So you're a senior at the University of South Florida, a theater major, and it's just about time to make that segue to a real career. But how do you start? Most of your acting's been done on campus, and not many directors in local professional theater even know your name. Sure, you could audition for parts at Stageworks, say, or American Stage, but that might mean months before someone gets around to hiring you. Or you could move to New York and really get lost in the crowd.
Meanwhile you've got skills that need immediate employment — skills in writing, for example, in addition to acting. So how about this: You put on your own one-man show, written by yourself, showcasing your talent for improv as well as for scriptwork. Since it's the first step in your new life as a pro, you call it embryogenesis with a small "e." You rent space (inexpensively) at Ybor City's Silver Meteor Gallery, print up some flyers, and contact the local arts press. You'll run it for three weekends, and you'll keep ticket prices reasonable.
"I'm trying to create some of my own opportunities," says Kurt Smith as we sit in a classroom on the second floor of the USF Theatre building. With his wide face, closely trimmed beard and short, spiky blond hair, the Jacksonville native looks considerably younger than 28. And his calm, almost impassive demeanor hardly suggests a young man about to launch a career. But that's his intention: To make a success for himself in Tampa, and then to bring his tested product to the larger, less forgiving locales.
"I don't really feel like just trying to save money, picking up and going to New York or L.A. or Chicago or somewhere like that," he says. "I want to be able to establish something here that's portable, that I can take with me anywhere. … It's all about trying to create a situation where I'm independent of having to rely on fitting in somewhere else, and create my own realm of possibilities."
Fitting in somewhere else. That means taking the thorny but traditional route of auditioning for parts until fortune, or a director, smiles warmly and sends a callback. Kurt Smith is betting on another approach altogether, the approach summed up in the words "performance art." What this category includes is increasingly wide open, but fundamentally it suggests a merged writer/performer.
The artist may speak for himself alone (Spalding Gray) or may play many parts, say, members of his family (John Leguizamo) or even subjects she's interviewed (Anna Deveare Smith). Or the performer may tend towards what's been called the "new vaudeville," like clown Bill Irwin, or comic juggler/magicians Penn & Teller or the Flying Karamazov Brothers. With the rise, since the 1970s, of performance art and its spinoffs, a young performer like Smith has an option besides an exasperating series of auditions for other people's projects. He can simply produce himself.
And Kurt Smith's got the material. embryogenesis, he explains, has been gestating for years, ever since the fall of '99, when he took a class at USF called "Creating Performance Art." At the end of the semester, he says, "we did three shows at the Springs Theater, and the production was called Paper or Plastic. … I created this suit of lights, stringed, battery-powered Christmas lights along my arms and legs, and a light on my head. And in total darkness, I could turn the lights on and off, create a human shape, play with the shapes of the lights, and it was very, it was kind of Mummenschanz, that idea of a whole body-mask, mime type work."
More than that, it was the start of Smith's fascination with solo performance. His next impulse, to work on a "physical-based, mask-oriented one-man show" eventually changed into something more complicated, involving traditional text, poetry, "and kind of even a slightly twisted stand-up comedy … a circus cabaret variety sort of performance." As the months went by, the new piece took on a more and more unusual shape. Smith now thinks of it as divided into thirds: the first third is "established scripted text," the second third is "almost entirely physical," involving juggling and clowning and a satire on interpretive dance, and the final third is "pure improvisation."
As he worked on the piece he found himself satirizing, of all things, performance art itself. "I've seen some performance artists on video and I've seen some performance art material around the school," he says, "and I've got this kind of bad taste left in my mouth from this sort of idea that performance art is a mask that an artist hides behind to say, "I don't have to be good. I don't have to be entertaining.'"
Therefore, says Smith, he's on a "crusade against ego": "My responsibility to the audience is to entertain. And by that I simply mean, I cannot bore them." Performers who blame audiences for their failures are deluding themselves, he adds. "There's no such thing as a bad audience. There are bad performances."
Which embryogenesis, presumably, will not be. And though Smith is modest about the show's potential (if he fails, he says, he'll "figure out what I did wrong" and go on from there), he's already got plans if the evening's a success. He'll either reprise the performance, perhaps at a "more recognizable" venue like the Shimberg Playhouse of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, or he'll build on his success by producing an entirely new show, with new material. And, of course, he'll try to make a living wage along the way: "There is the potential of making enough money to survive with," he says.
Well, maybe. The fact is that theater is a fairly pricey art form, labor-intensive, fundamentally unpredictable, and all too subject to the incalculable tastes of audiences and (yes) critics. Talking to Smith, you can't quite tell whether it's naivete or pluck that's led him to gamble on a brief appearance at the out-of-the-way Silver Meteor in a month when audiences are on vacation and no one expects too much from local stages. …
But, hey, stranger things have happened.
And you've got to admire the guy for taking the chance.
This article appears in Aug 23-29, 2001.