A Spooky Good Time For A Frighteningly Good Cause

The actors that make up the Fake Actors Guild are your neighbors. During the day, they’re retail workers, security guards and baristas at local coffee shops, but for one night every couple of months, they take the stage in the basement of Back to the Grind to do a table read in front of a live audience.

“Our ethos is that anyone can be a fake actor,” Maxwell Meyers, founder of the Fake Actors Guild, said. “Not everyone can be a professional actor, but anybody can be a fake actor.”

The premise of the show is simple. Every other month, a group of volunteers who have auditioned for the show come together to do a table read of two scripts, one that they’ve rehearsed and the other that’s a secret to all but a few.

“We’ve begun a new tradition of inviting over anybody who’s not on the table, the actors who don’t get cast, to get the special treat of getting to join us for a secret table read at our own home, where we read through two scripts and kind of feel it out and see which one we like better,” Meyers said. “And then from there, we decide on which script it’s going to be.”

But what happens at the shows is pure magic. 

“When you’re done with that first episode and you’re moving on to the next episode, that’s when things really happen,” Taarna Lockhart, who has been cast in multiple Fake Actor Guild productions, said. “You’re already riding the adrenaline from the first episode, and then you’re in it, and you’re like, ‘What is happening? I don’t know!’ The confusion is great, though.’”

Last month, the group put on a Halloween-themed event that brought everyone into the world of Bob’s Burgers, performing two episodes: “Fort Night” and “Nightmare on Ocean Avenue Street.” The second episode ended up being a complete surprise to everyone but Meyers, who stayed up late the night before writing and highlighting the script for the cast.

“This man cannot keep a secret,’ Foss yelled out after the big reveal. “This is evolution!”

In addition to the gluten-free pastries provided by Meyers for free as part of the $5 entrance fee, those in attendance could also purchase a cheeseburger for an additional $5. All of the proceeds for the performance, more than $500 according to an Instagram post by Meyers, were donated to Riverside Pride.

“We’re here for the love of the game, and we’re here to help people,” Meyers said. “Whether there’s 100 people here or 10 people here, we’re going to give it everything we got and all the money is for a good cause.”

The Fake Actors Guild table read event series grew out of a little piece of joy Meyers and Foss experienced during the Covid pandemic lockdown.

“We had some friends back in Portland who asked if we would want to read through the terrible script pitch for the third Star Wars movie that Colin Trevorrow had written,” Meyers said. “It had been leaked online recently, and one of my friends said, ‘Wouldn’t it just be funny if we all read through it?”

What started as a one-off Zoom turned into a regular online gathering with Meyers, his husband and Fake Actors Guild actor E.E. Foss, and their friends in Portland to dramatically read through different scripts of television shows, comic books, movies and plays.

“I feel like it kept us much more sane than it would have been, because we had just moved here to Riverside maybe a year before,” Foss said. “We were mainly cleaning out this house that was my mom’s house, and so we spent a lot of time just on our own, and hadn’t really made very many friends here yet.”

When local restaurants, cafes and bars started to open up again, Meyers got a job at Back to the Grind as a barista where owner, Darren Conkerite, asked Meyers if there was any sort of event he would want to hold at the space. Meyers pitched the table read concept.

“When I brought it to [Conkerite], he said, ‘This is kind of weird. I don’t know if this is a thing,’” Meyers said. “Which is fair!”

But Conkerite told the idea to his friend, and Back to the Grind regular, Anthony Harris who was a local actor and drag artist known as Tonelle Jenkins.

“A couple days went by, and he was like, ‘You know, I haven’t been able to get that idea out of my head,’” Meyers said. “‘I really think this is something. I think you’re onto something, and if you’re serious, I want in.’ And so he kind of pushed me to get it going.”

At October’s show, the cast and crew paid tribute to Harris, who died before the first Fake Actors Guild performance last October.

“I had a friend recently tell me, ‘I think you met a guardian angel,’ and I said, ‘I don’t know about that, but I definitely feel like I met the patron saint of the Fake Actors Guild,’” Meyers said at the show. “That man had one of the biggest spirits … and he spread it around, and when he passed away, people from all over the world came to his memorial service.”

Since then, the group has done table reads of Rick and Morty, Daria, Futurama and Golden Girls, which was performed by an entire table of gay men.

“Which just seems right,” Meyers said.

But the show is more than an opportunity for those involved to flex their creative muscles and perform in front of their friends, family and the larger community, it’s also led to other opportunities in the entertainment industry.

“I’m the star in a horror movie, and I’m super stoked about it,” Lockhart said of being cast in locally-produced film The Totem. “That’s an opportunity I never thought I’d have. I always wished for, but never thought I would have, but now I do.”

It’s also a way for those involved to build a community that Foss said he didn’t have access to as a teenager growing up in Riverside.

“I never really felt like there was much of a community here, especially like a queer community, like everything felt very underground, closeted, and being back here and feeling this level of community, especially with Daria, it was just incredible,” he said. “And then making all these new acquaintances and friends and new people that just have brought in all this extra level of spice to what we were already doing, I just feel so much more engaged with this town.”

And for those who attend the events, there’s even a chance for them to get in on the fun with a mid-show raffle that includes the grand prize of getting to be part of the table read for the surprise episode.

“They get their own script,” Meyers said. “It’s pre-highlighted for them, it’s maybe 10 or 15 lines, one or two roles tops, just enough for them to get a chance.”

And while October’s show was the last of the year, Meyers said he is excited to come back in February with a Boondocks table read for Black History Month, which he is hoping to cast with the Fake Actors Guild’s first all African American table.

“We’ve got some fun plans and some hopeful shows for the next year as well,” he said. “But, one show at a time.”