Taking his story to the stage
Scott Ehrenpreis’s blend of Aspberger’s syndrome and mental illness sabotaged an aspiring acting career for decades. Now he hopes to achieve his dream by owning his lived experience in a one-man show.
For as far back as he can remember, Scott Ehrenpreis felt like he didn’t fit in.
Despite his academic abilities, a processing disorder and other learning disabilities relegated him to special education classes and his quirkiness and social discomfort isolated him from his peers. Growing up in New Jersey, he was constantly picked on and made fun of, to the degree that he cannot recall having a single friend during his elementary and middle school years.
“I had difficulty connecting with the outside world and society,” says Ehrenpreis, now 43 and living in Sarasota, Florida. “I knew something was wrong with me, but I didn’t know what.”
Neither did his parents, who recognized his challenges but, despite testing, couldn’t assign them a label or find a “cure.” Constantly searching for a way to help their son, when he turned 9, they signed him up for an acting camp. His initial reaction was to reject the idea. But it took only his first foray onto a stage for Ehrenpreis to realize this was the place of ease and enjoyment that had previously eluded him.
“It was my first taste of what it felt like to have the floorboards underneath me,” he recalls. “I immediately felt different and I felt, this is what I want to do. I felt a sense of invincibility, like no one could touch me and I felt I could command the stage, even at such a young age. It was a place where I belonged, where I wasn’t rejected, where I could be accepted.”
He stayed involved with theater by joining a local drama club. But he was distraught when, after being cast in a production of HMS Pinafore, his parents made him turn the role down because he was already signed up to go to karate camp instead.
“I wanted to be on stage, not doing kicks and punches,” he says. “Acting made all the other problems evaporate.”
When Ehrenpreis was 15, his father, Joel, took a new job and the family moved to Cincinnati. Ehrenpreis saw the change of venue as “a good opportunity for me to start over and meet new people.” But the conflicts with his peers continued at the small Catholic high school he attended. By the age of 16 he began experiencing severe bouts of depression that manifested as an uncontrollable sadness, crying jags and an attitude that was both defeatist and defensive. Participating in his high school drama club and a four-year summer job playing the character of “Scooby Doo” at a local amusement part are the only bright spots he remembers during those years.
Convinced more than ever that he wanted to pursue his passion for acting, after graduation Ehrenpreis applied to the theater program at Ohio University, a competitive process that required an audition and a long summer’s wait to see if he, among 60 applicants, had been selected for one of the 15 available spots in the program. He worried that his learning disabilities and erratic academic record would work against him, but was relieved when the head of the department assured him that “a lot of people in the arts have disabilities” and that “some of the greatest minds could be ‘off the reservation’ at times.”
His acceptance to the program was a thrill and a relief, but the euphoria was short lived. Hoping to find a “family” in classmates who shared his passion for theater, he instead experienced the same social ostracization he’d been experiencing for years.
“I know I probably did some things that alienated me more,” he says in retrospect. “Maybe my behavior turned them off or maybe I was just too desperate for friendship. But my classmates never accepted me. I’ve felt like a social flop my whole life.”
Trying to fit in, on his first day on campus Ehrenpreis went to a party with his roommate, drank six beers and spent the rest the night vomiting into the toilet. His experience with marijuana, which he was introduced to shortly thereafter, was a different story. Smoking pot became both therapeutic and a way to deal with his loneliness.
“Usually you don’t get high the first time, but I did and I was hooked,” he remembers. “After that, when everyone was partying on the weekends, I was in my room, listening to Pink Floyd and getting high. That was my escape.”
A previous graduate of the OU program had become the artistic director at the Monomoy Theatre in Chatham, Massachusetts, and during one summer break, Ehrenpreis was hired as an “actor/tech” for summer stock productions. But very quickly the opportunity turned into a slammed door, when he again became confrontational and combative with colleagues and was asked to leave.
Despite the lure of his father offering to come and “scoop me up and take me home,” Ehrenpreis stuck it out in school, eventually graduating with honors. For an aspiring actor, however, a college degree is just that…a college degree. It doesn’t equate to a foot in the door in the entertainment industry.
There is no textbook to teach you how to make it in the theater world. Ehrenpreis knew that if he wanted to truly test his abilities, he needed to go to one of the three thespian “hubs” in the country – New York or Chicago for stage work, Los Angeles for film. He dreamed of going to Chicago and auditioning for the Steppanwolf troupe at the Goodman Theater. But he was paralyzed by the fear he says has held him back his whole life.
Instead, in July of 2002, he moved to Siesta Key in Florida, where his parents were also relocating. They took a year’s lease on a condominium for him, and he began doing some local community theater, but spent much of his time ignoring the sunshine and the Gulf beaches, sitting in his condo with the blinds drawn, watching movies. After a year, he sent his headshot and CV to Florida Repertory Theatre, a professional troupe in Fort Myers. He was called to audition and subsequently asked to join a production of Neil Simon’s “Biloxi Blues.”
“That was the only time I had a feeling that ‘I’m getting this,’” he says. “I just knew. And that’s when anxiety crept into my life. I don’t know where it came from, but it was debilitating. I felt my heart was going to rip out of my chest.”
He sought help from a psychiatrist, who put him on Clonazapan. Though he’d been prescribed Ritalin as a child – and has since tried a “cocktail mixture” that has included Seroquel, Wellbutrin and “you name it” – this was the first drug he’d been prescribed for depression. For a time, it helped.
But not enough. Still feeling “out of my element,” scared and uneasy, he began rehearsals in Fort Myers and immediately clashed with the director, who had little patience for the processing challenges that sometimes made it hard for Ehrenpreis to take and understand direction. He quickly became overwhelmed by the amount of direction he was given and felt “overloaded, suffocated and strangled.”
Though the opportunity in Fort Myers had led him to believe he was “going to make it in the industry, carve out a career,” the pressure was, once again too much and he was let go, something Ehrenpreis says “still paychologically scars me today.” The crushing dismissal left him wondering if it was time to consider a different career path.
“After that I thought, ‘Pick something else, man. Find something else that will be less stress and not make you feel like you’re walking on eggshells, afraid to be fired at any minute,’” he says. “The entertainment industry is a very heartless one, and it can be unforgiving. I didn’t know if it was for me anymore.”
At 25, the source of his challenges became clearer when Ehrenpreis was belatedly diagnosed with Aspberger’s syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism. At the urging of his parents, who had frantically searched online in their desperation to find a solution and support for their son, he moved to Melbourne, Florida and joined a program designed for people with Aspberger’s. When that didn’t work out, he switched to another program in West Palm Beach for adults with varying degrees of disabilities. But neither did he fit in with that population, all of whom were much more limited than Ehrenpreis in their cognitive functioning and life skills.
Meanwhile, his father, who “never thought I would catch the acting bug,” tried to dissuade him from pursuing his acting ambitions.
“We got in many arguments about it and for the longest time he did not support acting as a career,” Ehrenpreis says. “My Dad said the industry is so brutal to be in that to have a mental illness on top of it makes it nearly impossible. I look at it in hindsight as him trying to protect me but at the time it was a source of a lot of conflict.”
Eventually the clashes – over that and other issues -- led to an estrangement from his parents that lasted several years. Ehrenpreis, now living in West Palm, scraped by doing an assortment of menial jobs, such as delivering pizzas and Chinese food. It was a dark and depressing time of his life, much of which he prefers not to revisit.
When his parents, to his surprise, reached out and invited him to come back to Sarasota in 2017, promising to set him up in a new career, he agreed to return. Joel Ehrenpreis began initiating his son into a successful business venture he himself had created selling “the world’s skinniest wallet” at outdoor markets and craft and art fairs. But very quickly, Ehrenpreis realized the long hours of standing in the heat and dealing with crowds were “not my cup of tea.”
“He‘d say, “Scott, this is so easy. Look at all the money you can make,” Ehrenpreis recalls. “He said it was no different than acting – actors are salesmen, performers are selling entertainment. And you’re your own boss. He wanted to give me a life. But it just didn’t feed my soul, it didn’t light me up the way the theater does.”
Meanwhile, Ehrenpreis returned tentatively to community theater, where he once again experienced the rush of the stage and success in multiple roles. Joel Ehrenpreis, finally acknowledging the durability of his son’s passion asked, “Scott, did you ever think about doing a one man show?” Ehrenpreis hadn’t, but the concept of telling his story on stage was intriguing if intimidating. He never imagined it could actually happen.
How would he go about it? Ehrenpreis knew he wasn’t a playwright and his initial effort to write a script (tentatively titled “One Man, Many Minds”) was a disaster, resulting in a “self deprecating rant” full of morbidity, negativity and grimness that no audience would have wanted to endure. Next, his father tried his hand at a script himself, styling it in the vein of author and humorist David Sedaris. After reaching out to other theater professionals in town, that script eventually ended up in the hands of Jason Cannon, an actor, director, writer and former associate artistic director at Florida Studio Theatre, who gave it one read and said, “It’s too heavy.”
Cannon’s idea was to give the show a major injection of comedy, underscored by a heartstring-pulling humanity. Joel Ehrenpreis hired Cannon to write a script, then set about creating a nonprofit organization to raise funds not only for a run of the production at a Sarasota professional theater next May during Mental Health Awareness Month, but to cover his ambitious plans to both tour the production and create a video of it that could be circulated on college campuses.
Cannon began meeting with Ehrenpreis, mining his lived experience for potential story lines. Meanwhile both Cannon and Ehrenpreis signed up for an improv comedy class to refine their dexterity with humor and increase their understanding of how to deliver punch lines.
Recently, Cannon performed a reading of the third draft of the script – now titled “Clowns Like Me” – before an audience of supporters gathered at Ehrenpreis’s parents’ condominium in Sarasota. The hour-long presentation draws directly from Ehrenpreis’s lived experience, but is delivered with a humorous slant, making light of everything from his excessive body hair, to his expansive collective of martial arts DVDs, to a disastrous experience with an escort service. It was well – and emotionally – received and provoked a thoughtful and illuminating discussion afterward.
While once Ehrenpreis would have been “ashamed and embarrassed” to lay his life story out so openly – and Joel, who 10 years ago discouraged his son from giving an interview about his mental health to a newspaper reporter because he feared it would stigmatize him for life – both men now have aspirations for the show to have an enduring impact near and far.
“My Dad doesn’t want this to be a local smash and then archived,” Ehrenpreis says. “He wants this to have a life. I’m so proud of myself being able to be that vulnerable, naked and exposed without feeling shame or embarrassment and I’m so proud of my Dad, who has amazingly come full circle. This project has galvanized our relationship.”
Ehrenpreis says he is at once, “scared and excited” about the prospect of performing the show and plans to use his nervousness “as adrenalin to fuel my performance.”
“I’m just excited to share my lived experience with the world,” he says. “The main mission is to infuse and inspire hope and let people know they are not alone. That I can give a voice to the voiceless through my lived experience and let people know that, hey, if he can do this, I can do it too.
“And the greatest payment I can get is to see people impacted by this. Words can’t express how much this means to me. I’m just excited to share my lived experience with the world, to make people laugh, let people know this is me, warts and all, and to inspire people to own their own story.”
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