Look at these people. Really look at them.
These are theater people, the real kind. The ones doing Genet in a defunct federal building in San Francisco. Site-specific theater, which means they’re not just memorizing lines; they’re wrestling with architecture, with history, with the bones of a building that’s got more stories than any script.
You want to talk about hard work? These people are grinding. Every night, they’re walking that razor’s edge between art and disaster. No net. No second takes. No safety in editing. It’s raw, it’s live, and if you fuck up, everyone sees it happen in real time. That takes stones. That takes commitment to something bigger than yourself.
And Genet, Jesus. That’s not crowd-pleasing material. That’s confrontational, dark, challenging stuff that demands you bring your whole soul to work. These artists chose that. They chose difficulty over comfort, substance over safety.
What gets me is the faces in these portraits. There’s intelligence there. Purpose. The kind of worn, in dedication you see in people who’ve made peace with never being rich or famous. They’re doing this because they have to, because something inside them demands it. That’s the difference between artists and entertainers, artists don’t have a choice. This is how they process the world, how they make sense of the chaos.
Theater people are a particular breed. They’re building something that disappears the moment it’s finished. They’re pouring everything into performances that maybe seventy people a night will see, that won’t be preserved or monetized or turned into content. It’s ephemeral. It’s sacred. It’s the definition of doing something for its own sake.
That’s why you love them. Because they’re the real thing.
A true priest is aware of the presence of the altar
during every moment that he is conducting a service.
It is exactly the same way that a true artist
should react to the stage all the time he is in the theater.
An actor who is incapable of this feeling will never be a true artist.
Konstantin Stanislavisky
