By: Kieron Cindric
Tags: Commentary, LGBTQ, Gender And Sexuality, Arts And Entertainment, Masculinity

Professional theatre’s broken promise to accept us in all our glorious queerness

By Kieron Cindric

When I was in the 7th grade, I saw a touring production of A Chorus Line, whose complicated characters and general rawness mesmerized me. Especially dazzled by the final number, I had no clue then that the blinding lights and sparkling costumes — and the way these special effects sun-washed the characters into anonymity — was the show’s most poignant and powerful commentary on the lives (and invisibility) of chorus dancers.

I didn’t know it then, but this parable of otherness in musical theatre was a brutally accurate, if anachronistic, preview of my future life. Drawn in by the dream of an open-minded, emotionally intelligent community, I, along with many of my gay peers in theatre, found our masculinity repeatedly challenged and our place in professional theatre tenuous — contingent on our ability to achieve and embody a tacit set of heterosexist criteria. It is only now, with time, distance, and a literacy for our queerness, that we are able to step back and take stock of the gaslighting and deep sense of inadequacy that kept us singing, dancing, and yearning for validation until the pandemic and subsequent silence gave us the psychic space for long-overdue reflection.

Age 6, with my siblings, ready for both our dance recital and my career to begin

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FINDING OUR WAY TO THE ISLAND

Gay men don’t gravitate toward musical theatre because we feel unseen. No. We flock — we float, we fly — to the cattle calls of New York because, in many ways, we felt too seen in our various hometowns. Many of us were relentlessly bullied — shamed for our effeminacy: our voices, our shifting hips, our loose limbs and broad expressiveness. But in Hell’s Kitchen, in Chelsea, and in the Village even, we rule the streets, our gender embodiment a mark of belonging rather than deviance.

It’s especially ironic, then, that steps away, among the theaters just east of 9th Avenue and the audition studios south of 42nd, this same gender-queerness is censured or more subtly and insidiously condemned, a tactic engineered for sexy Broadway contracts and deployed downstream at regional-theatre auditions — mass-marketed, ultimately, to summer gigs and training programs.

The theatre industry has long been a haven for gay men and other individuals who didn’t quite “fit in” in a mainstream context — back home in Iowa or Texas or wherever else wasn’t San Francisco, Provincetown, West Hollywood, or Manhattan. So what does it mean when we arrive in New York only to be told that our marketability depends on our capacity to pass as the men whose very rigid and volatile natures we fled? And what happens, or how do we respond, when the other gay men to whom we turn as mentors and leaders — our teachers, choreographers, and directors — reproduce the terrorizing masculinity wielded by those corn-fed, emotionally unaware boys back home?

As theatre begins re-opening, we have the opportunity to re-imagine our theatrical practices. We must think about not only what we set out to produce, but also how we produce — cast and rehearse and promote — the things that do get the greenlight and funding.

In recent weeks, reports of bullying behavior on the part of Scott Rudin and other theatre dynamos have emerged. Of course, as in the film industry, such a story is merely the tip of the iceberg. The attitudes and environments cultivated by Scott Rudin and his ilk are pervasive; even productions like Hamilton, ostensibly diversity-affirming, have failed genuinely to support their cast members experiencing life in the margins.

For me — and for a number of my former colleagues and industry acquaintances — the theatre industry hit us especially hard where we were most insecure: our sense of failed masculinity. Instead of making up its own rules, the industry continually reinforced a heterosexist narrative, one which conflates gender (maleness) with sexuality (straightness) and tells us that a narrow, outdated version of masculinity is what matters. And in an industry where marketability and self-worth are often coterminous, this messaging was and continues to be toxic and, at times, lethal — a bitter betrayal of the individuals whose queerness and resilience built and have maintained the industry since its inception.

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‘…A VERY [CONFUSING] PLACE TO START’

While I didn’t attend a conservatory program myself, interviews with a dozen other professional stage actors and dancers revealed that masculinity policing is often at its most salient and damaging in these ‘incubators of talent.’ It is there that program heads and instructors feel it is almost their grotesque duty to toughen the skin of fledgling actors, especially as these young bodies and voices — paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for such trusted, ‘valuable’ feedback — begin to mature into whatever it is they’ll be peddling in New York or LA or Chicago. And while, yes, an accurate depiction of the competitiveness and even harshness that await these hopefuls is an ethical impulse, a fine line exists between arming trainees against the confusing forces down the pike and what amounts to outright abuse.

Charlie, a professional musical-theatre dancer, recalled a particularly jarring moment: “My senior year, my jazz [dance] teacher was going around the group, telling everyone a criticism about their dancing and she said, ‘You dance like a girl.’ I was playing Angel [in Rent at the time] and it was confusing, because when you’re 21, you don’t know how to compartmentalize or moderate your faggotry.”

Dancer Daniel reiterated the confusing effects of instructors’ misled guidance, pointing out how, in these environments, “You don’t really know which part of your identity you’re being asked to silence unless you’re able to step outside yourself.” This kind of perspective, we all know, is only ever retrospective, coming with age and the clarity of survivorship.

Such treatment also means that the sense of worthlessness already embedded in young queer performers’ self-perceptions is overlaid onto their professional prospects: a career we sought in large part because it seemed like the one corner of the world where queerness and effeminacy might be overlooked and even celebrated.

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‘WANT TO EXPLORE YOUR FEMININITY? TRY DRAG.’

Even before I ascended to the 15th floor of a lower-Midtown office building to scratch my name onto an audition signup list, this kind of lying-in-waiting bullying had appeared at my own high school in Ohio — a foretelling of the mixed (or un-mixed) messages I would later encounter in the industry.

As a junior, I auditioned for a show-choir solo competition with “Till There Was You” from The Music Man: a song I found simple and beautiful. After I had announced the title, my show choir director asked me why I “always” chose “women’s songs,” snarking that the only way such songs made any sense was if I’d planned on singing them “as a drag queen” — a comment that simultaneously passed judgment on my failed embodiment of masculinity while suggesting (and not-so-subtly condemning) my homosexuality.

A bona fide drag queen, one former castmate related how he was advised, before enrollment in a West Coast conservatory program, to “drop” his drag persona lest he disqualify himself from “legit” gigs:

“But [Matt], I just need to tell you: if you wanna get anywhere in this business, you gotta drop the drag thing…”

“What do you mean?”

“No one will hire you if this is what you’re known for. If you wanna make it as a leading man…you can’t have this drag thing.”

The interlocutor here was, of course, an official representative of the program.

A trio of us experimenting with drag while on tour

In 2016, I wrote an article for Playbill.com which categorized drag as “high” art in its title. I remember being confused when my editor recommended this angle — my pitch had merely suggested a look into and celebration of the sudden preponderance of drag among Broadway properties. Characterizing drag as only recently consecrated, however, betrayed a more general judgment on it. Before Broadway’s endorsement, drag, it would seem, had been sub-par or pedestrian — a semi-professional off-ramp for effete men who couldn’t hack it in a game that rewarded one version of inflexible manhood.

As such, drag represented an alternative: an anything-goes forum for gender-bending actors whose artistic profile had been dismissed and demoted by the institution of Broadway. For queer artists, drag may not have been top-shelf (or top-dollar), but among low lights and loud voices, it offered creative carte blanche…until Broadway decided to add it to the regular menu, of course.

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CATEGORY IS: BUTCH QUEEN REALNESS

There was a trend among director-choreographers of La Cage aux Folles in the early 2010s to cast the show with so-called “messy” drag queens — those whose muscles, hirsute limbs, and general (affected) clumsiness were meant to be shtick: a comic self-awareness of gender and the hyper-theatricalized “ridiculousness” of men in dresses and heels.

Dancer Charlie mentioned how this preference, among directors of both La Cage and Kinky Boots, meant the jobs for which he had long waited — for which he was finally ‘appropriate’ in his long-limbed gracefulness — were suddenly, heartbreakingly, off-limits: “They want a boy that’s fucking stacked that looks like fucking Adonis that they can kind of dress up in a half-idealized drag that’s about being a hot boy and being able to belt.”

Actor Jim seconded Charlie’s sentiment (and bewilderment): “Going to the auditions for Priscilla: Queen of the Desert; going for La Cage aux Folles; going to Kinky Boots…They were looking for men to play those drag queen roles. They wanted sexy, built, muscular men…’cause sex sells, and, for some reason, there’s been a narrative that feminine is NOT sexy, unless it’s a character role or unless it’s…a lead.”

While artistic visions, choices, etc., are a real and often legitimate piece of any creative docket, queer individuals’ performance or embodiment of gender is not an aesthetic choice. It isn’t even a “quality.” It’s part of the normal, beautiful, and compelling spectrum of our lived human reality — a reality that theatre stylizes, yes, but not one it is meant to scrub from the record.

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BOYS DON’T DANCE; MEN DO

Facing off with the angry specter of masculinity is an apropos introduction to life as a queer man in professional theatre. My own first professional audition experience found me veritably shaking in my jazz boots when the director-choreographer, mounting an international tour of West Side Story, began actively humiliating un-exemplary male dancers who were auditioning alongside me. Having already demanded the one lift the female assistant overhead (and thank God the dancer was able), the would-be drill sergeant turned to another, insisting the diminutive dancer disclose his years of ballet training. After the young auditionee stammered that he’d taken 4 years’ worth, and at the Boston Conservatory, no less, the whipped-up director berated him: “Well, you wasted your money, because your technique is horrible.” To the rest of us in the room, it was a flare: this was serious business, and it was men’s business. West Side Story, while about boys who dance, required men, this director would have us know, and men don’t fuck around, even (and especially) if they’re dancing.

In my decade on the touring and audition circuit, this overwrought sense of seriousness would resurface over and over again, as would the clear privileging of butch performers to play the “everyday” townspeople and ensemble members of whatever imaginary place — this is what theatregoers wanted, right?

Any such claims to audience ‘expectations’ for gender embodiment — a defense of these casting biases I anticipate — ring disingenuous, especially since these theatregoers, usually undiscriminating and eager for entertainment, plan to or will, naturally, suspend their judgment. For most of them, theatre is synonymous with flash and spectacle (and the gay community itself). The assertion that audiences nationwide look out for and even desire ‘butch’ chorus boys is, nakedly, projection — the fantasy and gender-based hyper-vigilance of director-choreographers writ large.

Attempts at integrating gay men into productions — but only on the fringes — can scan as transparent and tokenizing, a feeling actor Harry lamented: “They wanna see us on the periphery…It makes them feel progressive, and woke, and liberal, so long as the protagonists are still giving you cis[gender].”

Although more non-musical titles centered on gay men have sprung up in recent years, even the leads of these shows tend toward the un-queer: cisgender, white, and straight-acting. Jim, who appeared in the ensemble of The Inheritance, expressed his shock at how inaccessible the production felt to himself and his fem peers: “We had a real opportunity…and there was no consideration of gay men — whatever they look like — in those lead roles. There were two ‘out’ gay men in the whole primary lead cast.”

Thus codified as straight-acting, onstage “gayness” is something more akin to the performances of gay-for-pay men who populate the porn we watch than to any authentic expression of queerness. Many of our gay directors, convinced of the legitimacy of this code — and of their attraction to it — exploited their power to build the world they wanted to see and, well, wanted.

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OBJECTS OF THEIR DESIRE

It is important to distinguish between twin impulses on the part of these director-choreographers — these men who held all the chips, to whose careers we aspired and at whose feet we fawned and flitted in our tank tops and joggers, eyes twinkling and biceps glistening, hoping for a callback. In prioritizing butch dancers and performers, these men both policed our masculinity and also commoditized our sexual allure (which we in turn exploited, were we lucky enough to possess and trade on it).

“I want you to dance like men.”

I can remember numerous choreographers prefacing Equity Chorus Call dance combinations with this (hetero)sexist command disguised as direction. I can also remember most of the other dancers in the room laughing sycophantically and uncomfortably each time, ready to please the choreographer no matter what he said or demanded. Even if understood as necessary — respectful and customary — that laughter rendered us complicit: by it, we telegraphed our admission that, yes, a certain kind of masculinity, even here, in a musical-theatre dance studio, was ideal if not compulsory.

Subjects in a fantasy about gender in turn-of-the-century Oklahoma (or make-believe Oz or wherever), we were also objects of artistic lust, cast (when we were) often because we’d managed to catch a director’s attention or inspire his libido. Nearly every dancer I spoke with in my interviews mentioned the unspoken understanding that garden-variety sex appeal meant castability — but not simply as an abstract concept or quality. Charlie explained that “[s]o much of it is literally about whether someone in the high up is in your DMs…It’s not a secret: people wanna hire, and they wanna call back…the people they wanna have sex with.”

Charlie elaborated, likening the audition circuit to the power-plays at work in gay dating in New York: “Just the experience of auditioning for Broadway shows is no different from using a gay app in Hell’s Kitchen or going to a gay gym or going to Fire Island Pines…It’s the same standard for what’s hot, for what’s masculine.”

Whether on an app or on a beach, the strongest capital when it comes to “hotness” and masculinity is undeniable: muscles. One theory about gay men’s obsession with muscularity and conventional fitness, suggested by cultural anthropoligist Alan M. Klein, holds that this fixation is rooted in the AIDS epidemic. Before treatment advances in the ’90s, a telltale sign of late-stage seroconversion was a certain gauntness — a skin-and-bones frailty that betrayed positive individuals’ status and marked them as diseased. To counter these effects or to avoid potential association with this damned sector of the populace, hordes of queer men — infected or not — turned to the gym, banishing certain signs of illness while increasing opportunities for life-affirming, disease-defiant sex in the development of what has been labeled “protest muscularity.”

With a group of dancers while on tour in Florida

Other theories about gay men and their muscles exist, alternately citing internalized emasculation or disposable time and income or even the Western artistic canon. Whatever its provenance, this is the queer-male context from which many of the teachers and director-choreographers whose “tough love” we endured emerged. They survived the plague — at least physically. And while it’s only a hypothesis, I’d hazard a guess that the shame, fear, and trauma of that era cast a rightfully unshakable shadow — one that still haunts our former bosses, whose immense losses I can’t pretend to begin to understand.

Jim put it plainly: “What I’ve noticed is there is a generation of predominantly gay, cis, white men in their late 40s/early 50s who have not processed their own shame around being gay…And they take it out on the actors that come in for them and also in not having the dialogues with the people who are higher up from them who still have their own shame.”

Several years ago, I had my own unwanted taste of this toxic cocktail, two parts shame to one part lust. While out on an evening off exploring LA with a group of castmates, I ran into our associate choreographer, who was out on assignment to note and “clean” the show. Drunk and emboldened, he approached me, grabbed the collar of my shirt, and excitedly slur-whispered, “You’re so cute — if I didn’t have a partner, I’d be all over your shit!” Stunned and somewhat desperate to defuse, I mumbled that his partner was a “lucky guy” before he finally released my shirt and slinked back to the company of his unidentified friends. Two months later, the bullet I thought I’d dodged found the space between my ribs. The evening after having gone on for a principal track, and while the same associate was out to note the show again, I found at my dressing station a full page of typed notes from him — what amounted to a screed ridiculing my technique and overall performance.

Yet another of our “mentors” who had assuredly been “put through the ringer” himself, this gay man was another venomous casualty of the spotlight-proof darkness that engulfs so many queer men in the industry. Absent self-awareness and needed conversations, the shadow remains, and it is expansive enough that those of us involved in the New York theatre industry today continue to feel its chill.

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BROADWAY BODIES

A shot from the Annual Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS Benefit “Broadway Bares”

Within the shadowland of New York theatre, and even among its outposts, muscles don’t just give a seductive leg up on the competition; they’re currency.

Another teachable trait of the industry, the privileging of identifiable, Instagram-worthy fitness has become as much a part of BFA curricula as Stanislavsky Technique or vocal rep. A former colleague, Mark, mentioned with a shake of his head the annual “Broadway Body” award at his conservatory, officially voted on by students but nonetheless authorized by faculty.

Kevin, another former castmate, recounted how “[e]very meeting I ever had with my program head was always, like, ‘Get to the gym, start lifting weights.’”

The privileging and pursuit of hard, conspicuously masculine bodies is similarly overt in professional audition spaces, where director-choreographers will sometimes demand that auditionees remove their shirts and prove their toned suitability.

Samuel, an expert tapper who has appeared in a suite of Broadway productions, recalled an uncomfortable Legally Blonde/The Producers audition for a well-paid summer-stock season. Here, a casting associate, despite a producer’s polite protest, announced that shirtlessness, and, implicitly, looking “good” while shirtless, was practically mandatory:

“It was kinda gross…it was actually very nasty, because…[the choreographic associate] just got so excited when he forced…everybody to take their shirts off. And then when some people were like ‘Well, why are we taking our shirts off right now?’ …He said, ‘I won’t cast you unless you guys take your shirts off…You have to be prepared to take your shirts off, or you probably won’t get cast in Legally Blonde’…But the [sad] thing is, everybody did it anyway.”

Samuel also disclosed a troubling interaction in which a renowned tap choreographer had discouraged him from auditioning for a City Center Encores! production. “We’re only wanting people…that have more fit bodies,” the older director had dryly divulged — an unsolicited (and discouraging) assessment of Samuel’s desirability as well as an admission of a muscle-bound agenda: “…it just made me feel bad about my body…I get it, if they want people that look that particular way, there’s nothing I’m gonna be able to do about it…but when that’s the only body that is ever cast any time ever…that’s when I think there’s more of a problem with it.”

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HOW TO BE A MAN

Although it had more to do with my physicality than my physique, a certain bemusing experience comes to mind when I think of what Mark, Kevin, and Samuel shared. About 8 years ago, I worked out West in a summer-theatre production of 9 to 5, the Musical. Cast by the theater’s artistic director as Joe, the presumably straight romantic interest of one of the show’s female leads, I was pulled aside early into rehearsals and led into a practice room. There, the music director explained that he and the show’s director were “worried” about my physical carriage and “pelvic placement.” Confused but amenable, I let this older, also gay man — whom the (also gay) director had asked to ‘help’ me — instruct me in what he described as the Alexander Technique: a means of “grounding” my body and “preserving” my joints. While I knew the purpose of the exercices was to butch me up, my humiliation and the bizarre nature of the interaction left me docile and blurrily deferential. I never brought it up to anyone else involved in the production.

Other performers echoed this kind of experience with oblique manipulation of their gender presentation. Early in his program, multiple faculty members advised Jim on how changing his gendered embodiment would be the key to success: “‘You’re so talented and you can work a lot, but you need to put some lead in your shoes.’ ‘There’s no market for people like you; why don’t you try to think of being like Tommy Tune or Hugh Jackman?’ ‘You need to bulk up; you need to change your mannerisms.’

For Charlie, the gender code was literal: “I remember going to an audition for a non-eq tour of Annie…They called me back to sing the ‘Never Fully Dressed’ cut and…[right afterward] they left my [audition] card at the table, and it had my notes: ‘big vibrato, v light’…I wondered what ‘light’ meant and then I realized: Oh, it’s an industry term for ‘gay.’”

Multiple men I spoke with regretted that their bodily queerness and effeminacy meant that the industry had prescribed a limited range of roles. For Jim, “It was always, like, the weird, oddball…Is he gay? Is he a child? Is he a creature? Is he a monster? I found a real nice pocket in playing, like, vampires and zombies and aliens…drag queens…and when I got to New York I thought: ‘Perfect. There’s gonna be more of this available.’”

Matt corroborated this sense of pigeon-holing: “[I]f you’re not that [stereotypically ‘manly’]…then what are you right for? You can play a child, you can play an insane person, or you can play an animal or fairy-tale creature.”

Even in New York, queer capital of the world (or its second city — calm down, San Francisco), opportunities felt limited to us, shut out as we were from the broad scope of parts and productions because our goddess-given bodies couldn’t silence their corporeal lisps.

— — —

BROADWAY VOICES

Our superiors in musical theatre didn’t and don’t just police our “movement quality” — a clever, euphemistic way of referring to our fem-ness. It’s also our voices they surveil, along with the way our ‘verbal quality’ betrays our queerness, leaving a bad taste in the mouths and ears of these men who would, we thought, lead us through the theatrical night.

Mocked for our lisping and high pitches from childhood, many gay men develop a sharp self-consciousness about the way they speak from an early age, cringing at self-recordings and hyper-aware (and critical) of how gay other queer men sound.

One actor, John, reflected on the fact that he can no longer determine what his “real” or authentic voice is, having modified it so often and so thoroughly for self-protection and greater marketability that its unmitigated state had become unidentifiable: “I don’t even know what my natural voice is. I was filming these callback sides and…I realized I don’t know what my natural voice is.”

Another performer, Dan, recounted a stupefying episode in which a New England summer-stock music director had attempted to de-gay-ify his and fellow college interns’ South Pacific lyric-singing: “He takes the 4 of us in, sits us down, and talks to us about sibilant S’s. He…makes each of us go through, makes us replace all of the S’s with Z’s: ’Haz a zoft and wavy frame.’”

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MEN AT 12; WOMEN AT 3

Gender is an inescapable sorting tool when it comes to theatre. No matter the entry point, the industry sets and reinforces gender-based boundaries at every step of the process. For example, nearly all auditions are gender-segregated, with men auditioning in the morning and women in the afternoon or the reverse. Indeed, there is a palpable sense of transgression should a man try to “get seen” during a female call (or vice versa, which is far more common given the much higher ratio of women to men at auditions and in the industry generally).

Since the colleagues I interviewed and I usually attended “men’s calls,” it perhaps should’ve been no surprise that our gender performance was in the foreground. We just hadn’t realized which very specific kind of performance that needed to be.

Beyond casting logistics, though, and whether a show had “5 male ensemble tracks” and “4 female ensemble tracks,” dance combinations and expectations for audition attire and appearance were and remain highly gender-stratified. There was a valid sense that women were deeply and openly commoditized on the audition circuit; you could smell it in the way female auditionees rushed to paint on full faces before a rigorous 30–45 minutes of turning, leaping, and kicking. While no one group’s abuse here outweighs the other’s, the oppression of certain men in these spaces was far less visible but nevertheless damaging.

Queering the space near Mount Rushmore in SD

In a homosocial setting (an audition room full of only men) without a clear gender hierarchy (men v. women), other lines get invented and drawn in the sand to reproduce or establish a power imbalance. In men’s audition spaces, the “haves” were the men who could embody “straight” masculinity; the “have nots,” naturally, were those of us who couldn’t.

Aware of how meaningless these distinctions are, Mark compared them to the arbitrary standards imposed on, of all television series, RuPaul’s Drag Race: “For Drag Race, they had to say ‘this is good,’ and ‘that is bad,’…Broadway did the same thing: that guy’s better because he has a more masculine vibe.”

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THEATRE [FRAT] ROW

The biggest (or most immediately visible) “haves,” of course, are the directors and choreographers themselves. They decide who gets in — who passes the test and who gets contracts. A club dominated by men, musical theatre functions, in part, like a fraternity, one whose gatekeepers employ ritualized hazing by which the uninitiated must prove their commitment and value.

This analogy tracks when we consider the importance of trauma reproduction to the actor-selection process. For his publication Guyland, sociologist Michael Kimmel spent years investigating the forces behind frat culture. Writing about hazing, Kimmel points out the prevalence of “attribution error”: the tendency of fraternity-associated men to feel they owe their eventual maturing to the humiliation and risk they subjected themselves to (or were subjected to) in their college settings.

Many director-choreographers, it seems, fall victim to the same fallacy, falsely believing the abusive directors under whom they worked decades ago are the source of their own strength and growth. They “owe” it to neophyte actors, then, to provide the same rites of passage — leading to what actor Ben called the “shared language of pain” we members of the industry all speak. Charlie laid it out when he clarified that “people assume that musical theatre dancing and singing is a safe space…it definitely is not. It’s a lot of self-loathing gay men projecting all their ancient traumas onto you.” While a more empathetic and nuanced assessment may be necessary, the fact remains that a cycle of abuse is endemic to the industry. Unwitting or not, director-choreographers exploit a power dynamic privileging them (along with the men they elect) and leaving insecure would-be members of the men’s ensemble in its wake.

Mugging after a performance of A Chorus Line with fellow swings

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NEW YORK THEATRE: A POWER PLAY IN MANY ACTS

To be sure, this power differential isn’t exclusive to the dynamic between actor-dancer and director-choreographer — it stands at mission control of the entire theatre industry. Young creatives’ time and energy supply the commodities picked over and short-sold by production companies before any real investment (or structural improvement) has ever been made. This phenomenal talent glut, which feeds the industry so it can reliably churn out quality products, relies on the industry-blessing of those sociologists call “boundary spanners” (e.g. theatre teachers, casting directors) to break through into work. A red-hot branding iron, wielded by our earliest mentors and sizzling as it presses against our tender psyches, makes sure we never forget about this dependency and our commodification — the risky and deflation-prone nature of our product.

Mark, who has now moved into video production for a mortgage-lending company, explained how surprised he was by the options for professional development available at his post-theatre employer: “My company provides opportunities for me to be better at my job…for free! In theatre, that just never happens…We don’t have a good mentorship system built, because people are trying to compete with the people they should be mentoring.” That a company might envision its employees as growth-oriented was almost perplexing. Mark, like all of us, had come from a workspace where our marketability was our responsibility alone to perfect and maintain. Social scientists refer to this system as “entrepreneurial labor,” whereby employees and not employers assume nearly all labor-related risk, investing their own ‘sweat equity’ in a potential career.

Out on the town with fellow ensemble members

The only way to attract any external investment in the industry, of course, is through “representation.” Anointed by a management company or an agent, we could thus count on someone to ‘get us into the room’ and to envision opportunities. All representation is not created equal, certainly, but if you were lucky enough to secure an agent or manager, it meant someone was or claimed to be in your corner, to varying degrees of success and engagement.

Moreover, beyond a certain professional level, an agent was indispensable; various auditions were closed or otherwise unannounced. There is perhaps no better symbol of the actor’s powerlessness than the importance of professional alliance with an entity called — without a drop of irony — an “agency,” something so difficult for even the most talented and ambitious actor to possess.

Indeed, theatre contracts are often short (sometimes very short) so the potential for return on any investment is low. But if the pool of actors and creatives is understood as a community — a kind of amoebic and compartmentalized corporation — what is even more disheartening is that all such development is at the expense of those with the fewest resources and the greatest desperation.

It is thanks to such a setup that, at least in my last few years of full-time auditioning, ‘pay-to-play’ workshops and casting-director meet-and-greets (also purchased by the actor) began proliferating. While an optimistic interpretation of such ‘opportunities’ would characterize them as a kind of professional development — intellectually and artistically generous, even — a more cynical take says that these events greedily capitalize on an actor’s insecurities and impotence — the same way our director-choreographers preyed (if unconsciously) on our queer-masculine insecurities and desire to please — and on our yet more pressing need to earn.

— — —

‘WHAT’S YOUR NEXT PROJECT?’

In spite of its cycles of abuse, we (well, I) still deeply love theatre. We love the magic it represents, the prioritizing of self-expression, the ability to collaborate toward something that feels like it benefits all of us. It is also, at many points, full of a delirious kind of fun — a renunciation of the ennui and hard boundary-setting paramount to the popular idea of “adulthood.”

Theatre has also been a spiritual rendezvous point: a place where we queer and colorful kids found — or re-found — each other. But it also often feels like we were a group of boys suddenly stranded on an island, ill-equipped to govern ourselves and fumbling along as we tried. Unsure of whom to trust, we ultimately worshipped a hog’s head mounted on a stake, convinced that this was God, or at least the best way to protect ourselves against deafening cognitive dissonance about who we were and where we belonged.

We, as an industry, may eventually gain collective perspective on the toxicity and arbitrariness of these codes, bound to gender, sexuality, race, ability, and more; we may move past them as we move to the other side of the table; or we may even shed our theatrical skin altogether and move toward different professional domains. But the ideas and expectations learned in our youth and reinforced in those rehearsal studios — we will be hard-pressed ever to outrun them.

As the industry gains self-awareness, we can also begin to hold it more accountable for its behavior. Charlie offered his perspective: “I think it’s unfortunate that there isn’t or there wasn’t more compassion and more sensitivity…There needs to be sensitivity training — people are thrown into these positions with extreme power but without training.”

Dancer Daniel, who left full-time musical theatre to pursue a career in swing dance, outlined his point of view: “When it comes to the work I’ve done in the dance community. there’s kind of two [choices]: focus on the system that exists; or you can focus on trying to build the types of things you want to see.”

In that vein, Mark smilingly reported that the scene in Seattle, his once-again home, is promising: “We have the Sensible Theatre Company [where] the whole mission of the company is providing opportunities for the most fem person in the room.” More broadly, Mark described the “wonderful movement of awareness of people of gender non-conformity in Seattle [where certain] theatre companies are built to support it.”

The same friend whose pre-enrollment contact had warned him against tandem pursuit of drag and musical theatre had the opportunity, a few years back, to perform his one-woman drag show at the New Year’s Eve festivities of a regional theater where he had previously starred in 42nd Street.

Ben, who is about to enter an MFA program in acting, has also become involved in coaching, where he is quick to acknowledge and support his queer students in a way he was never able to experience himself: “I’ve come face to face with this as I’m starting to teach young kids…[One particular student] talks about his struggle with belonging, and a lot of us are challenged with that as effeminate gay men…It’s bubbling up for me in a big way [when I] connect that to what happened to us in pursuing the world of musical theatre.”

For us, the once-marooned queer men, it appears there are some happy endings. Some of us have escaped the island. And some of us have discovered ways to make the industry work for us, transforming the terrain and rotating crops all the while sowing new ideas.

I, myself, am now a full-time teacher, at an all-boys school in the Midwest, acting in productions in my local professional scene when time and circumstances permit. While my career in theatre has lent me confidence and a penchant for improvisation that are beneficial, I continue to be overly aware of the way I embody my masculinity, as if my own manliness were graded on an impossible rubric issued by an invisible, ever-present advisor.

It’s no stretch to say we, the islanders, may spend the rest of our days consciously contending with the belief that our performance of manhood is insufficient; we may never fully uproot that psychology. What we can do, and can hope for, however, is the opportunity to cast out that kind of policing for and among those we train, teach, and raise. We can make it better for them, and, on some level, for ourselves, too, buoyed by the knowledge that we’ve left the island better than we found it. As we look forward, we can try our best to keep the promise we believe theatre made to us and broke.

Kieron Cindric is a writer, actor, and educator living and working in Cleveland, OH. In his spare time, he enjoys eating carbs and painting portraits of puppies.

@KieronCindric | kieroncindric@gmail.com