From my friend, Christina.

What I’m working on now, which is really myself. Thanks to hero Dan Harmon for the story structure, to hero Joss Whedon for the mythos, and to friends who have read drafts and helped me mold.

I feel like it’s easy for people to give up on me, and I have unwittingly joined in that. I am a terror, a childish tyrant. It was always this way, probably, but I had better ways to hide it before. Better motivation to, at least.

My evils I have to let live. They are there for me to keep, like tigers in a zoo. Beautiful from a distance, but they make poor pets.

These escapes I came to love. I can keep those, too. Minimum security.

No one has ever said, “Don’t give up.”

I tell people I’m giving up theatre, and they just nod. I don’t expect their life to be about me, but I see this as evidence that I would not be missed. I think I would respond the same way to someone who said it sincerely if I did not think they were contributing anything worthy to the artform.

I changed my life intentionally to do this full-time. Did I waste the last six or seven years? What have I learned? Only that the people I expected to find also treading this path, the people I thought were my people, are few and far between.

Theatrical violence incorporates the most important aspects of theatrical performance: objectives and commitment at the very highest stakes, physical communication and cooperation between actors, and a dual awareness at both the character and actor levels. For me, stage combat informs all of my work as a professional actor in Milwaukee, and I am proud to have served as fight director for so many shows at so many companies, bringing safety and storytelling to their scenes of violence.

I consider stage combat to be a modern martial art, focused on storytelling, rather than defense, much like many Eastern disciplines teach that, at the highest levels, violence and destruction are set aside in favor of aesthetic creation. A master becomes an artist, as the understanding of violence reminds one of their human nature (the earth, the id, the beast, etc.) but channeling that directionless passion are the creative and rational drives. As artists in the theatre, the consummation of all arts, we have the ability and responsibility to bring this violence as realistically to bear as we are able in order to confront and discuss — and perhaps, to change — the way in which we accept and cope with our natural tendency toward violence.

To that end, it is essential that we as fight directors, give our actors the tools required to tell these stories. By necessity, we begin to help with precautions against harm; after all, beyond the obvious preservation of the actor, if the actor must hesitate because of a safety concern, then we have hindered the story by whatever fraction that hesitation costs. Contrarily, when we instill in actors the knowledge and practice to free them of the constraint of fear, we not only allow that particular scene to come alive, but we bring the actors to a greater state of awareness and commitment, which can only serve them in all aspects of performance.

The responsibility is colossal for fight directors, as with any teachers, to keep this always in mind. We must understand fear, violence, and all of the darkest parts of our humanity in order to create compelling art, but we must be in command of those forces, and teach others to be in command of them, if that art is to be of value.

(from my application to the SAFD TCW 2015)