The Working Actor: Back to School

Episode 114: The Working Actor: Back to School

Actor Steve Ross has spent 11 years at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and has performed for many years across Canada. He talks about the first step in his acting career – going to the National Theatre School. What stays with him about that time? Why did he choose that school? Why did he almost leave? Did it prepare him for a career as a working actor? Listen in and find out.

Show Notes

• National Theatre School of Canada
• Steve Ross @ The Stratford Festival
• Join our email list
• Among Friends and Clutter

Episode Transcript

Welcome to TFP – The Theatrefolk Podcast – the place to be for Drama teachers, Drama students, and theatre educators everywhere.

I’m Lindsay Price, resident playwright for Theatrefolk.

Hello, I hope you’re well. Thanks for listening.

Welcome to Episode 114. You can find all the links for this episode at theatrefolk.com/episode114.

Today, we continue our Working Actor series on the podcast. What is it like to be a working actor? How did a choice of school help? What is it like to tour? What’s something you should definitely not do?

The focus for this week is “back to school.” How does theatre school help prepare a working actor?

Today, I talk to actor Steve Ross who is just finishing up his eleventh year of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and he started his journey at Canada’s National Theatre School and I just need to preface that, when I was recording this podcast, I was suffering from a mild case of consumption – better known as a cold – I’m sniffling and coughing, all that fun stuff. I apologize greatly.

Lindsay: Hello everyone! I’m here with Steve Ross. Hello Steve!

Steve: Hello! How are you?

Lindsay: I’m wonderful. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Steve: Pleasure.

Lindsay: All right. So, first of all, where in the world are you right now?

Steve: I am in Stratford. I am in my eleventh season at the Stratford Festival.

Lindsay: Is that lovely to have a long-term job? Do you look forward to it every year?

Steve: It’s fantastic.

Lindsay: Yeah?

Steve: Not only is it nice to have an eight-month gig in general but it’s also just a really fantastic place to work. I have loved it since I got here. I didn’t intend to ever get here.

Lindsay: No?

Steve: No, I didn’t ever think I would, actually. It was sort of assumed when I went to the National Theatre School. It’s kind of a pipeline and people just immediately head to Stratford, but I didn’t because I wanted to really look at musicals. When I graduated, it was the time of the big, big musicals and multiple musicals running in Toronto and I wanted to focus on that.

So, I moved to Toronto right away instead of pursuing Stratford and I was there for seven years before they called me to come in to audition and I finally did get my head around, “Yeah, we could do both; we can do musicals and classical stuff here,” and I have since fallen deeply in love with the place.

Lindsay: Isn’t that interesting? I think sometimes actors get into their head that they can only be one kind of actor, do one kind of thing.

Steve: Yeah.

Lindsay: Is that something that you went through when you were a younger actor?

Steve: Well, I think I imposed it on myself, weirdly. There I was at a really wonderful classical school that was giving you wonderful classical training and all I wanted was to do musicals and I guess I was too narrow-minded. That’s all I wanted to do and I actually almost quit NTS.

Lindsay: Wow.

Steve: Because I thought, “You know what? If I’m going to do this, I should focus more on musical theatre,” and, as I was on my way to quit, our singing teacher at NTS walked by me in the hall – and he was a great guy – and he said, “Oh, where are you going?” I said, “I think I’m going to quit and go to Sheraton for musical theatre,” and, completely innocently, he went, “Oh, that’s weird. You don’t have that good a voice.” It wasn’t said meanly; it was just said as a comment and I literally turned around and went back to class, and I’m sure one would hope that others would have tried to talk me out of quitting as well, but it certainly didn’t get that far. I sort of went, “Oh, I guess I’ll stay then.”

Lindsay: It’s amazing how one comment can just sort of turn everything around.

Steve: Completely changed, yeah, and I told him that story years later and he laughed and, of course, didn’t remember saying it and laughed and laughed. But, yeah, I’m so happy with the training that I got from that place and then I just sort of played catch up when I got to Toronto after I graduated with the musical theatre stuff so it sort of was an on-going process for me.

Lindsay: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about National Theatre School. A lot of the folks who listen to this podcast have students who are looking at going on and becoming and going into some training and going into programs past high school. So, let’s start with, when you were in high school, why did you pursue National Theatre School? For those of us and, also, for those listening who are in America, National Theatre School is sort of Canada’s National, it is what it is, right? It’s National Theatre School.

Steve: It is, yeah.

Lindsay: There’s nothing else to say about it. So, what made you decide to go there?

Steve: Well, it was a bit of a longer process for me. I didn’t really act in high school. Again, I was told I couldn’t sing in high school.

Lindsay: Isn’t that funny, huh?

Steve: And I really don’t think I could in high school. I didn’t have any sort of an ear and I was really pitchy. And so, I was in band and all sorts of stuff like that so I didn’t do – I think I did one play in high school and I liked it, but it didn’t really occur to me that it was a career so I went into sports medicine and I was at the University of Western in London and it wasn’t really specific enough – the course – and I wanted to do something even more specific so I got accepted to another school that I was going to go to and then just sort of decided not to and just sort of decided to take a year off and I fell into a summer acting course which was really fantastic. So, I got the bug a bit there, but I just still wasn’t positive if I was going to do it for real.

So, I went to a university that my father worked at and I could go for free. But I didn’t want to spend any more money or any more of his hard-earned money until I knew what I wanted to do. So, I went for a year at this university in their theatre program and it was a great program but, again, a university program, I find, is very different than a conservatory program in that there’s all sorts of other things that go towards getting a degree and I absolutely understand the value of that. But it still wasn’t exactly what I was looking for so I asked around and the National Theatre School was suggested to me. I didn’t realize that 700 people apply every year and ten they’ll accept which was great – ignorance is bliss.

Lindsay: Absolutely.

Steve: And I didn’t get in this first year but they asked me to come back the next year. So, I went back for a second year at this university and then auditioned and finally got in. And so, it ended up being a year at Western, two years at this other university, and then yet another three years at the National Theatre School.

Lindsay: So, by the time you got there, you were ready to take on this career, kind of?

Steve: Yeah, I think I knew at that point and, interestingly, everyone in my class – except for one – had done the same thing. Every single one of us had been to some sort of post-secondary. There was one guy right out of high school, but all the rest of us had been around for a bit. They’re very good at NTS at figuring out a dynamic for a class and we all sort of came with the real fire of “Yup, we’ve been around for a bit, we do know what we want now,” and I think it really made for a good class dynamic.

Lindsay: Well, it also makes for you really take things seriously.

Steve: I agree. I agree, and you have to at that school. Well, you can faff around as much as you want, but you’ll really not be taking advantage of the twelve hours a day that they offer you at NTS. So, yeah, it was good that we were all ready.

One acting teacher who came in for a six-week course with us called us the “basketball team” all the time because, she said, “You guys don’t seem to do anything socially but, when you get in the class, all you want to do is compete with each other and be better than each other,” and I thought it was a really good way to describe us because we really, really, all we ever wanted to do was get on-stage and play. We weren’t really interested in going for drinks and knowing how everyone was. I mean, it’s not like we hated each other but we really just wanted to be better and play the game better with each other so I always loved that dynamic.

Lindsay: You’ve used the school for what it’s for – to learn and to prepare yourself.

Steve: Yeah, everybody was there to learn and really take advantage of it. I was always amazed because you would watch the dynamics of the other years as you were there and they had a very different but really clear dynamic in their classes too and I was always amazed at how, as an audition panel, you would find people with that same dynamic. It was very interesting to me.

Lindsay: What was the most valuable thing about going to a theatre school?

Steve: I loved how much stuff they throw at you in that theatre school. I mean, getting there at 10:00 in the morning and leaving at 8:00 at night, you would do the core stuff – the voice and the movement and all that sort of stuff – every morning and the singing and the improv stuff. And then, in the afternoon, there would be six-week blocks and you would do everything under the sun. You would do scene study or you would do contact improv or you would do stage combat and, you know, there would be people coming up from New York or people coming up from Toronto. The great thing was it was always working artists who would come in as guest teachers and that’s what I loved – you had a wonderful core of teachers who were there and you also had people coming in from the business who are working and they were as interested in talking to you about how the business works and being a functioning person in that business when you graduate as they were with the project we were working on. So, I’ve always appreciated that.

Lindsay: I’ve talked to other actors and one thing that they talk about sometimes is how their schooling didn’t prepare them for the real world and about how, if you’re talking to working actors, you get a sense of what it means to take on that mantle, right?

Steve: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve been asked that question before whether I felt prepared when I got out and I had friends – well, I was in first year, they were in first year in a Toronto school and so, we would go through our programs at the same time and we would compare notes kind of thing – and, when they were in their third year, in their final year, and they were doing their performance year, they were very aware of what agent was coming to the show and what person and what thing like that, and we weren’t in Montreal. We were in this kind of beautiful cocoon which, I guess, didn’t help with the business side of it, but what it did do was I felt like we got five true performances. We did five shows in my third year and it was never about the critics. It was never about, “Oh, my god, there’s an agent coming. Please, I have to get representation.” We sort of were blissfully allowed to just do the shows and wildly succeed or wildly fail. We did a show that was so bad but it was a real learning experience, too.

And then, it did mean you had to play a bit of catch up when you came to Toronto and you had to get used to, “Okay, this is how an audition call works and this is who an agency call works,” but I don’t know, I don’t know enough about other theatre schools and I don’t know whether even NTS does this now – I think they do – but I’ve always wondered if there’s a way to start to prepare people for literally the business side – how to write a cover letter, what kind of a headshot you should have, audition etiquette, that kind of stuff. I’ve always thought that that would be really valuable.

Lindsay: Yeah, it’s kind of a Catch-22, isn’t it? Because it’s really necessary to have the kind of experience that you had where it’s pure performance and also pure failure about that you not worry about whether an agent is going to come and see you and see you do something poorly.

Steve: Yeah.

Lindsay: But then, on the other side, if you’re going to be a working actor, you do need to know the basics and the basics are, yeah, how to audition.

Steve: Yeah, you really need that skill set and that toolbox. I have a feeling that NTS started to bring an agent in and do sort of a weekend workshop, and I don’t know that it would need much more than about a week, or even if these guest artists were there, if the director of the schools or whatever intentionally said, “Hey, while you’re there, do alert people to how this is going to work and stuff,” because I just feel like, even if you put it in a class context, I don’t know that that would be as worthwhile as just sort of sitting around and going, “Okay. Well, this is what works for me and this is what didn’t work for me,” and that’s why I think it’s so valuable too when they will bring back guest actors.

I went back one time to NTS about four years after I graduated and did a show with them. You know, I know Soulpepper. I think Soulpepper in Toronto has an affiliation with one of the theatre schools there. And so, you actually get to do a show with working actors, and not only do you learn about the resumes and all that – the agents and that kind of stuff – you also just learn how to conduct yourself in rehearsals and that kind of thing which is invaluable.

So, yeah, the integration part of it, I think, is so valuable. And, regardless of whether that’s there or not, you learn pretty quickly or you simply don’t progress.

Lindsay: So, what are the things that you think that you caught onto quite quickly when you moved to Toronto and you started your professional career? What did you see you needed to know?

Steve: It was interesting, the transition from high school to university, in that no one mollycoddles you in post-secondary, no one cares if you show up for class, no one cares if you fail a class, the way that people were always on you in high school. So, that was an interesting dynamic.

Similarly, you have to be so self-motivated because you literally are self-employed. You are selling your own product and I had to learn very quickly that, if you weren’t constantly keeping an eye out for yourself and looking for jobs and looking for the next gig and looking for the next what class to improve yourself and stuff, no one else was going to do it for you. I found that’s something that you very quickly had to get on that train or, again, you just didn’t work, and it’s hard enough to get work right out of theatre school anyway that, if you don’t start to be pro-active right away, I think you just don’t get into that rhythm and I feel lucky that I came very quickly to really like the business side of things.

Lindsay: Oh, yeah? In what way?

Steve: I really dug the chase of things. It made me feel really empowered? And I still, to this day, I love the period from about March of the calendar year to about May when all the theatres around the country announce their seasons and it’s like I get to pick and choose, and I get to say, “Hey, this theatre, I’d like to play this role, what do you think about that for me?” It’s not like every one of them goes, “Yes, please, Steve. Come and work for us.” Wouldn’t that be nice? But at least it’s a period where I am completely in control of a career that you don’t have a ton of control over in a lot of aspects and I always felt like really empowered in it so I love that time when you go, “Oh, that’s a show I’d love to do! I’ll write to him or I’ll write to her.” And so, yeah, I really dig that kind of a thing.

Lindsay: That’s a great attitude to have because it is a career that does have so little control and it’s so easy to get overwhelmed by rejection, isn’t it?

Steve: It really is. It really is. That’s a really good point.

I just did a talkback after a show the other night and a woman said, “Well, my daughter is going into the theatre and, statistically, it’s very difficult.” I said, “Listen. We are not pretending that it’s a difficult profession, but it’s a fantastic profession, and why would I ever quell someone’s want to be in that profession?” But you do have to very quickly come to terms with the fact that, yes, you are going to get rejected a lot.

I feel very lucky also that one of my first “Joe jobs” was as a receptionist at a theatre company in Toronto and I also got to be the assistant to the casting director, kind of his gopher while we were there. So, I got to be in a lot of auditions where I was on the other side of the table very early on and I learned very quickly that rejection isn’t always, doesn’t always mean that you are the failure. There are so many factors in what goes into casting someone that it kind of took a lot of pressure off so I felt lucky that very quickly I went, “Oh, okay, I can keep going,” because I know I’ve watched friends leave the business because they just went, “I can’t do it anymore. I can’t be said no to one more time,” and you think, “No, no, no, it’s not always your talent.” It’s that there are so many factors to getting cast in a show that I felt lucky that I could watch that process at an early time in my career.

Lindsay: Well, it just must have made you see a lot of mistakes too that happen at auditions.

Steve: Oh, boy, yeah.

Lindsay: Okay. So, what are some of the big ones?

Steve: Apologizing for your work.

Lindsay: Oh!

Steve: I’ve been a reader a lot for auditions so, you know, I’m the one who sits there and comes in and reads the scene with the actors. It is so fascinating the number of people who, the first thing out of their mouth is, “Yeah, I’m not feeling well today,” or, “Yeah, I just got these yesterday. I just got this scene yesterday,” and you think, “Well, nobody’s interested in that.” So, if you’re sick, and if you are genuinely sick, sure, they’re going to know you’re sick. No one’s kidding themselves in the room. But to apologize for the work? Or to say “I didn’t get this until yesterday,” well, probably no one got this until yesterday so suck it up, buttercup.

I found it fascinating that the people that would immediately cut themselves off at the knees and apologize for their work and I realize that, if you just dive in, that’s the best way to do and then hopefully, if the director wants to see you again, if you’re right for it, they will just go, “Great! So, that was good. Let’s try it this way,” and, you know, onward you’d go.

But, yeah, it’s amazing to me the number of people or the number of people who really won’t be open to the director’s changes in an audition. It’s always interesting to me that people will come in with a very clear idea of what they want to do and then the director will go, “Yeah, great, can you just try it like this,” and they’ll do it exactly the same way as they did the first time.

Lindsay: That’s a big problem with very young actors, with high school actors.

Steve: Do you?

Lindsay: Yes, that concept just doesn’t resonate with them, that it’s okay – well, and it’s all about failure. It’s all that notion of failure where, in school, you’re told that, if they fail at something, that they get a bad mark and to change is equal to failure in some of their minds.

Steve: I know. It’s so hard, eh? We have students a lot at chats and the first thing they say often is, “What would you do differently if you went back to theatre school?” and my answer is always, “I would be more fearless,” and, at NTS, you are blessed with there are no marks at NTS. You have an interview at the end of every term and you either get asked to leave or you get asked to stay, and you have a pretty good idea if you’re going to be asked to leave anyway. It’s not like it just comes out of nowhere. But you don’t have the marks thing but I still wish that I had been more fearless. I wish I’d taken more chances.

I spent so much time trying to do what I thought the teachers wanted and they even told me that. They told me that at one of my interviews. They said, “Yeah, yeah, it’s really good. It’s all there. You’ve just got to have more fun,” and the penny didn’t really drop. I mean, I still feel like I learned a lot at school, but I wish I’d been more fearless.

Lindsay: So, now, after years of being in the profession, do you feel that you have carried with you from your experience at NTS? What still has stayed with you from being at a theatre school, if anything?

Steve: There’s a lot. I think a lot about stuff. I think about specifics. I think about what different teachers say.

We had a clown teacher from Toronto; I really, really liked that six weeks and she taught us the concept of stillness in auditions and stillness in rehearsal and how valuable less is more and those kind of things and those are concepts that are really hard as a student I find to really, really embrace and trust. But, as you go on, it all gets in by osmosis and it’s all in the hard drive swimming around, but it never really clarifies itself until it needs to which is weird. I don’t know if that makes sense. But I constantly think about people.

I think about one of our acting teachers from the first year who was in from the HB Studios in New York who said some of the best things, but boy did they not make sense to me when I was in the class. But then, the penny will drop in a very specific situation and you go, “Oh, that’s what they meant! Oh, well then, I’ll try that now,” and now there’s no worry about, “Oh, my god, what does the teacher think?” You can just do it.

Just a couple of weeks ago, because these are long runs here at Stratford and I was thinking, “Yeah, how do I freshen this scene up?” and one of my acting teachers popped in. I had to come on laughing in a scene and he used to say, “It’s not working. Do you know any really dirty jokes?” I said, “I know a couple.” He said, “Tell yourself one of your really dirtiest jokes before you come on,” and I did it in a show the other day and it really freshened the scene up for me. So, I guess you need to be open enough to receive all of the information even if you’re not going to use it immediately so that it’s kicking around in your hard drive. But I appreciate that they did tell us that, too. They said, “We’re throwing a lot of stuff at you guys and we don’t expect you to process it all. We just want you to experience it all.”

So, I guess that’s the value. They let us experience a ton of different stuff and then it was up to us to go, “Yeah, that worked for me,” or “No, that was really not helpful for me but that’s okay that it wasn’t helpful.” No experience goes completely wasted.

Lindsay: No, no, and I think that’s important to have that sort of file cabinet, eh? Where things just kind of go in and then you pull it out. That must be very useful for you when you have to do these long runs. As you just said, if you want to freshen up a scene, you pull out something that you learned in the past.

Steve: Yeah.

Lindsay: As we wrap up here, I think that it’d be really useful for our listeners just to talk a bit about what it’s like to be in a really long run because Stratford, you guys run from April to October, something like that.

Steve: We do, yeah.

Lindsay: What’s it like to play the same character for months at a time?

Steve: Well, again, especially, I love it because we do two or three shows so it’s rep. So, for one thing, you’re never doing more than four a week which is fantastic. It keeps it that much fresher. I have learned over the years being here that, because it’s a long run, that the more I can dig in in rehearsals and really find stuff that works for me and stuff that resonates for me, that will only help me long term because I’ve done enough shows that get rehearsed in – gosh, I once had to do a show…

Lindsay: Two weeks? One week?

Steve: Well, I did nine days one time.

Lindsay: Oh, my gosh!

Steve: Nine days from first rehearsal to first preview, and I was playing triplets in it. Boy was it a hard show. It was a fantastic experience but you sometimes rehearse things so fast that you realize about three weeks into the run, “Oh, yeah, we never really dug into this moment and now I have no idea what it is,” and then it’s gone.

What this place has taught me and what the other long runs that I’ve done in Toronto have taught me is that, the more I can dig in in rehearsal and make real real sense of stuff, the more I can continue to come back to that and be able to go, “Yeah, no, this is what we did in rehearsal and this is what this moment was. Now, how can we shift that slightly if we need to?” but at least there’s a cornerstone.

Occasionally, I find – and it’s my fault – that I didn’t do enough homework in rehearsals and I didn’t dig in enough and so the moments didn’t make sense and then I was sort of left adrift by myself second and third week into the run.

So, yeah, I think, for me, the more I key in in rehearsals, the more I can do the long run.

And then, there’s the logistic thing of folks, now in September, paid exactly the same amount of money and are coming to see the show that I opened back in May, and it’s really important to remember that it doesn’t matter if you’re having a lousy day or something. This is their one chance and they spend a lot of money to come to this and you get to go out there and play and, come on, is there a better job? We could be digging ditches.

Lindsay: We could be coal mining. I always go back to that. I am not coal mining.

Steve: Exactly. I’m putting clothes on and I’m being a jerk for two hours in front of people. Come on! There’s really worse things. That gets me into gear, too.

And I also continually try to get better at just listening to the other person on-stage and I find that that is absolutely everything for a long run. If the other person is in the same boat and they just want to listen to you and you just listen to them, it just takes you back into the story of it as opposed to thinking, “Oh, my god, this is the sixtieth show,” or, “What am I going to make for dinner? I have a show tonight,” and all that kind of stuff.

Lindsay: And then, it becomes two people in a conversation as opposed to “Here’s my line, now it’s your line, now it’s someone else’s line.”

Steve: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you’re just marking time as opposed to just really getting out there and doing it.

Lindsay: And, lastly, what’s one piece of advice you would give to a young high school student? They’ve got the stars in their eyes. They’re like, “I want to be an actor. This is what I want more than anything else.” What’s the piece of advice that you would give them as they think about that career?

Steve: I would firstly make sure you know why you want to be an actor.

A couple of people, when I was in the university theatre school course, we went around in a circle and they said, “Why do you want to be an actor?” and two of them said, “I want to be a star.” I thought, “Ooh. That’s not a…”

So, really, I would think really, really think about whether you like acting or whether you like the business of it, and know that it’s tough. It’s not a walk in the park and, I mean, it’s easy to say when I get to work at Stratford that, “Oh, no, really think about what you’re doing,” but I feel like, if you really, really want to do it and you have loved the process and the meat and potatoes, bones of the acting that you’d done in high school, then go for it. But know that, if it’s just something you see on TV and you think, “I want to be that star,” that’s fantastic, too. I mean, why not swing for the fences? I’ve always just loved putting on other people’s skins and getting into their heads and doing those roles, and that’s why I like doing it. But it’s a lot of work and it’s a lot of dedication and there’s easier jobs, I guess, is the bottom-line. And, if you’re not ready for the work that it entails, maybe think about something else. But I never want to dissuade people at the same time. I hate when I hear people say, “Oh, no, don’t do it just because it’s hard.” Well, everything’s hard. To do everything well is hard.

Lindsay: Yeah.

Steve: To be a crafts person and make a chair is hard, but to make a good chair, that’s a beautiful accomplishment. But, yeah, I guess, if you’re prepared to do it, then go for it, I guess, would be the advice. Hmm. That doesn’t sound like great advice.

Lindsay: Aww. It’s a wonderful.

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.

Steve: My pleasure, Linds.

Thank you so much, Steve.

So, Steve and Craig worked together on a show a number of years ago and the general consensus is that there is not a nicer or a more generous person and actor than Steve Ross, and I am thrilled and honored that he made time for us today. It’s great.

So, if you want in on the written reflection and listening quiz for your students for this Working Actor series, make sure you join our email list. You can get the link in the show notes for this episode – theatrefolk.com/episode114.

Before we go, let’s do some THEATREFOLK NEWS.

It’s a play feature! It’s a play feature! It’s time to feature a play! And I’m going old school on this one. We go back to the beginning of Theatrefolk. Among Friends and Clutter is one of my very first plays. I didn’t have a lot of experience writing plays. I didn’t even have a lot of experience acting in plays, but this one came from the heart and I think that’s what shows, mostly because this play is over twenty years old and it still gets done to this day which really blows my mind, actually. It amazes me.

So, this play is divided into three sections – Friends, Family, and Love – and it looks at the different relationships in all of those areas. The characters start out as children. They grow. They succeed. And sometimes they fail and they fail big time. There’s a lot of clutter in our lives and in the lives of these characters

So, here’s a monologue for one of the characters, Joanne, from the Family section. She is sitting with her comatosed father in the garden.

JOANNE: There we are. Don’t want to catch a cold. But I don’t think you’ll have to worry today. The sun is so warm – not hot, just warm. A perfect day. The tulips look great, Dad. The colours are so beautiful. Mom said to planted them last year. She thought the frost might have damaged them but they look fine. Mom looks tired – more tired than usual. I came as quick as I could. I went for a walk this morning, down by the river. Everything has changed so much. Would you believe it? I ran into a girl I went to high school with. She’s never left town. Helen… funny I can’t remember her last name. Anyway, she had the most beautiful child – a baby boy with red cheeks and the curliest blond hair you have ever seen.

The house looks a little sad. I think I’m going to go down to the paint store and pick up something for the shutters. You always said that good-looking shutters can hide a thousand flaws. Mom told me you’ve been like this for a while now, although she swears you said her name last week. Your face is warm. Are you feeling the sun somewhere in there? Are you in there somewhere? Can you see me? This afternoon, we’ll go to the park and we’ll watch the kids play on the swings – as long as it doesn’t rain – would you like that? Would you like to go to the park? Please, say something, Daddy. Anything? Please.

That’s Among Friends and Clutter. Go to the show notes – theatrefolk.com/episode114 – and read more sample pages from Among Friends and Clutter.

Finally, where, oh, where can you find this podcast? Where can you direct students to find this podcast? We post new episodes every Tuesday ast theatrefolk.com and on our Facebook page and Twitter. You can find us on YouTube.com/Theatrefolk and you can find us on the Stitcher app and you can also subscribe to TFP on iTunes. All you have to do is search for the word “Theatrefolk.”

That’s where we’re going to end. Take care, my friends. Take care.

Music credit:”Ave” by Alex (feat. Morusque) is licensed under a Creative Commons license.