I feel you Lance

 Bay Area actor Lance Gardner, who works at KQED as a live events producer, helps run Night of Ideas, a free event last month at the San Francisco Public Library. Photo: Jana Asenbrennerova, Special to The Chronicle

Lance Gardner achieved the Bay Area stage actor’s dream, and it wasn’t enough

Lance Gardner can play the passionate leading man who makes everything around him wilt. The actor can take characters who might seem weary and resigned to the rest of the world and light a fire behind them. He can be that weirdo bundle of energy that shoots into a play as if from outer space and unsettles the whole stage. He has the technical proficiency, the discipline, the specificity to make you remember that acting requires just as much training and rigor as playing the violin.
Now, right when he’s regularly in demand at leading Bay Area theater companies — California Shakespeare Theater and TheatreWorks, Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Marin Theatre Company — he’s left the profession to produce live events at KQED.

Lance Gardner performed regularly in Bay Area theater productions, including Berkeley Rep’s “The Good Book” with Annette O’Toole (left) Wayne Wilcox, Elijah Alexander, Shannon Tyo and Denmo Ibrahim. Photo: Alessandra Mello, Berkeley Rep 2019

Gardner, a graduate of KALW’s Audio Academy, has been on staff at KQED since November, but his new job will kick into high gear in 2021 when KQED finishes renovating its San Francisco facilities, complete with a new event space called the Commons. While Gardner and KQED said they didn’t have specifics on their plans for the space or for events that far in the future, they both see Gardner’s theatrical background as an asset.
“We’ve asked him to pitch program ideas,” says Ryan Davis, KQED’s director of live events. “He’s going to generate new content.”

As an example of what Gardner might do on the job, Davis cites “Forum,” KQED’s popular morning program, which has a live onstage component, but one that could be improved. KQED treats it “as a remote broadcast without thinking about it as an event and as an experience that’s for the stage and for the people in the room, rather than just the listeners who are captive because they turned on the radio,” Davis says. Gardner might work to create added value for audiences who show up in person.

Lance Gardner helps Dolly Chammas during Night of Ideas. Gardner’s theatrical background is viewed as an asset in his new job as an events producer for KQED. Photo: Jana Asenbrennerova, Special to The Chronicle

Gardner, 38, sees his new job as a chance to have creative control, as opposed to just a creative outlet. It’s a chance “to flex my full creative muscle,” he says. He identifies not just as an actor, but as a musician, an artist, a creator, a thinker.
This new job isn’t the first time Gardner has left acting behind.
He remembers finally committing to the profession in earnest on his 25th birthday when an audition at Cal Shakes required he take two trains and a bus in the pouring rain. In his younger years — he was born in San Jose and went to grade school in Berkeley and Cupertino — he might have decided no gig was worth that trek. But that day “was when I grew up. I didn’t give up.”

Lance Gardner kisses Annie Abrams as police officers Ron Campbell (left) and Cassidy Brown observe in “The 39 Steps” at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. Photo: Kevin Berne, TheatreWorks 2019

“I, for the most part, didn’t have many day jobs outside theater, and I needed to make money, and I believed that theater ought to be a job, ought to be a career,” he says, referencing his time spent building his acting career. “I had a basic need for food and shelter that wasn’t fulfilled by stipends and honoraria.”
So he, at times, took more lucrative gigs over the ones he thought might be the most artistically rewarding.
Then for 2½ months in 2011, just after his son started kindergarten, he went with the show “Man of Rock” to the New York Musical Theater Festival. “When I came back, (he) looked at me differently,” he says. “I could see in the eyes of my child that he wasn’t sure about what I was going to do, because I’d been gone for so long. He didn’t know if I was going to be leaving for long periods of time again. That was too much for me. I decided that I couldn’t live that kind of life, but I also knew that if I really wanted this to be a career that I needed to be traveling and working elsewhere.”
But, he says, that wasn’t “the kind of father I wanted to be.”
So Gardner quit theater and went back to school to get an emergency medical technician certification. He then rode on ambulances for 2½ years.

Lance Gardner says he loves the theater but needed to move on to a profession that pays enough to make a living and support his family. Photo: Jana Asenbrennerova, Special to The Chronicle

“I loved that job. It made me a better person because I was experiencing the real world every day instead of imagining the real world every day,” he says. “I discovered that the real world is more unimaginable than any fictional world could be.” He also “learned what a bad day really is at work. In the theater, a bad day is forgetting your lines onstage or hitting a roadblock in rehearsal, but on an ambulance a bad day is somebody dying.”
That whole time, though, he had stifled his creative side. Even watching a movie made him feel “left out or spiteful.” Gardner consumed less art, but it still seeped in, even to his high-stress, life-and-death job.
“Riding around all day on an ambulance with people, there’s only so much to talk about, and a lot of people talked about the arts — about movies, about music and not so much theater, but theater, too. I realized that art was providing a service that people needed to stay afloat in their own lives. People who are dealing with these really difficult situations were looking to art in their free time.”
Hearing them “gave me permission to feel like doing that” — creating art — “was of value.”

Lance Gardner says the most he made in one year as a union member and sought-after theater actor was $29,817. Photo: Jana Asenbrennerova, Special to The Chronicle

In 2015, he took paid leave to do “Proof” at TheatreWorks. In 2016, Cal Shakes called and offered him all four shows in its summer season. At that point, he was all in again.
But theater hadn’t started paying artists a living wage in Gardner’s time away from the stage.
“The same problems arose, and I was vocal about them. I was just honest, with everybody.” He was “not pretending like what I’m being paid is adequate” in one of the most expensive regions on Earth.
Gardner shares a Facebook post he wrote last year, in which he described a local audition where it was “degrading to be asked to allow non-black directors to assess the quality of my performance of blackness, and it’s further degrading to be asked to say the word ‘n—’ in an audition when I’m the only n— in the room.” He says that experience was not an isolated one.
“I came to a point where I thought, I either have to do something else, or I have to try to make some sort of structural change, or at least start conversations that will lead to structural change.” After that one especially bad audition, “that was where I just didn’t have any more time to have that conversation.
“Theater is so collaborative and so touchy-feely and people-focused, but it’s not really people-focused, because if it were people-focused, it would focus on taking care of the person as they exist outside of the theater, not just providing them a space to do art, but paying them a living wage, giving them the time off that they need, and that doesn’t happen.”
The last time Gardner left acting, it was out of spite. This time, “I just felt like I knew what I needed in my life, and theater wasn’t providing that, and I didn’t want to get to a place of spite. I wanted to be able to give my full, loving self to theater, and I didn’t have what I needed in order to be able to do that.”

Lance Gardner will help run events such as the Night of Ideas and plan programs for a new events space at KQED’s studio, which will open in 2021. Photo: Jana Asenbrennerova, Special to The Chronicle

A lot of Gardner’s fans have lamented his departure. While he’s grateful for the appreciation in those comments, “it also frustrates me that people would ask of me to continue to do something that isn’t good for me. Part of it is that I doubt that people know how much anybody makes in the theater.”
For one show in 2018, Gardner made as little as $592 per week; the most he’s ever made per year from acting is $29,817, and this is as a union-protected, frequently cast actor.
When acting goes well, Gardner says, “It feels like you’re working toward perfection, knowing that you’re never going to get there, and that’s OK. It’s meditative. It’s a collaboration with everyone, and when it’s really working, the audience is there for the collaboration as well.”
But other times, it’s not collaborative. Sometimes, a director’s vision isn’t strong either. “That gets very frustrating,” he says, “to live inside of somebody else’s mistake.”

https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/theater/lance-gardner-achieved-the-bay-area-stage-actors-dream-and-it-wasnt-enough

• Lily Janiak Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak