Fiction | October 07, 2026

The Prepared Actor 

Every analog has its own, correlating analog. Tap into the prime analog and you tap into the prime truth. 

From The Process, Chapter 1 

From ages thirteen to seventeen, I had a poster of The Actor on my bedroom wall. The wall was one of four in my square bedroom, in a rectangular house seated at the end of a circular cul-de-sac on Charity Lane in Loveland, Ohio. The poster was from The Actor’s breakthrough 1999 film, in which he played a brooding geology professor in love with his third cousin. I watched that film over and over, reciting lines with my friends, all of whom kept journals full of lyrics to songs we’d written despite the fact that none of us played an instrument. But the obsession with the film, and with The Actor, cut deepest for me. I wanted to be him, wanted to be that third cousin, Midge Talmidge, wanted to be the small-town pastor who got to deliver the line, “You can’t spell cousin without S-I-N.” I wanted to be the rocks he rolled in his hands, the full English breakfast he threw across the room in the breakfast scene, but more than anything, for the rest of the time I lived in that geometry lesson of a neighborhood, I wanted to be an actor. 

My friends went on to English majors and marketing degrees, and I went to a mid-tier state school with a top-tier acting conservatory and a curriculum that was rooted in The Process. My classmates and I devoted ourselves to the technique that had been employed by countless actors since the early sixties. Beyond the classic curriculum of impulse ventilations and regression diagnostics, my professors instilled in us the truth that the life of any artist is equal parts calling and slog, and that there is no such thing as a big break. And I believed everything they said.  

About four years after graduation, when my agent, Phil, called and said he’d finagled me an audition for the Broadway revival of The Crucible, starring The Actor, I cried on the G train. The production wanted an unknown, up-and-coming ingenue to play Abigail Williams opposite The Actor’s John Proctor. I was absolutely unknown; whether or not I was up-and-coming was really up to them. 

I quit my job at the Park Slope coffee shop where I’d been pouring flat whites for a year and spent the next week delving back into The Process. I memorized every one of Abigail’s lines, not just the scene I had to prepare for the audition. Giving myself over to a role, even one I had yet to book, was a pleasure. Like sucking on a sponge, it was a way to blunt the hunger pangs of wanting so much more.  

Every single in-person audition in New York back then was the same. Somewhere in the swirl of the West 30s, you would enter a too-narrow building and think, “This can’t be right.” But it was. Then you’d find the room where three producers sat behind a card table, usually with the remains of lunch still in front of them. With the smell of Caesar dressing heavy in the unmoving air, you’d display the craft you’d spent thousands of dollars and hours perfecting, and exit knowing you would never hear another word about the project. Oh, once in a while you booked something. But most of the time, almost all of the time, this is how it went. 

But not this time. This time, I was called back. Then, at my second callback, there was no one else in the waiting room. When I was called back a third time, it wasn’t to a room in the West 30s; it was to a small room above the theater itself. That final audition was an hour long, during which I was given notes by The Director himself. I allowed myself to fantasize in those days after my final callback that maybe, for some people, there is a moment in which a dream just comes true. 

When Phil called two days later, I asked my favorite of three roommates to record the moment. I put Phil on speaker. “Well, hello, Abigail Williams,” he said. My fingers curled against the Formica top of our thrifted table. I stood and said, “Stop, Phil, don’t tease me.” I swore I could hear Phil recline in the cheap rolling desk chair where he sat in his third-floor walk-up office on West 46th St. “Just promise you won’t ditch me when you move to LA,” he replied, and I promised I wouldn’t before declaring, “Oh my god, I’m gonna jump out the window.”