Inside NY Creatives #4_Michael Rhodes, the hardest easy thing
Michael started talking before I even had the chance to pull up a chair. That gives you a sense of the energy of our conversation. I hope you’ll find it as rich and inspiring as I did.
Welcome to this new episode of Inside New York Creatives, the blog where artists talk about their creative processes, their obsessions, and the paths that brought them to their work.
Michael Rhodes is an actor, director, playwright, and co-founder of Tangent Theatre Company. For over twenty-five years, Tangent has created theater in New York City and the Hudson Valley, first through fully staged productions and now through a series of intimate play readings that regularly fill rooms across the region.
I first encountered Michael’s work at one of those readings. I did not quite know what to expect: the actors remained seated, scripts in hand, with almost nothing between the audience and the words. Yet within minutes, the room had changed. The pages seemed to disappear. We were no longer watching people read a play; we were inside it with them.
Michael speaks about theater with the same mixture of intensity, self-doubt, humor, and conviction that seems to animate his work. He calls acting either “the easiest hard thing” or “the hardest easy thing” – he still hasn’t decided which. What is certain is that theater became the thing he could not stop returning to, even through day jobs, loss, injury, the pandemic, and the disappearance of Tangent’s permanent space.
We met in Tivoli, where Tangent began presenting pub readings in 2009, to talk about finding a vocation by accident, learning through an ensemble, trusting an audience, and why the work that frightens us may be the work most worth doing.
You describe acting as either the easiest hard thing or the hardest easy thing. What makes it both?
You would think acting might be simple, but it isn’t. It’s a great puzzle. A lot of actors begin with: What do I want? What do I need in this scene? I am always asking: Why is my character saying this at this particular moment?
That question simplifies things for me. If I can understand the why, I can stop trying to demonstrate an emotion and begin responding to the person in front of me. There is nothing I like more than watching a character think onstage, and nothing I like less than watching an actor think onstage. Of course, we all do it. We judge ourselves while we’re performing. Half the battle is getting out of your own head.
Every time I accept a role, I immediately regret it. I think, There is no way I am going to figure this out. But perhaps we should be frightened by what we do. What do you learn by choosing only the things you already know you can do?
Was there a moment when you realized theater was for you?
I found acting almost by accident. In my early twenties, I wanted to direct films and took some television production classes at Dutchess Community College. The head of the department told me that if I took his acting class, I would learn more about directing by understanding how actors work. I had absolutely no interest in acting.
Four or five years later, I was working in a lumberyard, pricing molding – a job everybody hated because all you got from it were splinters. A brochure from Dutchess arrived in the mail, and that same acting class was being offered. I still don’t know why, but I signed up.
Within the first few classes, I was playing Hamlet in the closet scene with Gertrude. I was making the class laugh, and my scene partner too. The teacher stopped me and said, “I think you would be angrier here.”
I asked, “How angry?”
He said, “Find out.”
I remember marching downstage and seeing everyone in the audience lean back. Some people might call it a light-bulb moment. For me, it was a solar flare. It was literally the first time in my life I thought I might be good at something.
After class, I asked the teacher if he thought I had something. He encouraged me to join a small theater company in Poughkeepsie, where a group of young actors were taking the work seriously.
Two people there became especially important to me, and, completely coincidentally, they were both named Keith. One was an actor; I learned how to act by working with him. The other Keith was a director and the company was his. Years later, he became the third co-founder of Tangent. We lost him a couple of years ago, but his influence is still part of everything we built.
For about three years, we met constantly. We watched films, studied scenes, experimented with different acting methods, wrote plays, and produced shows. Everyone wore different hats.
I would not trade those years for a Juilliard degree. That is not to diminish training, but I learned by working, night after night, with people who challenged me. Nearly forty years later, every reading and every production still adds to that education. It never stops.
Is that ensemble experience what led you to create Tangent?
Yes. When I moved to New York City, I kept looking for the kind of company I had experienced in Poughkeepsie: an ensemble that worked together repeatedly and developed a shorthand.
I think of good acting partners as good tennis players. You want someone who can send a 110-mile-an-hour serve across the net and make you think, Whoa. All right – how about this? You want to be surprised.
In New York, I was often doing what was offered rather than what interested me. I had found a certain ceiling in the Off-Broadway world and became known, in some circles, as the “funny asshole.” If a production needed one, I got the call. Many of the new plays were not very good, the roles were variations on the same character, and none of us were making money. Eventually I began saying no, and then the phone stopped ringing.
At the same time, I was meeting tremendous actors who were bartenders and servers and wondering why they had never gotten a break. Tangent became a way to take some control over the projects we gave our energy to, and to offer good actors roles they might not normally be asked to play. Sometimes someone would say, “I’m not sure that part is right for them.” My response was, “That’s why they should do it.”
Tangent began with traditional productions. How did the readings become central to the company?
When we were producing in New York in the early 2000s, rental costs kept rising until we could no longer afford to work the way we had been working. After we moved to the Hudson Valley, we wanted to introduce Tangent to the community before mounting a full production.
In 2009, we approached the person running the Black Swan in Tivoli with the idea of doing a play reading in the pub. His response was essentially, “Tivoli needs something like that.” We chose Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story because I knew the script backward and forward. It was an hour long and had two characters – something we could manage.
Thirty or thirty-five people came, and we knew perhaps five of them. People were already taking a chance on us. The original plan was to hold three readings and then launch our first production somewhere with a larger population, perhaps Poughkeepsie, Hudson, or Rhinebeck. Instead, we continued the readings for a year. By the third one, I told the company, “We are going to launch here in Tivoli.”
Some people thought that was crazy. Tivoli had a population of about a thousand people, one intersection, and no traffic light. But audiences kept coming for plays they had never heard of. They trusted us, and we trusted them.
The readings were initially a way to keep working between productions and to challenge ourselves. Over time, we began to understand that they were not a lesser version of theater. They were their own form.
What happens in a Tangent reading that is different from seeing a fully staged play?
We keep the form very simple. The actors sit with the scripts. Stage directions are read aloud. There are no sets and very few visual cues, so the audience has to participate by imagining the world of the play.
But it isn’t passive. It is closer to hearing a story told directly to you. When it works, the audience stops seeing the pages. You feel the room listening. There is what I call the good silence – an intense silence when you know people have moved to the edge of their seats. There is a bad silence too, when the energy drains from a room. You learn to recognize both.
We generally have only two rehearsals. The first is to get the words out of our heads. In the second, we begin exploring what they mean. More rehearsal is not necessarily better for this form. With a third rehearsal, actors may begin assembling a performance and thinking too much about what they should do. I want them to trust their instincts, listen to one another, and find the music on the page.
Anything can happen in front of an audience. A line you never thought was funny gets a laugh and throws you off. An actor loses their place because they looked away from the page to connect with their partner. The reading has to remain alive enough to absorb those moments.
At a reading of Donald Margulies’s Dinner with Friends, there is a scene in which an estranged husband and wife argue and then begin furiously making out. There was no physical kiss; the stage direction was read aloud. My acting partner and I simply ended up nose to nose, then slowly turned away. The audience applauded. We looked at each other as if to say, What just happened? They had completed the moment with us.
Tangent no longer has a permanent theater. How does working without a fixed space shape the work?
Even when we had a theater, we tried to find a space that could become the last character in the play. We changed the orientation of the audience, or chose a site where the story seemed capable of happening.
Last summer we read a new play set in a remote part of Alaska at The Tin Barn in Clermont. It is a simple, raw space with large metal doors that open toward the trees. That afternoon, the wind moved through them while the play unfolded. The setting gave us something no constructed scenery could have produced.
Not having a home creates real problems though. Before the pandemic, as many as thirteen households in Tivoli offered housing for visiting artists. Now, we are down to a scarce few, which limits whom we can invite. Every reading costs money: performance rights, scripts, programs, actors, and stage directions. A reading can cost between $700 and $1,000 or more before the lights go on.
Still, a permanent space brings another kind of pressure. If it is yours, you have to pay for it, and that can force you to create far more programming than you are ready or able to sustain. So we keep looking for a home we can afford, while also treating each temporary space as part of the work.
The readings are free. Why is that important to you?
Removing the ticket price changes the relationship. No one has to decide whether an unfamiliar play is worth twenty-five dollars. They can enter, take a chance, and discover that theater might be different from what they imagined. When we were producing, someone once told us they could not afford the ticket. We said, “Just come in. We want you to see the play.”
The paradox, of course, is that free theater is not free. Artists have to be paid, so we work with donations. Our audiences are generous. One person leaves a hundred-dollar bill; another leaves five dollars. Someone who has very little money might help stack the chairs. All of that has value. Most of the time, donations allow us to break even.
Has Tangent changed you, beyond your work as an actor?
Very much. At our first pub reading, I was a shambles. I had to represent the company, introduce the play, perform, and then ask for donations. I rambled through it.
I don’t know exactly when it changed, but over time I found a kind of confidence I had previously felt only while playing a character. I learned that I could win a room by being honest. I don’t have many filters. I don’t speak from the head, because not much goes on up there. I speak from the heart – or from the ground.
The audience can feel how much I love the work, and perhaps they get swept into it. Acting taught me something about being a human being: stop thinking about how you appear and pay attention to the person in front of you.
It is still difficult. Before a reading, part of me would rather do anything else. I think, Just get me to the end of the night. When it works, it is a high. When it doesn’t, it is a slog. Then we come back and do it again because I don’t know how to do anything else.
For years, I felt frustrated that I was not doing what I was supposed to be doing. Recently, I asked myself a different question: What if I am doing what I am supposed to be doing? There is tremendous satisfaction in what we have built here.
What have you learned from the audience you built in Tivoli?
Trust your audience. Don’t dumb things down.
We never felt we had to placate people by programming a familiar hit. Our audience came for stories we loved, not stories we chose because we thought they would sell. They were willing to encounter difficult language, unfamiliar playwrights, and provocative subjects. That trust made our work possible.
After the pandemic, we returned without a theater and without knowing whether audiences would return at all. Twenty people came to the first reading, which was about fifteen more than I expected. In the last two years, our audiences have doubled. Sometimes we announce only the date – not the play or the cast – and half the seats are reserved within hours.
I look at a full room and cannot believe there are so many people looking for this kind of adventure. Professional theater has become scarce in the Hudson Valley, but the appetite for it is here.
The lesson is not only to trust an audience. It is to trust oneself enough to offer the work one truly believes in. That is difficult. We are all plagued by doubt. But we get to do this. Nearly forty years after that first acting class, I am still here.
I have a mystery box filled with questions people have always wanted to ask an artist. Can you choose one?
“What moment has felt like the brightest light in your journey as an artist?”
The first answer could be that moment in acting class, when I realized I could affect both my scene partner and an audience. But what first came to mind was a Tangent production in 2012.
The year before, I had taken part in a reading in Dublin and worked briefly with an Irish actress. We barely knew each other, but I loved working with her. At the wrap party, I told her I hoped we would find a way to do it again.
Later, I found an Irish play – a beautiful, turbulent love story – and thought of her. I sent an email asking whether she would consider coming to slightly upstate New York for three months to do it. She replied immediately: “Until I tell you no, don’t speak to another actress.” Half an hour later, she wrote again to ask what the play was.
We brought her over, found housing, paid her, and mounted the American premiere. It became the play that put Tangent on the map. People came from counties away. A member of our company was at a party in New Jersey and overheard someone in another room talking about the remarkable Irish play they had seen in Tivoli.
At the end of one performance, after the actors had traveled through every possible emotion, we took our bows and received our first standing ovation. A friend from Dublin was in the front row. Seeing him stand, and feeling how deeply the play had affected that room, was emotionally overwhelming. It was a turning point for Tangent, and it remains a very bright light.
I am drawing a map of New York’s creative souls. I believe in webs and connections. Who should I interview next?
Mick Lynch, an Irish singer-songwriter.
Our conversation ended where Tangent’s work often begins: with a question about space. Michael showed me a heavily revised script, its colored pages recording every change, and described the places that had become temporary homes for the company – a pub, a village hall, a barn open to the wind.
Perhaps that is what Tangent has learned to do so well: make a theater wherever people are willing to gather and listen. The room changes, the actors change, and the pages change. What remains is the exchange – the moment when a story passes between performers and audience, and everyone in the room helps bring it to life.
Follow Tangent :
Instagram : tangenttheatre
Facebook : @tangenttheatrecompany
Cover photo by Cynthia DelConte
