We recently connected with Tom Steward and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Tom, thanks for joining us today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?

Looking back, I couldn’t have started my creative career sooner or later. As a child, I was acting in theatre. As a high-school student, I was acting and writing plays and poetry. When I got to college, I kept all that up and produced theatre while co-hosting a radio show. Then I abandoned it all to pursue a career as a scholar in Film & Television Studies, completing a Masters Degree and PhD and then teaching in universities for a few years. When I moved to the US, I decided to act again and writing naturally followed. After several years in San Diego theatre as both performer and playwright, I formed my own theatre company Lonesome Whistle Productions to make solo stage works. Then at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I started co-hosting a film podcast called Everything Sequel. I have the rare distinction of saying that I began too early and not early enough.

I don’t regret my time away from a creative career. A fatigue – maybe even a little apprehension – about a life in theatre crept in at the end of college, when I was faced with the choice of pursuing an academic or creative path. I needed to experience another potential career future to truly understand and appreciate the life in the arts I really wanted. I needed to learn about media arts from a critical perspective to become a better and more capable creative. To this day, I feel like I approach acting differently because of those years I spent analyzing and writing about TV shows, movies, and plays. I feel like I have a breadth of knowledge about the creative process I wouldn’t have had if I had simply slogged away as a theatre artist all my life. With my recent move into podcasting about film, you could say that I’ve come full circle and am now actually bringing all that knowledge to bear.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I got into acting as a child, growing up on a street with a theatre across from my house. I took every opportunity to perform there and then did as much acting as I could in high school and then college productions. This culminated with two consecutive years performing with student companies at The Edinburgh International Fringe Festival. I started writing poetry in middle school, then short and full-length plays which I produced in theatres and on campus all the way to the end of college (like Max Fischer in Rushmore!). Podcasting and production are more recent strings to my bow. I formed Lonesome Whistle Productions initially to stage a solo show about the James Bond films (The Bond Show) but since 2018, we continue to develop and produce in-person and virtual shows (Space Force!/Space Force: Quarantine!, The Godfather One Part/Two Parts). In 2020, I started The Everything Sequel Podcast with co-host Michael Shantz and we are approaching 150 episodes of podcasting.

I’m proud of the work I’ve done as an actor with some truly outstanding theatres and companies here in San Diego. I’m a familiar face at both New Village Arts (Awake & Sing, Guadalupe in The Guest Room, Intimate Apparel) and Onstage Playhouse (Venus in Fur, Admissions), working with directors, crew and cast that have helped forge me as a performer. I’m grateful to have had many short and one-act plays produced in California and New York (New Village Arts, Theatre Arts West, Lamplighters Theatre, Navigators Theatre). Writing, producing and performing The Bond Show (which has been spun-off into a feature-length production, virtual specials, a musical, and a film commentary) has been one of the highlights of my career. In fact, all the Lonesome Whistle productions have been innovative multi-media pieces and we continue with three original projects for 2023. The Everything Sequel Podcast is a funny and thoughtful look at film sequels, shaped by the chemistry of the hosts.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to unlearn the lesson of saying yes to everything. When you’re trying to get yourself out there as an artist (particularly as an actor), it’s tempting to take every opportunity that comes your way. Not only do you find yourself in below-par work, you run the risk of losing other, more rewarding outcomes in the process. You should really care about and want to be involved with a company, project, or process before you commit yourself to undertaking it. This doesn’t mean you have to be in love with everything you do, but you should at the very least be genuinely interested in some aspect of it. Maybe the play is not perfect but you know you want to experience working with the theatre or the director. Conversely, you may want to submit your play to every theatre in the vicinity, but not all theatres have the same mission, and some will not want to produce your writing. Be open-minded but also selective, at any stage of your career. Just because you are not currently involved in a project does not mean you should rush and get one just for the sake of doing it.

In late 2016, I unlearned this lesson the hard way (I’d like to say I’ve not made the same mistake since, but it’s certainly a process). I committed myself to a leading role in a stage production of a superb play at a good theatre for excellent money. However, the director was inept and the company had no talent, resources, crew, or infrastructure. This was evident from the start but I justified joining the production because of the perks and because I wanted to work and earn. As a result of taking this role, I lost the chance to perform in a flagship production with one of the best small theatres in San Diego, which would later win several awards and critical acclaim. I also missed out on becoming an understudy to an actor I greatly admire with one of the major professional theatres in the area. To boot, I ended up getting paid less than I was originally quoted, the production was poorly attended and never reviewed, and many performances were cancelled (freeing up dates that had I known would have allowed me to have taken the other two jobs I had been offered.)

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding aspect is always seeing what people do with your art. It doesn’t matter whether they are the audience or your collaborators. Whenever I write a piece, act out a character, or produce something creative, I have a fixed idea in my head about what it means, how it should be done, and what it represents. As soon as I release my art into the world, that changes completely and always for the better. I’ve marvelled at how directors and actors have taken plays I thought to be serious and turned them into comedies, or how audiences have warmed to characters I’ve played that are completely unlikeable. When I produced The Bond Show at The San Diego International Fringe Festival 2018, I assumed I was making observations about the Bond films that were entirely my own. Hearing the audience react to certain moments – and talking to them after the show – I realized I was tapping in to what viewers of those films have been thinking about since they first saw them. As an artist, you’ve created something that always the same yet different to everybody.

I remember attending rehearsals for the performance of my play “Live At Folsom Prison” at the New Village Arts Final Draft New Play Festival 2018 and the director asking me if the main character was actually in solitary confinement and imagining everything that was happening. The play was ambiguous enough to accommodate that interpretation, though it wouldn’t been my first choice as a direction to go in. I said “Maybe”. Because I didn’t object to or refute that conclusion, the director, actors and creatives were able to run with it, and audiences who saw the play found it the most compelling and richest part of the piece. Some even said it saved the play for them. I could have been precious and insisted that this wasn’t what I intended and that it was a blind alley to go down. That wasn’t my place as the play was in their capable hands now and furthermore I knew that it would only improve the more they explored the possibilities within it, whether or not I was conscious of that when I was writing. The same is true of following a director’s vision of a character.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @lonesomewhistleproductions
• Facebook: lonesomewhistle
• Twitter: @lonesomewhistl3
• Youtube: Lonesome Whistle Productions

Image Credits
Ciarlene Coleman, Daren Scott, Ana Carolina Chiminazzo.