I am going to start with a confession: I used to do theater. I say “do theater,” because I did it all: I acted, I directed, I wrote. I designed costumes, I studied the Meisner technique, I rolled around on the floor in a leotard—I even made puppets. None of this was professional; it mainly took place in black boxes for hire, school auditoriums, and the workshops of eager hobbyists. But theater was my first love, and like it is with many first loves, my former feelings now often embarrass me—not just because I no longer feel them, but because falling out of love was so decisive, so shattering, so apocalyptic that the person I was when I did theater is a person who will never exist again.
If this sounds dramatic, well, I did just confess to being a theater kid, and what prevented me from becoming a theater adult was character actor Richard Kind. You might be a little confused, wondering how someone who is fairly successful and otherwise innocuous could be an instigator for such discouragement. I can assure you that he did nothing bad; in fact, what he did was beautiful. I heard what he said to me very loudly and clearly at first, then more subtly over the course of my life, as I’ve returned to it and understood it differently at new ages, while he probably gave it less than two seconds of thought at the time.
For those who don’t know: Richard Kind is a successful, funny actor who often appears both manic and aggrieved, in Curb Your Enthusiasm, Only Murders in the Building, various John Mulaney projects, the major network sitcoms Mad About You and Spin City, and in movies like the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man. (In other words, he is Jewish.) If you google him and don’t recognize his face, you might know his voice, which is almost always violently loud, with a comic timing that is both elegant and blunt. The New York Times ran a piece last year that was simply dozens of people professing their love for him, comparing him to comedy legends like Zero Mostel and Jack Benny. There are some people who are just funny, who make both babies and jerks laugh with only a look, and that is Richard Kind.
I encountered Richard in a weird setting. The summer before my senior year of high school, I attended a theater program at Northwestern University, meant to simulate the conservatory experience for kids who are about to apply for Juilliard, or skip school altogether to audition for Broadway as soon as possible. I was about to do neither; I wanted to go to a regular school. But I was there because I loved to act, and all my teachers had encouraged me to apply, and two of my good friends were doing it too. There was also the sheen of knowing that it was hard to get in, and that your acceptance meant some kind of talent, some promise of big things. We were told in the application materials that many people who did this program went on to be famous, and in my twenties, I did in fact see familiar faces and names from my program trying to make this prophecy come true, in national commercials, downtown cabaret acts, and failed television pilots. All of that would come later though; on that first day, we all showed up to Northwestern with the same smugness, the same understanding that we were there to compete, and the same ignorance of a world where we fell short.
The leaders of this program were a married couple who were likely beards for one another: a stern and stocky woman who seemed mean, and a lighthearted twink who actually was. On the first day, they gave us two mantras that we were to repeat to ourselves when the program would inevitably get hard. One was “be the change you wish to see in the world”—Gandhi, very appropriate. The other was “you get to be here,” as in, pursuing this strange vocation was a privilege, not a right, if the price tag on the program hadn’t already tipped you off.
“You have to really want it,” the male leader of the program said, meaning we had to want to act in order to succeed. “That’s what distinguishes people in this business. Those who want it, and those who didn’t want it enough.”
Where is Richard Kind in all this? That summer, the male leader of the program was acting in a play: Stephen Sondheim’s latest musical, what was eventually called Road Show but was then called Bounce, in previews in Chicago before it would ship off to Broadway, and Richard was one of the leads. The idea was, all of us would get to see the play, then we would get Richard, the director, and the leader of our program all to ourselves, to ask questions, get advice, and have a brush with our future. This was both a sweet idea and misguided—the play was, in a word, bad. And 16-year-olds catch boredom from each other like the flu. By the time of the Q&A, we were all overstimulated and itchy, ready for the next thing, and these three men sat in front of us to be devoured on the stage of the Goodman theater, once everyone else in the audience had left.
The very first question was asked by a girl I don’t remember in a flattering way, with apologies to her. She was one of the musical theater kids, bubbly and earnest and a little bit simple, which were all the things my teenage self could not handle. She said her question was for Richard, and Richard tried his best to focus. I remember he seemed exhausted, actually. Perhaps because he knew the play was not working, perhaps because it was incredibly warm in that space, or perhaps because when faced with a blob of children, all of us filled with a persistent, consuming need for encouragement and validation, one can’t help but feel underslept.
“Richard,” she said. “Do you have any advice for a young, aspiring actress who really, really wants to do what you do?”
Immediately, he leaned forward, almost as if he were suffering from indigestion. “Uh…” Richard Kind said. “Don’t do it.”
There was a dreadful, hurt silence that the leader of our program rushed to fill.
“I think what Richard means here is, you have to really want it…” he started to say, falling back on his mantra.
“Nope,” Richard said. “I mean don’t do it. If I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t do it. I’d be a lawyer. That’s a simple, good job, and it pays well too. This kind of stuff does not pay well.”
He went on like this the more that people didn’t laugh, deftly swerving around our program leader’s attempts at positive spin, obviously in such a mood that his behavior’s reception made no impression on him. I don’t really remember what happened in the rest of the Q&A, as a result. I remember looking around at the others, my peers, and noticing how no one seemed to be reacting to this like I was. They were ignoring it, almost like they were confident he was wrong and thought they had to be polite about it. At that age, that’s how it is with love—you are rebellious in the face of disapproval or dismissal, you don’t let just anyone shake your conviction, you are not someone who is joking around. But to me, what I had just seen was almost overwhelmingly funny—I had just witnessed a middle-aged man refusing the whole concept of inspiration, in front of an expectant and sincere group of youngsters, whose parents were paying a not insignificant amount to professionalize their dreams.
There is really nothing as devastating to a love affair as a mismatched sense of humor. At once, I felt alienated from my fellow strivers and in cahoots with this older actor, understanding the truth in his joke while also, for the first time in my life, being curious about its real implications. What if I didn’t do this with the rest of my life? What if I didn’t really want it, as my program leader loved to say? What were the other things I wanted instead?
After the Q&A was over, I loitered outside the Goodman with my friends and saw Richard Kind once more, emerging in his regular clothes. He did not acknowledge us; that obligation for the day was done. He simply got on a used bicycle and wobbled off into the distance, down Dearborn Street in the languid humidity, and I watched him for a while. He seemed different from the semi-suicidal figure he had just cut, but I didn’t know how. Was he sad? Was he simple? Was he free?
I did continue with theater after that summer, for a few years more in fact. But eventually, I tried Richard’s unintentional advice: I took a break. And in that time off, it was clear a spell had been broken for a long time. Theater no longer felt like a compulsion, and it really has to feel that way for anyone to do it—there is a kind of joyful insanity to doing something so repetitively, over and over, expecting people to believe it’s the first and only time. I wasn’t there anymore—you could say I didn’t “want it.” But it turned out that “wanting it” was beside the point. Whether you want something does not mean you’ll get it, obviously; just ask any working actor. Instead, I found that your desire to pursue any kind of art is quickly overtaken by the fact of doing it, and doing it is the only thing that matters. It becomes like breathing or eating, in an ideal world; it exists underneath and alongside the many other actions of your life, not always resulting in ecstasy or windfalls, sometimes yielding frustration or pain but never a question of whether you should stop. Mostly, it makes you feel content, more like you—or like Richard, simply on his bike, done for the day and going home. Needless to say, he never went to law school.
