Telling the Truth: The Role of the Artist Under Occupation
Lessons on Acting for Liberation
“Artists don’t get paid to have long fuses.”
A middle-aged, very tall and quite serious Italian-American acting teacher with a zero-tolerance tardy policy said this to a room of sixteen students in the basement of a church in Cleveland. Victor D’Altorio hated the spate of bad acting taking over film, theater, and television, and saw it as a direct threat to a healthy society. For Victor, acting was life or death.
“Okay,” he said, “you’re going to come up in pairs and face each other.”
We were silent, confused and quietly terrified.
“One of you makes an observation about the other. If my partner looks like they have no idea what to say, I would say: you look like you have no idea what to say. The other person repeats it exactly, but makes it personal: I look like I have no idea what to say.”
Then he explained the real challenge.
“No matter what you’re thinking or feeling, you have to say the line. We repeat it until it’s no longer true. When something else becomes true, that’s what you say next.”
We didn’t know it yet, but this was an exercise in honesty under pressure. It was absolutely thrilling.
After the awfulness of music school, a domestic life that didn’t work, and a job in arts administration where my boss attempted to sexually assault me while we were working overseas, Victor’s class became an oasis of truth.
I learned that through the lies of the playwright, actors look each other in the eyes and show the truth of what it feels like to be human in extraordinary circumstances. The extraordinary circumstance was the theater. The human was the actor who learned how to strip away pretense and shorten their fuse.
Insincerity belonged to corrupt politicians, phony religious leaders, manipulative lovers and greedy executives. Art demanded imagination and sincerity. For thousands of years, it has helped us understand ourselves. The theater was a temple. Lying about your fantasies or your emotions was profane.
Victor loved asking a brutal question borrowed from avant-garde performance practice:
What are you doing?
For someone who graduated into a stolen election, then watched a man celebrate the collapse of the World Trade Center while I stood in a flower shop on September 11th, that question lived dangerously close to others:
What should we do?
What have we done?
What will they do next?
Victor gave us a daily practice: five minutes of automatic writing every morning, and journal responses throughout the day whenever something surfaced. The task was simple and patient. Lost voices were allowed to speak, even briefly, even privately. Truth got a chance.
That tiny dance—seeing something, naming it, saying it out loud—was rehearsal for doing so in front of others. A crowd. An audience. And reacting to whatever happens next.
In 2005, I drove from Ohio to Los Angeles. After months of auditions and background work, I landed a featured appearance on Charmed. I played a nerd in a speed-dating scene. I showed up in my own clothes and waited twelve hours to do nothing. At one point, a young woman asked, “Are those… your clothes?” I said yes, and she walked away like I was a freak.
Finally, the last shot of the day was called. Suddenly, the entire set focused on me. My direction was simple: walk down the stairs, look at Paige—played by Rose McGowan—and “do something funny.”
The cameras rolled. I walked, looked just past the camera at a stand-in, and gave the biggest grin of excitement I could muster. The crew burst out laughing. The director reset the shot, Rose rolled her eyes, and the illusion of film was complete.
Later that night, celebrating at a bar in West Hollywood, a powerful entertainment attorney approached me. He asked if I was an actor. I told him about my first TV appearance. He made it clear that if I slept with him, he could call friends at Warner Brothers and help my career.
Soon after, I was offered a contract to join a boy band. A record producer roommate explained what it really meant: loss of image control, loss of personal autonomy, loss of speech, debt disguised as opportunity.
Once I understood how the industry actually worked, my dream of being a movie star evaporated.
But I kept writing.
I learned how to hear every thought passing through my head and tell the truth—at least between myself, my pen and the page. And somewhere in that honesty, imagination appeared. Other worlds began to surface.
Years later, Victor developed excruciating bone cancer. He told us plainly that he would take his own life in a year to end the pain. And he did.
Before he died, he told me, “For every hundred good actors, there’s one good director. For every ten good directors, there’s one good writer. If you think you can write, write.”
I still struggle to live up to Victor’s standard of honesty, especially about what it’s like to grow up and live in the United States. After my disappointment in LA, I drove back to Cleveland and moved to New York City. On the way, at Petroglyph National Monument, where I saw sacred and personal symbols carved onto volcanic rocks 400-700 years ago by Native Americans and some Spanish conquistadors. In faces and animals etched out across the landscape, people the land did not let go stared right back at us. A few states later, I was in St Louis at the Gateway Arch, a monument to colonialism and genocide not far from Cahokia, a great mound city that was home to hundreds of thousands of people in pre-colonial times. Truths, imaginations and lies are side by side.
On December 27th, 2005, I settled into a tiny bedroom in an apartment on 42nd Street between 8th and 9th Avenues that I shared with two other people and a fair number of roaches and mice. On New Year’s Eve I went with my soon-to-be ex-partner to stand in Times Square for the ball drop. We ended up locked in high security pens for nine hours with no bathrooms, no food, no shelter, no place to sit and a couple hours of the old TV star Regis Philbin yelling at all the celebrities rehearsing. Fortunately, it was raining, so we had plastic ponchos on and were able to hide trips to the sides of the pen against the gutter where we relieved ourselves like potty bandits. It was very ironic as four years earlier, 9/11 had caused a hit dystopian show about “paying for the privilege to pee” called Urinetown to close. In the following twenty years, African-American, Palestinian, Indigenous, Irish and fellow Romani friends helped look me in the eyes and tell the truth that we are still in that pen, and they keep stopping us from telling each other that we can get out.
I understand now that the role of the artist is not to invent lies that comfort power. It is to stand in the middle of collapse and say what is actually happening. It is seeing that we were always the prey for the machine. It’s seeing that imagination can reveal the heart’s deepest desires.
The actor’s job is audacious: to continue play-acting when the world demands war. To show us what we’re thinking and feeling before language becomes propaganda.
Hamlet doesn’t hesitate because the actor doesn’t know what to do. He hesitates because Hamlet doesn’t know what to do. And in that confusion, something essential is revealed about what it’s like to have power yet be powerless to watch the people you love be threatened and destroyed.
As systems of control multiply, honesty alone is not enough. We also need imagination—the sense that something exists outside the immersive theatrical production of colonialism that we’ve been given. Every attempt to reform this maze builds another corridor. But imagination remembers that there is an outside. There is a before, and there will be an after.
The playwright creates a situation of possibility. The actor enters it honestly. And the audience watches to see what becomes true next.
When the media no longer shows you the truth, take your ideas and a play through it with your friends in your living room. Read Julius Ceasar, go see A Raisin in the Sun or The Death of a Salesman, and you’ll learn all about humanity in crisis.
That is how truth survives occupation.