|
I remember an incident that happened to me a number of years ago. I had just gotten the lead role in a play. The director wouldn't give me the script before our first read-through. When I got there and read the play out loud with everyone else, I discovered that the play was absolutely terrible - actually offensive to me in many ways.
I took the script home, showed it to a number of people, and everyone agreed that I should run the hell away from this situation. So I thought about what to do. I don't back out of projects very often. The easy thing would be to say that I got a paying acting job that was going to take me out of town for a few months - any theater company understands that, if you're doing a show for no pay, you go where the money is. But for some reason, I felt bad lying in this case.
So after a couple of days of deliberation, I called up the director and I said, as politely as I could, that I had some serious issues with the script, ones that made me extremely uncomfortable, and I wouldn't feel right doing the play - I felt I wouldn't do it justice with these issues I was having.
The director, who didn't write the script but obviously believed in it, did what I pretty much feared he would do - he hung up on me.
So what did I accomplish by telling the truth? Yeah, I was honest, but a) I burned a bridge (this director has gone on to do projects that are actually good, but I can't ever audition for them), and b) I insulted someone.
Should I have lied?
__________________
You have to laugh at yourself...because you'd cry your eyes out if you didn't. - Emily Saliers
|