Site Updated : 05-Jan-2009

Jan Steen. The Meal. c. 1650-60. Oil on panel, 40 x 49.3 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy. (Image courtesy of Olga's Gallery).

The Libraries

 

 Of Interest~

Where Southern Charm
Meets Broadway Dreams

by Rebecca Sweat

Rude taxi drivers who are in no hurry to get anywhere. Skyrocketing housing costs. City streets that look like parking lots. Tight job markets. Subways stuffed with pushy passengers. Telephone booth-sized apartments with window views of alleys and brick buildings. That’s life in New York City . Still, Constance Zaytoun is just thrilled to be living there.

Zaytoun is someone who lives, breathes and dreams the theater. She is part-time actress, while pursuing her Ph.D. in Theater Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center and teaching acting and theater classes at various community colleges in the NYC area.

“I wouldn’t have been able to have done what I have done if I hadn’t been here,” says Zaytoun, who moved to New York in 1993 from her hometown of Raleigh , North Carolina , so that she could be “near Broadway.” She had just graduated from the University of North Carolina with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in dramatic arts. “I wanted to experience first-hand what I had been reading about in my textbooks,” Zaytoun says.

The job that actually brought her to New York, however, had nothing to do with the theater. “I came to New York to work in the sales and marketing department of an industrial paper company,” she recounts. After that, she did sales for a securities company and managed a music store.

“I thought I’d give these other jobs a chance, just to see if I’d like them,” Zaytoun says. While managing the music store, she enrolled in graduate school part-time at NYU, taking classes towards a Master’s Degree in Theatre Arts. She also landed a few roles in some “off-off” Broadway performances.

Her heart was still in the theater, even though she knew it was not a practical way to make a living. “Acting is one of the most competitive fields there is, and it seems like there are always 50 million people trying out for the same job you’re trying for,” she says. “To break into it, you really need to live in a city like New York, which is where most of the auditions are.”

New York is also one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in. Zaytoun has seen many budding actors move to New York over the years ended up moving away after a while because they couldn’t find acting work or jobs that paid well enough and didn’t have the means to pay their living expenses.

For Zaytoun, the solution has been to develop a teaching career in addition to trying out for acting jobs. After she got her Masters from NYU, that opened up the door for her to be able to teach college-level acting classes. That way, she says, “I could be involved in the genre at a university teaching, but still be involved in some repertoire company, either acting or producing.” Without the teaching credentials, she would be forced to rely on just acting jobs to pay her bills, which would be tough. Of course, teaching jobs can be hard to find too, but with qualifications for both teaching and acting, she feels the chances are good she’ll always be able to get work in at least one of those areas.

She prefers acting in contemporary theater, and has performed in numerous small plays over the years. However, since she’s begun to focus on her Ph.D. dissertation, she’s transitioned to television commercials.

“I haven’t broken through to regional theater or Broadway theater, primarily because I’ve been working on my Ph.D. and have been devoting most of my time to that,” Zaytoun says. Television commercials are easier fit in right now, because they’re short-term projects and aren’t as big a time commitment as performing in a play.

She’s been going on commercial auditions two or three time a week on average, as her agent lines them up for her. “I actually enjoy the auditions,” Zaytoun says. “You get to perform and interact with people and pretend. It’s just a very wonderful moment.” While she may have to wait several hours for her name to be called, the actual audition usually only lasts about 5 minutes, she adds.

The chances of landing an acting job from an audition are really quite slim, so it’s great that Zaytoun enjoys the auditions for their own sake. She figures that for every 20 auditions she goes to, she’ll get one call-back for a second audition. Then after that, she still may not know if she’s going to get the part.

“It’s really a random business,” she observes. “A lot of it has nothing to do with your talent or whether the director thinks you could even do the role, but rather what is their vision of what the character is supposed to look like and do you fit that? Sometimes you can change the casting director’s mind, but a lot of the times you can’t.”

Sometimes Zaytoun gets nervous in auditions, especially if she really wants the job. “If I put an expectation on it like, ‘If I got this part I could make some good money and pay some bills,’ then I feel pressured and I’m not going to be focusing on what I need to for the audition and I won’t do as well,” she says. She’s learned that the trick is not to think about what getting a job could mean for the future, but rather to just enjoy the experience itself. “You just have to tell yourself if it happens it happens and if it doesn’t it doesn’t,” Zaytoun says.

What are her goals for the future? “On a basic level, I would love to be able to support myself performing as well as teaching, while not having to worry all the time about whether I’m going to be able to pay my bills,” Zaytoun replies. She hopes to have her Ph.D. credentials by next spring, which should qualify her for professor-level teaching jobs. She’ll also have more time to pursue roles in plays. Landing a part in a Broadway play would be the ultimate goal.

In the meantime, Zaytoun is just enjoying living in New York City—despite the high cost of living and the crowds. “There’s never a dull moment here,” she says. “You’ve got the Theater District, plus all the museums, clubs, restaurants and stores you could ever want.”

But does she ever get homesick for North Carolina? “No, I don’t,” she replied. “I’m doing work here that I really love, and I probably wouldn’t have nearly the opportunities if I was living in North Carolina.” However that doesn’t mean she considers herself a Northerner.

She sees herself as a “North Carolinian New Yorker.” In other words, “I love New York, but I’m still very attached to the South,” Zaytoun says. “ North Carolina is a beautiful state, and my whole family lives back there.” Not only that, she adds with a chuckle, “I’m still very tied to Carolina basketball. Next to the theater, that’s probably the most important thing in my life right now.”

****

Rebecca Sweat is a freelance magazine journalist specializing in health, pets and family topics. She lives in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area with her husband and two sons.

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