On April 18th, 2025, I observed a day of silence at work in honour of Good Friday. This is maybe not an entirely unusual thing for a traditional Catholic to do. It was, however, unusual in my line of work: performing in a West End show.
Onstage, I still said my lines. But other than that I was completely silent; all the normal tiny microinteractions — goodmornings, checkins in the wig room, jokes in the wings — were off the table.
Chatting is important when you’re an actor, because when you’re an actor, other people are constantly doing things for you. In a big production like this, the entire backstage ecosystem is bound together by the little chat: you chat when people are handing you props, putting on your wig, buckling your shoes, or in one case, doing up nearly a hundred poppers on a pair of trousers. And chatting makes the job better. When you’re doing the exact same thing over and over every night, the one element of novelty is the micro-conversation you have with your coworker. Not to mention that the least you can do, really, is to say thank you to the person pinning the large pilgrim’s hat onto your head.
So I was nervous about going “off-the-grid,” as it were. I told as many people as I could the day before, and hoped that with some explaining the following day, I’d be able to smooth things over.
On Friday morning, I woke up early. Before I left my house, I scribbled on an index card, “Observing Day of Silence for Good Friday.” What an absolutely insane thing to do, I thought to myself. What’s everyone going to think? Who on earth does this fundamentalist American girl think she is?
When I got to the theatre, the light in the upstairs hallway had gone out. Instead of the usual fluorescent flatness, the hallway now had a shadow of the monastic about it. It felt like a sign. I took my slightly-tattered copy of the Imitation of Christ into my favorite nook in the stairwell and blasted Hildegard of Bingen through my noise-canceling headphones, almost loud enough to drown out the 5-minute call to stage.
The Imitation was written by an Augustinian monk, Thomas à Kempis, in the 15th century. Despite its enduring popularity, it is not exactly what one might call a comfortable read. The Imitation is unequivocal in its demands. In order to walk the narrow path, one must be crucified to the world: must give up self-love and love of worldly things in order to heed the higher call. “All earthly things are full of vanity,” à Kempis writes, echoing the preacher. “Learn now to die to the world, that you may begin to live with Christ.”
Sitting there before the show, with some atmospheric assistance from the broken ceiling light and from Hildegard, the question felt both pressing and elusive at the same time. What could it possibly mean to be crucified to the world? I was aware of the absurdity of the situation, reading à Kempis in the stairwell as I prepared to spend three hours singing, dancing, and generally engaging in an activity that would have been incomprehensible to the austere 15th century monk. Go inward, be quiet, avoid large gatherings, says à Kempis. I read this as I prepared to go onstage to wave my pompoms around for the 250th time.
I think that à Kempis would have harsh words for actors in particular. “Those who stand highest in the esteem of men are most exposed to grievous peril, since they often have too great a confidence in themselves.” Erich Fromm, the 20th century psychoanalyst, makes a related criticism. The actor is particularly vulnerable to spiritual dysfunction, especially in cases where “his neurotic qualities are an asset” and when “his narcissism is a necessary condition for his success.”
There’s a logic to this criticism. The path of the actor not only selects for, but encourages, states of self-delusion. A founder friend once said to me about startups that “the value of a startup is in the four-dimensional space between a founder’s vision of reality and reality.” In other words, the most important trait a founder can have is the ability to suspend reality in favor of an image; to have a dream and believe in it hard enough that it actually becomes real. Both actors and startup founders need to be, to use the Gen Z terminology, a little bit delulu (delusional). And with actors, the brand of self-deception becomes intensely personal: your mission, your venture, your startup is yourself. And in the economy of illusions, the biggest ego stays afloat.
How do you reconcile this dynamic with this other calling: to self-renunciation? This was the question that sat with me all day, as I bounced around the theatre in my little pod of silence.
I don’t have an answer. But I do have a few adjacent thoughts.
The profession attracts … people with astonishing openness of heart
The first is on the egotism of the profession. It’s true that the industry can select for — and cultivate — incredible degrees of narcissism. But I think that this stereotype about actors can obscure another equally important truth. The profession attracts, at the same time, people with astonishing openness of heart: people with incredible sensitivity, imagination, and a general bigness of soul. Among the 31 people I shared a company with last year are some of the most generous, selfless, other-oriented people I’ve ever met.
It’s true that building a career can encourage an inordinate focus on self. But the day-to-day experience of the working actor is an exercise in renunciation. Backstage, nothing works if people are self-interested. The tremendous coordination required to put on a show only works when people submit their individual interests to the demands of the bigger picture.
And my last thought is about the paradoxical nature of vocation. It doesn’t make sense to me, rationally, why the call of vocation would have led me to Hildegard in the stairwell at the Phoenix Theatre. But maybe one of the most important elements of heeding the call is that of surrender, surrender to being part of a mosaic that transcends your individual understanding. Maybe that’s why the call often comes in the form of a question, a widening horizon. As Leonard Cohen puts it, you hear the “Bat Kol,” the divine voice. “You hear this other deeper reality singing to you all the time, and much of the time you can’t decipher it.”
I went to bed that night tired and a little relieved. But when I woke up the next morning, things felt very bright. No answers, of course; just grace on the threshold.
