I first saw Steve Garland on stage two years ago in St. Petersburg — in the title role of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, late night at American Stage — and though I didn't much like the production, I wondered how an apparent newcomer to the Bay area theater scene had won such a choice role.
Then I started finding Garland everywhere: at Jobsite Theater in The Pillowman, at Gorilla Theatre in Bug, at The Studio@620 in Grace and again at Jobsite in Woman in Mind. And what became increasingly clear was that Garland amply deserved starring roles: He was an actor who truly transformed for every part, a versatile Everyman with a hard-to-pin-down look — he could be Irish, Jewish, Swedish or Hungarian. He won the Best Actor award in Creative Loafing's 2007 Best of the Bay issue, and he is already making a run at this year's prize with fine performances in Bach at Leipzig and A Dream Play.
It was after seeing the latter — in which Garland skillfully portrayed an attorney who marries the heavenly Agnes — that I decided it was time to find out a little more. We sat down at Café Kili in Temple Terrace, where the 42-year-old Garland generously explained his "sudden" appearance in the area, as well as his conviction that eventually he'll have to ply his trade elsewhere. He was candid and good-humored, occasionally pausing at length to deliberate over the best answer to a question. He was also unfailingly modest.
Garland came to the Bay area from California in 2003 for personal reasons (which he later defined as "love") but didn't appear on a local stage until 2005. "I had been playing an approach/avoidance game with the life of an artist for any number of years," he said. In fact, he'd acted in school plays from grade school onward but had stopped after college and only began "to sort of dip my toe back into it" in the years just before his move to Florida. The problem was that he couldn't reconcile himself to the life of an artist. "I had an antiquarian view of being an actor: sort of an ignoble passion for a gentleman," he said. He enjoyed his post-college eight-year stint in L.A., working for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as an assistant curator, but when he thought of acting, it seemed decidedly "insignificant."
And then he got interested again. "A good friend of mine was taking classes out at Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice," Garland said, "… and she was the one who sort of coaxed me back into the fold." First he audited, then took classes at the theater. Next he was cast in a show in L.A. — an adaptation of Aphra Behn's The Rover — at the Actors' Gang Theatre. He found it wonderful to be back on stage, but "I was still very self-conscious. One of the reasons why I ultimately left Los Angeles when I decided that I wanted to get back into acting or any kind of art was that I didn't have a lot of self-confidence at all. And L.A. is not a place to be if you do not have self-confidence."
A friend told him that a theater in San Francisco was auditioning actors for Jack Hefner's Key West; Garland went for it and won a role as a Swedish hustler who spent half the show totally naked. Not surprisingly, he found the work "battered down the self-confidence issues." He next performed with a group called the East Enders, who were producing "great American one-acts." But approach/avoidance kicked in yet again: Garland moved to Palm Springs and from 2001 to 2003 didn't do a bit of theater.
And then, he says, "I figured I'd been in California for almost a quarter of a century, and I want to see something else." Part of the reason was "to follow a loved one," but he also wanted to do "something radically different and just shake it up."
Some efforts to do theater in the Tampa Bay area after his arrival in 2003 didn't pan out, but in summer 2005 he was cast in Sordid Lives at Gypsy Productions and then "I just started auditioning for other companies and getting roles."
Garland played Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Catherine Hickman Theatre, and Krapp at American Stage, and then — thanks to director Ami Sallee Corley and all-round good guy Brian Shea — got noticed by Jobsite Theater. From 2005 to the present, not many months have passed without a Steve Garland performance somewhere in the Bay area.
But he doesn't think he can afford to stay here. "To reiterate, I've played approach/avoidance with acting my entire life. Now that I'm firmly committed to it again, I realize that with the things I want to do and the places I want to go and the goals I want to achieve, it would not be advisable for me to stay here forever."
Garland thinks he'll eventually move to a major theater market — perhaps Chicago — "where theater is more vital to the populace and where you could make a living as a professional working actor." The latter idea is particularly important: "I'm an actor, and I want to act, and I want to keep working. And if you profess to be anything, why wouldn't you want to be doing that every day that you woke up? Everybody else goes to a 9-to-5; I want that to be my 9-to-5."
As to reaching the top echelons, he's aware it's a crapshoot: "I know a million brilliant actors who are living in all parts of the country, who aren't names, but they're a hundred times more brilliant than some of the people that you see at the movies or on television. It's luck of the draw."
He doesn't know when he'll move away — only that he will. So catch Steve Garland on stage. Look for him next in Jobsite's Embedded. And everywhere else in the world of Bay area theater. And do it soon.
This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2008.