Resume Building on the Other Side of the World

In January 2005 I went to Australia to study acting at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney. January is the summer term in the southern hemisphere and so this was just a one month course. In a lot of ways, everything about the trip was somewhat ludicrous - living in New York City, there was certainly no obvious need for me to leave home to study acting. The reasons I did decide to go were largely routed in personal obsession: several actors, directors and writers I admire all went to NIDA, and I went to Sydney as much to find the training that helped develop their skill as I did to perhaps understand their work better or get brushed with some form of similar luck.

Australia was difficult. I lived in a youth hostel for a month, in a room with as many as five other ever-changing roommates from all over the world. I had no privacy and little quiet. I sat in cafes in some of the seedier parts of Sydney until late into the night desperately trying to learn lines for scene after scene after scene, to the point that I was dreaming Macbeth (not a particularly pleasant subject for restful sleep) at one point.

While I was friendly with my classmates, they weren't actual friends, and the various successes and failures and embarrassments that come with acting were hard to bear without people I was prepared to trust outside of the classroom, especially when they asked me why on earth I had bothered to go all the way to the other side of the world for classes I could have more or less taken in New York.

Of course, I had a lot of stock answers: it was, after all, easier to focus on craft somewhere I wasn't also worrying about auditions. And, New York is, as a rule, very cold in January, so why wouldn't I want to get away? Eventually though, it was hard not to break down and tell people I was there because of this that and the other NIDA graduate that most Americans had only heard about in passing. I got teased a lot, but I also had instructors who had taught those people tell me stories, and it meant a great deal to me, like talismans that weren't a matter of touch.

After I came back from Australia, a lot of things happened for me all at once. I got a role in an off-off-Broadway production that wound up getting my name into the New York Times and I wound up finally qualifying to join the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). And while it certainly became easier for met to get auditions with that line about my training at NIDA on my resume, I also found myself acting more because I enjoyed it and less because I had something to prove or some mystery about famous strangers I wanted to solve. I also discovered a bug for writing plays and directing and I've done both since then as well.

Mostly people to go to Australia for the incredible landscapes, and eventually I'll probably get back there for that very thing. But in my case, Sydney changed my life because I went there for reasons somewhere between silly and outrageous, was lonely and worked hard.

The more complete and complicated story of my Australia adventure will be appearing as an essay in Idol Musings, which will be released by Fae Publishing Ltd (Aukland, NZ) later in 2009.