Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Alex Roe. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alex, looking forward to learning from your journey. You’ve got an amazing story and before we dive into that, let’s start with an important building block. Where do you get your work ethic from?
Heretical though it sounds, I have to admit I’ve never been good at envisioning a goal, laying out a plan to reach it, and taking the steps to get there. I admire people who do, and I believe they exist. I am much more of an explorer, tending not to imagine something that doesn’t exist and strive to create it but to build on what I have and see where doing so leads. But all the more important is it, then, to work, for only in the working can one make the discovery. And the quality of work is best described by a harp string.
Twenty-five years ago, I sat in an ornate reception room at a music conservatory in Paris with small audience to hear a private harp recital. The harp has always enchanted me, and I was honored to be among the guests of the conservatory director. That afternoon, too, I was hard-to-tie-my-boots exhausted, still fighting jet lag and having flown a company of 14 to a new city to mount a play in about 24 hours. So, no doubt highly suggestible, I appreciated something for the first time. When a harps string is plucked, it vibrates so fast that it cannot be seen. It’s as if the string, sounding its ethereal and transcendent tone and joining in harmony with the strings around it–that is, in fulfilling its potential–must disappear.
I thought of how I found myself in the chamber in the first place. On the one hand, there was the long chain of incidental connections that ended there. An acting company I was leading had been invited by the director of the conservatory. We were in Paris at all because we had been asked to participate in an international theater festival there. That invitation came when the festival’s organizer happened past the theater in New York where the production was first staged. That staging opportunity followed my meeting the show’s producers at a ceremony where I’d received an award two years earlier. That award was for directing a comedy for a brand new theater company. That company knew me because one of their members acted for me a year earlier with yet another company. THAT company knew me from my days managing a cluster of rental theaters. I’d wound up managing those theaters after taking some classes there. And I was enrolled in the classes because I needed SOMEthing to do when I arrived in a new city with no connections or offers.
So there was that long, unbroken chain of actions that put me in the room with the glorious harp music.
But there was also work that each link of the chain represented: the classwork; the theater management; the adapting, directing, and designing of each of the three plays; and most recently, assembling the touring company, raising the money for the trip and stay abroad, building a set in a new city, and pounding the pavement with French fliers I’d made advertising the performances.
Harp strings, then, in their physical disappearance into their own sound, capture for me the transcendent qualities of work. Work is first a combination of self-effacing labor, in which the static, visible thing I seem to be (my appearance, my title, my net worth, my self-consciousness) disappears in the acts of creating, leading, connecting. It is moreover a magic spell, as that disappearance creates the fortune of incidental connections that transform one from, say, eager student to grateful impresario, as surely as if following a playbook.
Work is a reward in itself, because it is our way of being. Coming from the theater, I know that playing a character is not simply putting on a costume and looking the part; it is enacting the part. Character, on stage and in life, is what one does, and in doing, we create our characters.
But the magic part is that, even in not knowing where we are bound, that work will assuredly lead us somewhere. We know that one action leads to another that leads to another that leads to another; that first connection starts a chain of connections that becomes our history of accomplishments. And if one has my disposition, not only will it be unexpected, but beyond one’s imaginings.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I have created live theatrical events for 40 years as a writer, a director, an actor, a designer, and a producer–always taking more than one role at time. Never one to sit aside and demand from my partners, I take a hands-on role in each production: as a director, I am a fellow explorer; as an actor, an engaged partner; as writer, a collector of inspiration; as a designer, a builder, too. With a background in performance but also comparative literature, carpentry, music, and motorcycle repair, my work draws on intellectual inquiry and tactile practice.
For 22 years, I shaped the work of New York City’s Metropolitan Playhouse, award-winning theater devoted to exploring the United States’ forgotten theater to better understand the country’s current political and social scene in the light of its past. Lauded for Metropolitan’s potent rediscoveries of overlooked masterworks on stage, I also spearheaded innovative live, on-line performances.
Now, I am returning to freelance work to re-invest in my core artistic strengths and expand my circles of collaborators. Open and available to new project proposals, I am currently drafting several new plays and creating a performance lab to explore evolving techniques and possibilities for live theater, both in-person and online.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Perseverance, Curiosity, Empathy These three complement one another, and each one requires the others. You can’t satisfy your curiosity without perseverance; you can’t empathize without being curious about others; you won’t persevere if you aren’t curious; and without empathy, your perseverance won’t get you as far and your curiosity will hit a wall.
But what if you quail at setbacks, find your attention wanders, simply don’t connect to others? That’s where the work comes in: stepping outside yourself to see yourself giving up before you’ve gone the particular distance, asking one more question than you already have, looking for the effect you have on your collaborators. Perhaps this requires engaging another quality, and that is a disciplined detachment.
In the end, though, each quality informs and requires you to listen to your own, singular perspective–as you are curious about, perseverant in spite of, and empathetic with–yourself.
What would you advise – going all in on your strengths or investing on areas where you aren’t as strong to be more well-rounded?
I’m going to cheat this question, in that a well-rounded life is a life well-lived, but fitting a square peg into a well-rounded hole is a losing proposition. So instead of encouraging doggedly working on weaknesses, I want to stand up for working on mysteries.
You don’t know what you don’t know….until you try to learn.
In our brief time in the world, we owe it to ourselves to cultivate, enjoy, and share our gifts, to follow the opportunities they create for us, and to see how far they take us. But the same goes for the opportunities that lead us into the unknown, and often enough, those are challenges to learn or try what we have not explored before. Forging ahead down untraveled paths does two things: one, it reveals the hidden strengths and aptitudes our experience (our education, our families) never helped us see. And more, it can lay the foundation for new ways of enjoying the strengths we already knew about.
Leaving college with no clear direction–afraid to commit to a life in the theater, honestly–I seized an opportunity to teach high-school. The school needed a game generalist; I needed a place to go, but I had no experience with teenagers beyond having been one, and that was a period I’d been glad to leave behind. Nothing had been so eye-opening as to find the real joy of working for these young and curious minds, showing them what I had discovered in the five years more I had lived than they had. Teaching challenged me to learn more, sharpened my ability to communicate, and opened my heart to my students (and the world) in a way it had never been before. And in fact, a couple years as a high school teacher pointed to a promising future as an educator.
Except I knew my heart lay elsewhere, and I put teaching aside to pursue in earnest what would become my theater work. But that wasn’t going to pay the bills; certainly not right away. So I asked a local antique restorer if he needed help at his shop. I knew nothing about furniture repair, and he didn’t have any openings. But he pointed me to a truck parked around the corner. Its owner did some cabinetry. I left a note on the truck, and a couple days later was unloading lumber shipments and hand-assembling shelves in an abandoned waterfront loading dock. Building during the days (and auditioning at night), soon enough, I was assistant manager of the storefront. When a touring gig took me away from the shop, barely a journeyman, I had still gained new experience in contracts and deadlines, as well as passable woodworking skills.
Flash forward 8 years in this pattern, through the theater renting, the decorative painting, the executive assistantship, the lighting apprenticeship–each opportunities I picked up out of curiosity and need for employment, and all pursued while I continued to seize directing, acting, and writing jobs wherever they lay. A young and growing theater sought a new director, someone to take over its artistic mission and its administration. It needed someone who was a creative director, surely, but also little bit an educator, accountant, negotiator, painter, plumber, electrician, and builder, too. Check. The unexpected avenues I’d traveled, out of curiosity and necessity, looked like the course of an aimless jack-of-all-trades. But that past developed skills essential to the operation of a theater, and for two decades there, my stage practice flourished.
There is such a thing as ignoring one’s calling. When we have vision and talent, we should let those winds fill our sails. Meanwhile, we don’t serve anyone by doggedly throwing ourselves at tasks for which we have no aptitude in the name of general “improvement.” Some things are better left to other people. But we give ourselves many gifts when we step out of our comfort zone to find the limits of what we don’t know.
Contact Info:
- Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/alex-roe-8474166/
- Youtube: @alexroevideo
Image Credits
Jacob J. Goldberg Photography, Steven Lembark, Kendall Riliegh, Nathaniel P. Claridad, Lorinne Lambert, Cliff Miller, Perri Yaniv
