Three months

Some of you might remember that in mid December of last year I was feeling pretty low.

It was on that day that I wrote the first real article in this space, one in which I began to share the thoughts and feelings that had been building up for a while. I was pretty pissed at theater, pretty pissed with being an artist and pretty unsure about whether I was going to be doing it for much longer. After a rather abortive trip up to New Haven, I had officially decided that Grad school wasn’t something I was interested in either, at least right now. I didn’t have a rehearsal process in sight. I felt far from my art, far from myself, and more than a little out of control.

Three months later, where am I?

Still here, for one thing.

I re-read that post this morning and I asked myself, “Do I still feel the same way?” I tried to think about some of the concrete steps I’ve tried to implement since then – creating more structure in my free time, really requiring myself to leave space for the art making, defining my artistic practices, writing about the kind of work I want to make and asking myself if that’s what I’m doing.

Has any of it helped?

Yeah, in fits and starts. It has. By writing here often it feels like I’ve slowly started to realize that it is in large part up to me to continue re-defining my future in the arts. With each essay or exercise I remember that while no one is coming to save me, there’s also nothing stopping me from doing exactly what I feel like but myself. I realize that I have to look at the ideas and values I had at 22 and reassess. I realize that the idea of the artists we are and want to become has to evolve and change.

You know that play Proof that was super huge a while back?

I also realize that I hate that play.

I hate it because it reinforces this idea of genius and creativity that I think is super toxic. Take for example this passage between a mathematician and his 25-year-old daughter:

Catherine: I haven’t done anything good.

Robert: You’re young. You’ve got time.

Catherine: I do?

Robert: Yes.

Catherine: By the time you were my age you were famous.

Robert: By the time I was your age I’d already done my best work.

In realizing I hate this passage, I see that I hate it because it is an emblem of what so many of us unconsciously internalize as young creators. We as an American people love our youth. We love a prodigy or savant even more. If American Idol and its reality brethren teach us anything, it’s that talent is great, but it’s way greater if it comes from someone young or with no training. As if artistic prowess magically popped into them through sheer force of will.

Fuck that.

Fuck that because it’s the ideas like that which causes the mid-career artist to lose faith and despair. Fuck that because it’s that evil kind of thinking worming its way into your mind that says if you haven’t made it as big as a mentor or artistic hero by the time they did, you aren’t going to. Fuck that because it’s a thought process that says your best work is behind you.

It isn’t. Unless you let it be.

Three months is forever and no time at all. It is a blink of an eye if caught up in a rehearsal process or two. It is an eon when one has no place or space to express and make. In three months I went from feeling like I had no creative work to a whole host of projects that demand my active attention right this very minute. I went from feeling alone and small to sharing a deep and persistent feeling with so many in my community. In three months I began to see my creative self in a new way. In three months I began to realize that the difference between my 22-year-old creative self and my 30-year-old one was not a lessening of “I can do it all” energy or a push towards wimping out on the biggest kinds of risk taking. I realized that in fact I had fewer barriers in my way than ever before. And I realized that if I did everything I’ve done so far with the meager resources I had then, I must be capable of so much greater a body of work with the ones I have now.

In three months I realized that sometimes you forget you’re making progress. And that’s ok. But you have to keep at it. Because you are.

The problem with maturing is not that you are less creative. The problem is you have to deal with your success and wisdom.  These things give you a wider perspective, and the more you see, the more you realize the potential for failure, for risks not to pay off. Let that second sight help you when it can. But make sure it doesn’t stop you from doing what you know you really want to.

This must be your mantra: My best work is still ahead of me.

Do you have that prickle in your chest? Do you feel that little tug that pulls away from saying such a thing?

That is all the crap that feeds into your life telling you otherwise. All that stuff is wrong. Don’t let it eat you up. You tell that crap inside to shut the hell up. And then you think about the project you always wanted to make but didn’t believe was remotely possible and then you think about it being in the world someday.

Your best work is still ahead of you.

How can it not be? With all that accumulated experience? With all that added knowledge? How can you not continue to make better and deeper and truer stuff as long as you keep making what’s yours and not what you think someone else wants you to make?

Say it right now: My best work is still ahead of me.

It is. It really is.

Three months from now what do you want to be doing? What do you want to have added to your horizon?

Are you brave enough to write it down?

Because once you do you have this to look forward to.

A

Where are you people?

The other day I was in a room with a bunch of other arts organizations. We were all there receiving money from the city but beyond that the only thing we all had in common was a Philadelphia location and some connection to the arts in some way.

A woman came up to me and introduced herself as the director of an arts education program in the northwest area of the city. We started chatting about our work. After hearing about the great things she was doing with the kids she interacts with I told her a bit about the theater work I’ve been making. She hadn’t heard of Swim Pony (not really a surprise) or the giant Festival in the fall that used to be called Live Arts (that one I found a bit more surprising) in which I would be presenting my next show The Ballad of Joe Hill. I told her a bit about the show – its music, history and spectacular location at Eastern State Penitentiary.

At the end of the conversation she said, “That sounds awesome. I totally want to see that show! How do I find out about it?”

“Uh… Well… You can… go to my website. In August. Maybe July. Or, look… for it… Live Arts, I mean, Fringe Arts, I mean, The festival… they always have a lot of marketing. You’ll see big signs and stuff on bus stops. I assume my show will have one, I think. Or get on my mailing list. And I promise I won’t send you a lot of spam. No really. And our facebook page! Please like us. And here’s my card! Take it!!”

Does this sound familiar to you?

Audiences are weird magical unicorns.

I really believe that my work is pretty great. And I think if people knew that it was out there, a lot of them would come. Every time I do a show, especially a funkier, out of a theater, more experimental thing, the people who come that ARE NOT other artists are the ones the most enthusiastic. And there is a small core of those people that come to Swim Pony shows, sometimes emailing me to see what’s up with us when it’s been a while since anything has been presented. But these folks are the rarity. (How did I even find them in the first place?)

So when I’m having trouble funding people, I don’t really think it’s the fault of the show, but of me getting that show to the people that might see it.  I think this because every week my partner and I also sit at home on Saturday and wonder where to look to find something awesome to do. And when we don’t want that to be theater, which we know about because it’s our profession, WE HAVE NO IDEA WHERE TO LOOK.

The problem, I don’t think, is that there’s no one out there making stuff that’s weird and awesome. I think the problem is we spend so much time and energy making it that we can’t think about a lot else. And the super frustrating part is that right at the moment when we need to me THE MOST inwardly focused, THE MOST inside the process and devoted only to the work is EXACTLY the time when we need to be getting the word out about the thing.

And on top of that, in this time when people are bombarded with so much information, it is so difficult to be the thing that pops out in people’s minds long enough. I don’t think it’s cost. I don’t think it’s the difficulty of leaving one’s house. I think it’s getting the information that you are an interesting experience into the viewspace of that person that might come.

Facebook invites are over, yes? We all still create them, but we’re all ignoring them when they pop up in our notification tab in the upper left corner. There was a time when responding “yes” to an invite meant that you’d actually be there, but that time is over.

Reviews are no guarantee either. In fact, some of the shows for which I’ve had the best reviews of my life, I’ve had three people in the audience. One show, the first on which I spent a significant amount of my budget on a marketing firm had AMAZING press coverage and still couldn’t get butts in seats to save our life. In fact, the only times in which I’ve really had houses that counted in terms of size were when I’ve cozied into the audiences of another marketing machine: a festival, a theater company that’s been around, an event like a first Friday that’s got a built in base.

And because so few of us self producers really know how this brave new world of devising companies making a show or two a year can really keep someone’s attention, we’re all sort of schizophrenically operating on a variety of marketing platforms at the same time. We’re all trying whatever way we can to reach someone. A lot of us become PR machines – schmoozers to the highest degree constantly handing our stuff to anyone that comes near – and some just give up and plead irrelevance. A few luck into a snowball of awareness that gives some real and consistent support.

I don’t know what else to say about this other than that it is one tough nut to crack. I don’t know where to turn and it’s something that I’m increasingly aware will make the difference in my long-term success.

How do I find you people? There are a million and a half of you in the city proper and another five mil in the surround metro areas. If I could get just one half of one percent of those folks to see my show I’d have 30,000 people as my audience.

How do I get to you and you to me?

I know you’re out there.

A

Heavy

35.9% of Americans in 2009-2010 were considered “obese” by the CDC. An additional 33.3% were categorized as “overweight.” That means at that moment, 69.2% of the country is heavier than “normal.”

When we go to the theater what are we looking to see ourselves reflected in the stories portrayed on stage?

If so, why don’t two thirds of them look like two thirds of the country? If not, are they the images we wish ourselves to be? Or are they simply supposed to be the strongest creator available for the role, and if that’s the case, why are so many more of them than us so much thinner?

Do you notice how carefully I’m wording things here? I do. Have you noticed that I haven’t used the “F” word yet? I do. It’s hard to write objectively about this. This is such a tricky subject. It is so sensitive. But it dominates so thoroughly the vision of our stages that I’m going to stop dancing around and just say it:

It is hard to be a fat actor.

It is hard if you are not fat, but a little heavy. It is hard if you aren’t fat but could be and fear becoming so. It is especially hard if you are a woman.

There might be a few reasons that don’t point toward malicious bias. Heavily dance or physicality based works are going to require a higher level of physical strength and endurance and result in a larger expenditure of energy.  While that does not exclude a heavier performer, I think it makes some logical sense that you’ll get a higher proportion of people who are thinner, which is probably somewhat correlated to long days of exercise and physical activity.

Being fat might make it harder to do your job… maybe. But it might not. And I think it’s rarely the full reason that certain kinds of roles are off limits to certain BMI’s.

Because that argument just doesn’t fly when it comes to a lot of theater. It is possible to be in tune with one’s body even with “extra” weight. And if the performer doesn’t limit themselves, why do we limit the roles that are open to them? Why are we instinctively so nervous about seeing certain shapes do certain things onstage? Are we grossed out, worried, upset? What is it? Forget the gender gap, the racial paucity; I defy you to find me a show full of “fat” actors in Philly. You will not be able to.

If you are doing Grapes of Wrath and everyone is starving, fine, I understand. But show me where it says that Emily Webb from Our Town has to be skinny. Yet I’d stake my savings that 9 times (or more) out of 10 the thin girl gets the role.

Look, I don’t pretend to be objective here.

I have a long and complicated history with weight, one that has spanned both ends of the size spectrum.  At 13, I probably weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of 180 or 190. I don’t really know, because I didn’t go near a scale if I could help it. My grandmother used to chide me with reminders like, “Fat girls don’t get married.” An aunt once remarked, “Adrienne eats like it’s war.”

By my own admission, I was not happy with my body. I hated it. And to compensate I retreated into my brain. I was at war with the free and uninhibited person I felt like on the inside and the tight, closed off and frustratingly clunky form I had on the outside. Which was why late in my 14th year my mom intervened, told me that she loved me no matter what but that if I wanted, she would help me develop a healthier set of eating habits.

Which I did. Sort of.

That summer I started paying attention to the things I put in my body. I stopped housing bags of Doritos absent mindedly. I started exercising on a consistent basis for the first time ever. I learned to really enjoy cardiovascular work outs. I realized that it helped allay my natural tendency toward anxiety. I felt better. I liked how I looked. I was proud of myself for doing it.

Then I went back to high school. I felt so much better, I was so much more excited to be seen. I got the only female lead, as a sophomore, in the first play of the year. I was bumped into a higher level choir and auditioned and was selected for the state competition. I got a boyfriend, which I’d never had. People suddenly paid attention to me. I got friends in the older kid crowd. I felt on top of the world. The change was so sudden and so total and so completely timed with the shift in outward form that it seemed impossible to extricate the experiences of that year from the process of losing all that weight.

The truth is of course not so simple. Yes my outer self had changed, and because of that I allowed more of the person I really felt myself to be to shine through. All the confidence and brazenness and smartness and silliness I always had suddenly seemed like it had a venue to be shown. I had just finally given myself permission.

But of course at the time I associated my new-found creative and personal successes with being beautiful. And I associated that beauty with being thin. And so when I had to wear a bathing suit onstage, I lost another 15 pounds. And when I played Wendy in Peter Pan and was told to try and look younger, I lost another 10. It became a game, the weight loss. One that I assumed would just continue to result in rewards, in a better and better version of myself.

I would go out with friends and eat watermelon for dinner to save on calories.  I worked out a couple hours after donating blood in 90 degree heat. (PS, I didn’t eat the cookies). I was obsessed with food and thought about it ALL THE TIME.  I fixated on my “big hips” which I couldn’t do a damn thing about because I had whittled them down to jutting bones. I want to look back at 18 year old Adrienne and say, “You actually can’t workout your way to a smaller pants size if you have a wide skeletal pelvis. Maybe put some of that energy into learning your lines.”

At my thinnest, I was somewhere around 104 or 105 depending on how much water I’d had that day.

I’m 5’6” by the way.

And that was the point at which my mom said I was done losing weight. If you consider the standard BMI measurement useful (which is super questionable) I started just on the cusp of officially “Obese” and plummeted down well below “Underweight.”

I got over it. College food helped. Learning to love weight lifting helped. I work hard to focus on feeling strong, quick and agile rather than simply thin.

This blog isn’t an autobiography. And I don’t bring up this story for sympathy, though I bet many people reading this who can sympathize. But my story is not the same as many others. There are people who are beautifully in tune with their bodies regardless of their body fat index. Who are graceful and flexible and could be called fat. In fact just this afternoon I was talking to a friend who said that gaining a bunch of weight after having a kid helped her to realize that her creative talent wasn’t dependent on her staying small.

The point is that I felt able to embrace and believe in a fuller vision of myself as a creative person when I thinned up. Until that point, I’d always loved theater. I participated in middle school and my first year of high school. I’d had lovely, nearly transcendent, experiences. But I didn’t believe that I was eventually going to be one of those seniors that got out front and center. Based on the things I’d been cast as before – Mrs. Hannigan, the mom in Music Man, Golem in the Hobbit, ensemble member in Godspell – I figured I’d find a niche in the strong character roles that I’d seen other heavy girls play.

When I came back that summer lighter, I was so upset that they’d switched the fall play from Arsenic and Old Lace to a Neil Simon romantic comedy. I knew I could kill at those funny old ladies I’d been practicing all summer. But it didn’t occur to me that my lovely voice, passion for acting and intelligent incisive attack of text could put me front and center.

I couldn’t be a leading lady. Not if I was fat. And in my head I still was.

I auditioned for that show’s sole female part – an ingénue role – with little expectation. But during the audition process, I began to realize that people saw me differently now. And no doubt, the confidence that blossomed that show, that year, had to do with the fact that for the first time, I believed myself capable of ANY kind of role, ANY kind of creation. I could make people laugh or cry or sigh. I felt like I had control over my creative destiny. And I assumed all of that had to do with the new exterior through which those things were expressed.

I believe with every fiber of my being that there is no way I would have gotten that part if I hadn’t been thinner than the year before. And some days I really wonder if I hadn’t lost all that weight if I would have believed in myself with the same vehemence and confidence. And without that, I wonder if I’d have bothered continuing with acting, found directing and do what I’m doing today.

Two thirds of people in this country are “heavier” than “normal.” How many of those people do we see on the stage? How many stories do we tell that can include that perspective? And more importantly, how many kinds of characters do we unconsciously limit the size of, regardless of the actor’s ability to embody the role.

When was the last time you saw a heavy Juliet or a pudgy Romeo?

I’m left with lots of questions and not a lot of answers. Is this inevitable? Who’s driving it? Why does it happen?

And if it bothers us, what can we do about it?

A

Context

The other day I spent my lunch chatting with a group of apprentices from Interact and then immediately went and had a meeting with a soon to be graduated student from a small liberal arts college. In both cases the conversation centered on navigating a career as a maker and producer of theater. In both cases I had plenty of concrete advice about resources to look for, things that I had tried in the past and either found successful or not, and how to keep a hold on the reasons one starts making art in the first place. I found myself repeating this phrase a whole lot:

“I’m not sure if it’s like this everywhere, but I know that here in Philadelphia…”

This combined with the recent discussions in relation to grad school and collaborators has me wondering how environment affects our work. A bad rehearsal space can hinder creation. An underwhelming performance locale can limit the scope of one’s imaginings. But what about a city? These smart young women I met last week have all had to weigh the question of context. They are all in the midst of deciding if this city is fertile ground from which to plant their artistic seed/selves. And I started thinking, “Why?”

Why Philly or why not? What does this city have to offer an artist and how does that offer change as they grow? I started to think about how I have been shaped by the place in which I now live and create my work. I started wondering how the daily backdrop of Philly and the people within it have made me the artist I am.

I’m interested in what questions a city can raise. What thoughts and ideas does it bring out of us? How does being here in particular color us as creators?

For the record, I didn’t intend to live here. I moved to the east coast for school and always thought that eventually I’d go back to Chicago. Somehow everything in the east coast cities I visited felt like it had a little less breathing room than back home. My family was there and at heart I felt like a Midwesterner. People here seemed a little harder, a little more closed off. I didn’t want the scale and exhausting competitiveness of New York. Boston seemed too small and insulated. And Philly was… a little off-putting.

I knew very little about this place before I came here. In college the entirety of my sense of the city was limited to taking the R3 from Swarthmore and bumming around South Street. I thought Olde City was cute but small. I had a few bewildering encounters with Fringe shows. I capped every expedition with a wait for the train in Market East. In short, my sense of the whole place was a bit gritty, a little dated and a lot dirty.

I see it differently now. That one-year gig after college turned into more. I grew up a lot while being here. I found a strong and supportive community. And something about this place now feels like a familiar if sometimes frustrating kind of home. So here I am. But going back to the initial questions – what influence does the city have on its artists? If it had gone another way, would I still be the same?

So for those new folks, looking to weigh the city on its artistic-potential inducing merits, here are a few observations:

Philadelphia feels like a small city, at least artistically. “Philadelphia County” is listed 5th most populace US city.  We’re bigger than Dallas according to 2010 census data. But I don’t think most of us think of this place as having a big city feel. The areas of Philly you move within are likely rather confined. It feels like a city of neighborhoods and we tend to stay loyal to the areas we inhabit. The artistic community in particular feels small. This can be great to be so familiar, to watch people grow and change, but it can also be limiting, difficult to be honest in critique. With the web so interconnected each shake or tear carries more weight.

This place feels like a family in the best and worst ways. It is hard to define oneself entirely out of context of the artistic family members that one is surrounded by. Sometimes it feels like funders are like parents with only so much love to go around. As a second generation experimentalist there are times when I feel like a second sibling who will always be in the shadow of those who came on the cultural landscape earlier than myself. I can’t help but wonder about those that will come after me. Will they have any room?

Philly is a place of genuine artistic fraternity and support. The arts are where the real brotherly love lies. I have shared stories with friends of mine in other communities about the help and mentorship I have received here. They are often jealous or astonished. No one can believe me when I tell them that things like Artist U are free. I have been amazed at the kindness of those ahead of me in sharing their knowledge, skill sets and literal stuff. It makes me want to do the same. We are a familiar folk, we Philadelphians, and in general we pay it forward and want to love and support each other.

We are also a city with a lot of history and legacy. It creeps into works in small and big ways. We employ a lot of theater folk in our historic cultural centers. We make stuff in sites of history. We have stuff that’s older than most US cities. There have been lots of “Philadelphia”s – from Ben Franklin’s to Rocky’s. We are still figuring out how to blend them together both in life and our work.

We are a relatively cheap city that feels like it’s on an economic upswing. An artist can own a house here. Let me repeat that. An artist can own a house here. Do not underestimate how radical that is to people living elsewhere. You can get space for cheap or free. There’s a bit of breathing room in a city that isn’t so expensive. People are easier with giving things away. You hustle a lot less. Art is more of your actual income. And at the same time, it doesn’t feel like that is at the cost of the city falling apart. Even in the midst of the worst housing crisis, many neighborhoods (mine included) have not lost property value.

There’s that Quaker thing. Maybe it’s because of my Quaker college that I feel so aware of it, but I do think there’s something about the large presence of Quakerism in the early history of this city and the quiet witness it continues to bear here that raises a sense of consensus and social justice in its people.

In a similar vein, we are a city surrounding by academic institutions. There are those obviously in its borders (Temple, UPenn, Drexel, Jefferson, PCOM, UArts, St. Joe’s, Pierce, La Salle, University of the Sciences, PAFA, Curtis, Moore, Chestnut Hill, CCP) and all the ones within the city’s reach – Villanova, Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, Haverford, Arcadia, Rowan, Rutgers, Ursinus, Cabrini, Eastern (I know I’m forgetting some). This is an insane number of schools. And all these are places we create our work, teach, attend and learn from, make money at, borrow resources from, use the libraries of, connect with students from. Whether you personally work or study you are still the beneficiary of the many intersections of these institutions with the arts community.

Philly is dirty. What is up with all the trash? In both 2011 and 2012, TRAVEL & LEISURE put Philadelphia in near the top of “America’s Dirtiest City” list, for having the most unremoved, publicly visible litter, selected and voted for by both magazine readership and city residents. What does that do to our sense of aesthetic? How does it change our relationship to beauty in our work?

Philly has a higher than average rate of crime for a city our size. As sensitive people, we take in our environment. Ask most artists and they have multiple stories of witnessing or personally being the victim of crime. That stuff can’t help but come out in one’s creations and the more it happens, the larger it weighs in your work.

It takes a long time to get anywhere. “SEPTA. We’re getting there.” Is this the most unintentionally accurate slogan ever? And given the small size of the city and the high number of artists that use public transport, this matters a lot. I think it holds us back as a metropolitan community. I think makes our city seem less professional and unapproachable (as do we, its artists, by association). I once had to give an NYC playwright friend directions on taking a Philly bus. Just one, in a straight line from the north part of 4th street to the south. I had to make sure she had two dollars, exactly. I had to promise a bus would come to the directed corner even though no sign would indicate such. I had to tell her to go 10 minutes before the schedule said because you can’t trust what’s printed (but then it might be 10 minutes late, sorry it’s cold outside). Thank god she didn’t need to get from south Philly to the Museum district.

We are a city with a deep racial divide. Last April I was lucky enough to be sitting in the “grantee” section at a Knight Arts. As I flipped through the book of other winners I noticed another listing for Theater: $20,000 for GoKash Productions to expand the Philly Urban Theatre Festival. It amazed me that here was an award winning company creating original works and an ENTIRE FESTIVAL that I had no idea existed. I thought it amazing that such a company has survived without support from the traditional funding sources and, as far as I know, with little support so many other small companies enjoy from the larger theater community. There’s been a lot flying around the major theater blogs recently about how get people of color to the theater. I thought of GoKash. They’ve already done it. How many others companies like them are out there? Why are they disconnected from the community I am connected to? What is my responsibility in that? More recently, as I gathered data for my women in theater posts, I noticed a trend, especially among larger companies, to produce a single “diversity” play in a season with a relatively small (if existent) number of actors of color throughout the rest of the year. I thought a lot about how I feel about all women shows  – incredibly protective of their importance but at the same time nervous about being set apart. Racial division is a backdrop to our lives. How can we become smart and aware about its influence in our art?

It’s not as easy as you’d think to be a solo creator. Though we have a lot of them, solo creator artists don’t have the easiest time. The funding structures in this city are pretty company (aka non-profit) oriented. Despite a few high profile grant programs, we are overwhelmingly deficient on residencies and grants for individuals. Most foundations won’t let you apply until you have the tax exempt status and a certain level of size. There are precious few folks past their 30’s still making their own work without having gotten the 501 c 3. Which means in general, if you want to make your own work in Philly you not only need to be a creator but a producer as well. This is not the case everywhere else. We are in desperate need of curatorial institutions. Yes, we have Fringe Arts. And they do a lot. But we need more than one voice. Where are our PS 122’s, La Mama’s, and HERE Arts spaces?

We have some crazily bizarre liquor laws. Alcohol, like it or not, is a huge part of how most people socialize. I’m going to guess that’s even more true for the coveted 20 – 30 something age range, one that theater in particular has a hard time reaching. Imagine a band in a place where no drinks were served. And while some people get around this, I think that it cuts out a huge social lubricant and money-making avenue for smaller theaters (who could never afford the insane liquor license fees) to access.

And finally, when I step back, I see that we are not actually one artistic community. We aren’t even just one kind of theater community. There is a dividing line in town between the generative artists and the interpretive ones. Between “straight” theater and devised. Between the experimenters and those who find meaning in tradition. But as different as we are, there’s an open curiosity that I see around me. What I like about Philly is that this division is, as the cell biologists say, a permeable membrane. I’ve found real growth in interacting with actors who have never written their own lines before or created a scene. It reminds you to questions your assumptions. I’ve learned a lot by jumping out of my usual role and ADing a super “play play.” And as I grow, I find that more and more useful, to seek out opportunities to watch how other people do what they do. And there’s a trust and respect that Philly fosters that allows that to happen. And if there’s anything that’s kept me in this place, that’s it.

A

Eureka

Yesterday I was out running when without warning my right brain exploded.

It began as I was listening to a piano concerto and randomly thought, “What if we had a toy piano in The Tempest?” And something about the concreteness of that image began to open up a series of others, piling on top of each other: from set pieces to staging visuals, ways to solve a problem moment in Act IV to songs that would completely underscore a given moment at the beginning. These ideas began to vomit up so fast, so rapid fire that I was actually afraid I would forget them before I was able to get back home and write them down. I spent the next fevered four miles trying to create a mnemonic to help me remember.

It’s things like this that make me angry at my brain.

For the past week I’ve been slowly and methodically working my way through a script, trying to come up with potential cuts and updating the text to reflect the cross-gender casting choices I have made. I wanted to make sure I understood all the language, the references, and that I would be able to speak intelligently about what the play was about. But more than any of those functional things, I was looking through this text trying to get to the heart of the thing. I wanted to know the texture of this piece, I wanted to find the essential flavors of the thing.

I think of it as tasting the play. Until I know that feeling in the mouth, until it is tangibly sweet or crunchy or spicy, it’s only surface level research. Until I can really bite on the qualities and chew them up, anything I say feels paper-thin and insubstantial – something from brain but without soul.

I can’t explain exactly how I know when I’ve found that texture. The form the inspiration takes is never the same. It’s been many things – a song, an image in a book, a color pattern on a building, a series of words in a script – but whatever it is, it’s some tiny thing that opens everything else up. It’s the trickle from which a stream begins to flow. When I find it, it seems like a dam breaks, like a tiny hole bursts in the wall between me and the piece. It’s a way that I can start to glimpse the other side. And rather than a feeling of randomly trying to move forward on all fronts, my direction finally has purpose and, well, direction. I can use that momentum as a vector to channel my efforts and start to chip away and the division. It’s the first step to getting closer to the thing I seek.

The trick is finding that crack. Without it, it’s just banging away at a brick wall.

Yesterday, while running, I felt something crack (“We split, we split!”) and I truly had the impulse to yell “Eureka!”

As if I were in some Renaissance laboratory with my alchemy agents. As if I’d just turned steel into gold. It felt like something had just been bequeathed to me, magically, divinely, I’m not sure, but totally random and out of my control.

“Eureka!”

This “Eureka” is not singular, there will be more to come. Always, one finds them multiple times throughout a production’s life, a random punch that busts through a plateau a given stage of the work has hit.

But weirdly, as grateful as I was for  the ideas and their clarity – ones I had felt in desperate need of in order to tackle this play – it also reminded me of how out of control the whole process of inspiration feels. If I’ve found any pattern in the Eurekas I’ve had in the past, the consistent thing about them is that they’re frustratingly indirect.

I have committed myself to time and space to work with collaborators only to have the Eureka come in the last hours together. I have had them about a project I just finished during the project I should be currently working on. I’ve had them randomly and intensely about pieces that do not yet exist and that then vehemently demand themselves into being. I have had them in the midst of giving a interview about a piece, suddenly knowing I will shift things in a massive but yet untried fashion. I have had them on the bus while randomly chatting with someone about the play.

They are sometimes convenient. They are sometimes not. They are almost always unexpected.

In the shower, while running, cooking, traveling, whether I have pen and paper or not, whether I am able to remember them, sometimes in vivid nightmare, sometimes in distracted day dream, they come when they feel like it but never ever ever when I ask them to. And the more desperate I start to feel, the more intensely I crave the Eureka, the faster and tighter I try and grasp for it, the more elusive they are.

Ugh.

It makes me a little nuts that I can spend 20 hours in a week trying to pull the play apart and it’s only in the moment that I take a break that my brain floods in with the amazing perpendicular and unexpected ways of seeing the thing. It’s in the moment I’m thinking about something totally different that I start to make connections.

Gods of Eureka, I don’t mean to anger you. But I spent all week offering sacrifice of time and thought. Why are you so random? Why must you wait until I don’t have a pen and am really sweaty and out on Festival Pier?

It’s no longer is a surprise. And in some ways, I can see that the sacrifice of the research was not wasted, it was simply percolating. But it’s still maddening.  It feels like I’m just doing all this work in order to distract myself. I wish I could just get to the meat of the thing head on.

I’m trying not to hate on this. I’m trying to just relax, and let it be, which probably helps the thing come quicker.

But it’s hard. It’s so hard when you put in effort and don’t see an equivalent result right away. I want to be able to just DO the thing, not do and do and then suddenly have the thing appear in front of me.

It’s hard to sit there hammering away at the wall.

A

Confidence

As I sat down to write my last essay I started thinking about a single word that could sum up what I wanted from this collaborator thing. And then I started thinking about the times when I have felt at my own personal best as a creative maker. I thought about the times when I didn’t know enough to know that something should have seemed impossible. And thought about the times when something seemed so easy, so obvious, and I totally psyched myself out and was unable to complete the task.

What’s the magic sauce of the first that is missing in the second?

It’s something to do with confidence, with brazenness, with daring with to use the very best of your abilities. It takes courage to believe that you can even if you don’t yet exactly know how.

More than anything for myself and for the people I make with, I want an attitude of:

“Yeah!!! I am TOTALLY going to do this. And if I don’t know how, I will TOTALLY figure it out.”

And:

 “This challenge is awesome!!! It is exciting to me. And above all it is one I will find a way to be capable of.”

You know that feeling, right? The one where you are on top of the world and able to tackle anything creatively thrown at you? That’s what I want: people who believe in their own badassery.

And if you are like me you also know the opposite, the feeling where supposedly you should be able to do this thing you are tasked with, but for whatever reason you keeping messing up, or feeling blocked, or actually do fine but still feel like you escaped without others knowing you’re a poseur that is just skating by on luck.

What’s up with that? I don’t actually think that about myself. So what makes me feel that way? And more importantly, how can I avoid it?

There are some things that seem obious: We prepare. We study. We learn enough so that we are armed with the info needed to tackle the situation. Without that we might literally lack the tools to achieve our aims. This is the eager student who is handed an instrument he has no experience playing. No amount of “want” will make him know the fingerings on a trumpet.

But it’s not just that.

Because there’s that other end of the spectrum where we’ve been doing something forever and then suddenly, weirdly, we start to realize the mechanics of it. We start to over analyze. We choke. We guess and second guess our choices and things that were once easy are now ending up muddy and unclear. When we know we are smart enough why do we let our own selves get in the way of just doing it?

There was a daring and obliviousness in my early work that I sometimes mourn. That stuff wasn’t as clean, as well thought out, as cogently researched or thoughtfully put together, but somehow, that didn’t seem to matter a lot of the time. It felt like it just had a kind of “heart” in it that was going to come through regardless. And often these days in my theater making I feel myself getting bogged down or distracted by knowing every cultural implication of writing this particular line or so totally aware of the piles of books I ought to read before claiming something in that particular scene.

The more I learn the more I realize I don’t know. And it makes it that much harder to feel like that brazen “I know I’m right” confident creator I want to be. I’ve been burned with saying or displaying things I didn’t know enough about in the past. And I’m now smart enough to know that I might not always be right, know that not every choice is the right one. But in creating you have to act like it is. You have to choose and commit or you hesitate and end up doing even more damage than if you’d just gone ahead.

Sometimes I look at others and think, “How do they know they are right? How do they just continue to believe their art is so good?” I wonder where that magic ability, the one that allows them not to question whether they have made the right decision, comes from. And I want to know if I can have some of it.

I suppose there are people that might think the same about me.

Because I try very hard to look like I know what I’m doing. Sometimes I do. But there are plenty of times I have to make a decision or answer a question and I am simply flying by the seat of my pants. Or rather, feel like I am falling by that pants seat. I want to fly. I want to stop looking at the ground fast approaching and stop worrying if I’m going to hit it. I continue to want that confidence in the people I work with. I want it in myself. I want to be in a state of flow in which my high level of challenge is matched with an equally high level of prowess. I want us all to feel like the beasts of creation I believe us to be.

How do we do that? Literally, in a way that I can implement today, how do I start to nurture that? Do I ask more questions of the people that I think do know stuff so that I can steal their wisdom? Do I just assume that everyone is in the same boat and fake it until it feels real? Both? Neither?

I was talking to someone the other day about how I sometimes wish I weren’t a deviser. I said that I wished that there was a single method or cannon that I wanted to subscribe to. Wouldn’t it be awesome to believe that there was one way, one method, to pursue? To know what success looked like and how I could emulate it? To find the art in every finer and more beautifully crafted depth of a detail rather than starting anew with each and every project?

Then I started to think, maybe it’s a kind of an out, this starting over and over from scratch. Is starting from nothing every time a little bit like waiting until the night before a paper is due to begin?

“I would have researched and written a better paper but I only had one night.”

“I would have made a richer play but I’ve no one’s ever done this before.”

I do believe that it is important to question how and why we make the choices we make. I believe we need to make our work useful to contemporary audiences. But a little part, a hidden part, knows that a little bit of the thrill of starting from a blank canvas is that it’s an impossible task. Create something revolutionary that has never been done before. Defy everything that’s come before and do something richer, better and more relevant to today’s audience. And if one gives oneself an impossible task, any success, even a partial one, is a win.

And it’s in the midst of this that I sit right now heading into a summer project – The Tempest – whose measure of success will be just the opposite.

This is no Lady M. This is a straight up, no f-ing around with it, in the park, saying all the lines, Shakespearian drama. For the first time, I have to think about how to make a cut of a script that a lot of people know a lot more than me about. That’s not self deprecating, that’s just true.  Think about it. There are people that spend their whole lives on this one play. There are people who study single lines for years. So when I decide to get rid of this or that, I’m claiming dominion over all that expertise.

Can I stress how different this is than in a work in which I am the originator, where the only person I answer to is myself and my co-creators?

I was reading a scene in The Tempest in which Miranda meets Ferdinand and I was looking through to see if there were any cuts I wanted to make. Then I read this line where she talks about her modesty being the jewel in her dower. Initially, I passed over it, leaving it in. Cutting it doesn’t really help shorten the play and the whole keeping her pure thing is a big undercurrent in their relations with each other and Prospero’s oversight of their courtship.

And then I stopped and said, “What the hell? Would I ever in a million years let a female character in a show I created tell a dude that her modesty was the jewel in her dower?”

No. Emphatically no. I think that is bullshit. I know it’s a historical text. But it’s a historical text that will perform in a modern world and speak on behalf of how I think it should be shared with a modern audience.

And then I started to think, “Oh god. But there’s probably a million scholarly reasons that thing is in there. It’s probably so important for reasons I am not noticing. And they’re all going to be upset if it’s gone.”

But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, I just can’t. I guess people will have to yell at me. Because if I am doing this play, I have to believe in its message. And leaving that line in is a tacit and casual agreement that the foremost concern in that young woman’s mind should be staying a virgin until marriage. And that’s not a world I want people to see, or a view I personally espouse. I want Miranda to be the weirdo, awesome, strange wild child of this island. The same one to whom it never occurs not to carry logs like a man when the guy she has the hots for gets tired.

Because while I want the benefit of others’ expertise and analysis, I can’t let it stop me from my own opinion.  I can’t let it stop me from my own confidence, because that’s the thing that really makes me the artist I am.

A

Collaborators

Talking with someone who you are thinking about working on a project with is a little bit like dating. There’s a chemistry, a way of similarly talking about what you want and how you want to do it that is so tricky to define. Seeing someone’s work matters. But not always. Someone who can talk a good game is important. But it’s not everything.

Sometimes it feels like you just know. And sometimes you’re right. Other times you are super duper wrong.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as I bring people on in various kinds of capacities for a whole host of projects. There are the collaborators I’ve worked with in the past, people who may not at first blush seem right for the thing I’m asking them to do, but damn it something just says, if you want them do it anyway. There are people that I don’t know at all, who might be crazy or unstable or un-collaborative, but something in my gut just says to do it.

There are people I have made things with that turned out really really well and for some reason the process just didn’t feel right. So even though the outcome was fantastic, something internal keeps me from bringing them back.

There are other people who feel like the open my brain up and make me see things that I could never have imagined. They are creators that I feel like talk the way I talk about work. As if I can be more honest about what I really want and how I want it. I still don’t know exactly what that feeling is or how it happens, but I know when it’s there. And whether it results in the best work I’ve ever made or not, I seek it hungrily.

And then there’s everything else in between.

It’s hard to know sometimes exactly what you’re looking for, and in what proportion: some combination of intelligence, kindness, initiative, talent, confidence. And of course the balance of these things in one person can often smooth out the deficit in another. It is a strange alchemy, this practice of creating something with a group of people. It’s a kind of cookery I’m often feeling just a step behind on.

In high school I co-wrote a musical review with my best friend at the time. We spent months in secret creating a script for “What We Did For Love” (remember that post where I said I could never go to a college without a musical theater program?). The show was a pre-Glee high octane rom-com high school musical fantasia with a loose homage to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. We were a phenomenal writing team. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve been quite as passionate and diligent about a co-collaborator. And recently, when I went back and looked at the thing I was still more than reasonably impressed with some of the snappy, silly, and oh-so heart-felt-edly genuine words we poured our efforts into.

As co-directors (the only time such a thing has ever been functional for me, btw) we were compliments of each other in an easy and comfortable way. While I preferred to look at the big picture of staging, structure and transitions, Tracey was super smart about the details that really mattered, especially when it came to the wry smile of our ingénue or the right delivery of the male lead. Nowhere was this eye for detail more needed than in casting. Which was unfortunate when Tracey came down with chicken pox and had to miss the entire audition process.

The leads we could convene on. These were folks we knew and had strong ideas about going in. But it was those smaller, bit roles, the ones that weren’t large, but really made our script what we imagined it to be. This is where we stalled. We talked, but there wasn’t any substitute when it came down to it, and she just had to go with some of my impulses.  Some of which worked out, others not so much.

The problem with me, I think, is that when confronted with something, I am often swept up by imagining the potential of the thing or person rather than what is actually in front of me. I imagine what, given infinite time and ideal circumstances and a bit of luck, could be the best version of a collaboration. And in some cases, the more underappreciated I see someone to be, the more I really want to be the one to put that person in a position to really shine, surprising everyone with the potential I envision so that their undiscovered artistic superpowers might be brought out.

This works fantastically in some cases, especially when I am thrown into a situation where I have little control over the people I am involved with. I have often agreed to create with those I know almost nothing about and been open enough to discover a multitude of amazing and creative things about them. When I have to make the best of an unknown, I am generally pretty great at mining for the gold.

Sometimes though, that ability to imagine the possibility of such a discovery can get in the way of objective assessment. I often find myself in love with a strange or small quirk in a performer or potential collaborator. Many is the time I realize I am measuring them not against some impartial standard but against themselves. When I see them grow, it feels amazing because I have been on that journey with them. But this is not always the experience of the audience. They most often only see the end result, which may not seem so impressive without the context of the starting point.

There are days when I wonder if I’m a lucky fool. Or some kind of idiot savant. I have had the fortune to hook up with some amazing artists. But I don’t know if I always knew what I was doing. There are many times when I wonder if I actually know what “good” is.

Which is why I am often at such a loss for how to choose new co-creators. Which is why I like to stick so close to the chest and hold on to those people I know and love. I do think they are talented, but more than that, I know they are interested in the way that I happen to create. Which is a hard to define mix of forthrightness and listening. Which requires an open mind and relatively flagrant disregard for how things are usually done. A maker whose mode of making includes a hearty belief in their own artistry but is able to apply that in context of a group discovery and naïveté. I need each process to feel like we are finding it anew together. I need artists who know they will find something worth doing because they know they’re awesome. But for the result to be a real discovery, none of us can be sure exactly what that awesome thing will be. Which is perhaps why I so rarely begin in the usual fashion from a script. Which is why Swim Pony’s work is often me asking people to do anything except what I’ve seen them do before. Which is why I tend to like performers who tackle things from an odd angle that I don’t totally know how to deal with.

So back to Tracey. It was rough, and I didn’t like that I had to cast the show mostly without her. There was one, a kind of mannish gym teacher, role that I gave to a freshman. It was, in the end, not the most shining part of the play. And I realized halfway though the process that the person Tracey wanted would have been a lot better.

But I think I cast that freshman because I liked the idea of giving her space to be huge and loud and in charge. I wanted her to have a chance to be brash and funny because she wasn’t really that way in person. I liked the idea that she could, some day, be that character, even if she wasn’t right now. And It wasn’t the best in the moment choice, but it was a kind of long view tactic at creating a space in which people get to express all kinds of sides to themselves.

That kind of vision of theater requires community that invests in its creators over the long haul. It requires us to want to allow people not to display talent but develop it. To break the stereotypes of what we see people already capable of in the immediate takes time and a lot more leeway to give them room to grow.

I don’t know which is better.

But it’s why I continue to surround myself with lots of opinions, so that I have balance in the way I evaluate the people with whom I will work.

A

Ownership is not the same as owning shit

What does it mean to own our creative work?

Is there anyone out there who hasn’t had a moment of green rising proprietary “back off what’s mine” sensation when seeing another artist doing something just a bit too similar to something they have already done?

I have. “That was my idea.” I’ve said that a lot. In the last month. More than once. So trust me, I get it.

Our creative work feels like it is of us. It feels like a piece of us. And when someone seems to takes that piece, even if they change it up a lot, even if they interpret it differently, we start to feel a little nervous.

Why?

Is it because that new version reflects back on us in ways that we don’t want? Is it because we fear that they might do it as well (better?!) as we did? Are we scared that people will see this new version of our thing and forget that we got there first?

A bit of all of the above, most likely.

Most of my artistic career I have spent copying other people. Often wantonly and shamelessly. Ariane Mnouchkine, Julie Taymor, Joseph Chaikin, Dan Rothenberg, Whit McLaughlin, Jon Stancato my college boyfriend, Robert Johnson my high school director, Tracey Servé (née Deerfield) my best friend at 16. All of these other people’s styles and humor and tricks were things I vacuumed up and spun around inside of me and spat back out into new forms.

Early on I loved Mozart’s Magic Flute and Greek mythology. In retrospect I see this isn’t simply because I had a natural born affinity for the finer classical things in life but because I happen to get to see my voice teacher in the chorus at the Lyric Opera and because my 6th grade teacher had a bangin’ unit on the Greeks in which I happened to seriously dig on Hera. These are influences that planted in my forming brain and stuck there. So when I happened to get around to making some shit myself, it’s not surprising they dislodged and informed the things that started coming out.

At the time I had no sense of how the work came out of me, it just came. And as I started adding layers of influence, the studies in college, my own research, the new people I met and the things they had to say, it felt like my work kept getting richer and richer. All through school this trend continued and it felt like everything I saw could become part of the work: every word, every line of music, every movie, every image. These all had the potential to change how I thought about the things I was making.

And then a few years into working professionally, I made a show that I was really proud of and that show got a review and that review had a sentence or two that mentioned a couple songs I’d used and it was clear that they felt like I had no right to take this music and use it for my own purposes.

It sounds pretty naïve now, but it was the first time it ever occurred to me that I had to be careful with using other people’s material.

This is a tricky thing. There are times when we take the work of another and we do something to it that the original author might feel perverts the original message. That’s a tough thing. It’s tougher when we are farther and farther from the sources we appropriate. There’s a kind of cultural colonialism that can leave a bad taste in the mouth. This is something I think each artist needs to wrestle with. What is the story I am telling and why am I using this source? Only you can decide if you feel like you are doing so responsibly. Only you can decide if you are qualified to own that shit.

In this way, I’m glad to have become aware. I think it’s good to think, so long as it does not paralyze. It’s important to imagine how your interpretation of another’s creative output will affect you and them. Owning your inheritance is part of growing up as an artist.

But in another way, one that I think is quite separate from this first way of seeing ownership, I think we start to see our work as a commodity that we control.

The funny thing about the devising process, for me at least, is that it is a medium of association and collage. And the more I know, the more I start to see that every idea at some level comes from somewhere else. And the more I start to try and limit myself to the things that I can conceive of without “stealing” from another artist or person, the more I start to despair that any new work is possible.

I think that maybe there is no such thing as new ideas.

Lady M is Roy Hart voice on Shakespeare’s text and a lot of choral movement work I see in other directors

SURVIVE! is Radiolab mixed with a video game with Pay Up with Neal deGrasse Tyson.

Joe Hill is Hill’s folk music and Eastern State and historical re-enactment

The Giant Squid is “What if I mixed H.P. Lovecraft with Steve Zizou and site specific staging?”

These works feel the most unique to myself and my company. And they are all nothing more than a mash up of other people’s stuff. Everything I’ve ever made is just a mix of elements from other places that happens to come out in the particular measurements that are unique to me. And really, how else could it be? Is it really possible for anyone to have a totally unfettered and brand new idea? Really?

And if the idea of ownership and copyright were to continue to its logical end wouldn’t every combination of words or notes or movements at some point in the future become property of someone else? Creativity is a process of impulse and intuition. It is a process of meaning making in which we create image, story and metaphor by combining things in new and unique ways. That’s why we see other people’s theater, that’s why we study the masters as students. Because we want to learn and pick up things from those that have gone before us. We are supposed to be inspired by other people’s work. But I guess not too much, or too obviously.

Not enough so that you can see the raw materials we’re drawing from.

But isn’t that just the difference between an awesome piece of art and a mediocre one? Is the awesome piece of art really missing the same set of inputs that come from outside of themselves? Or is it just transforming them in a way that makes us astonished and awed and not really care where it came from, because of its so obvious newness in its combination?

There’s an article out there that I read once about how inventions arrive when the culture as a whole is ready to receive them.  I’m too lazy to look up the exact link right now so you’ll have to take my word for it. But this makes sense, no? No one is going to create a light bulb until electricity has been invented. And similarly, a specific series of notes might not be possible until the culture of jazz or blues or funk or whatever has arrived to usher our ears into wanting to hear it.

It starts to feel a little arbitrary saying “This is mine” or “That is his” when really, we might both have never arrived there without the discoveries and forward motion of a million tiny pushes before us. People talk a lot about the kind of omnivorous consumption of influences in Shakespeare’s text. I wonder if such a writer could exist today…

This is why I think that taking ownership is different than owning our work the way we own a car or a book our house. Our work is a living, changing, shifting thing. It has meaning only in so much as we share it with others. And in sharing it, we need to know, need to hope!, that it’s going to matter enough to someone else that it’s going to stick in their brains and reappear and come out when they too start making shit.

I know it twists a little something inside when you see a character that looks just like the one you made. I know it hurts a bit to hear a melody that sounds too much like yours. These words and sounds feel like ours. But they aren’t. Not really. They came to us by virtue of the artists before us. If we’re truthful, if we really take a hard look, nothing we create is truly and totally our own. I don’t believe it can be possible.

And if we can give ourselves up to that, I think what we do is put the value on the expression of the idea, the form and context of the words, and the performance of the sound, rather than the thing itself. In doing that, we put the value not on the art but on the artist, on the producer and not the product.

Anyone can come up with a good idea. The trick is to execute them with brilliance. That’s where the real craft comes in. And ultimately that’s the value I want to create in the world: my worth as a maker, one who takes ownership over the influences I include and the messages I create of them, one who then freely gives that to anyone who’s aching to take it up so that they too might do with it whatever they will.

A

Project: Write your own eulogy!

You know what sometimes makes me a little sad?

If you ride SEPTA you know the strangely accented woman who voices the stops on the Broad Street line. A couple years ago I became hyper aware of the particular announcement she gives just before the metal entryway slides shut and the car starts to pull ahead:

“Doors closing.”

Think vaguely Indian mixed with British, every time just as you are about to move on:

“Doors closing.”

I don’t know why, but I always have this tiny existential sadness slip into my heart when I hear that.

“Doors closing.”

Now when I make a big choice, one that feels like it’s going to determine the course of life for the next month, year or beyond, I think of that announcement. When I hit a major milestone I hear it too. Sometimes, I’m just sitting there thinking and I realize that at one point I thought I wanted to be a doctor and now I teach actors to fake illness for them instead. I think about whether I could, if I had the inclination, turn it all around and still go after that medical degree. And I think, maybe I could, but I probably won’t.

“Doors closing”

That announcement rings in my ears often, reminding me that I’m about to do (or already have done) something that will dedicate myself to one path instead of another. It’s a wistful thing, but not an outright depressing one. This is the price we pay for depth of experience, this loss of the breadth, yes? But it’s still a pinprick of wondering what might have been, if I’ve made those other choices.

Too often, I think we see ourselves in this direction, from beginning to end, thinking only of change as a series of losses we incur. Too little are we able to imagine ourselves in reverse, looking back at the slow gathering and gaining of life.  Would we do things differently if we knew better which path we want to be on, which doors we should be perfectly happy to let swing shut as we speed on by to our goals? This is for our careers, our artistic lives, but of course our artistic lives are inextricably entwined with our larger selves as well. They don’t all move ahead in step but shift forward and back in tandem creating the momentum for the overall direction we take.

“Doors closing” is sad because it reminds me I don’t have forever and I’m the one to make the best of the time I still have left.

Here’s a project for today: write your own eulogy. Take 20 minutes to imagine the kinds things people will say about you when you’re gone.

And don’t just write what you think might be possible based on where you are now. Write the fantastical “you” that you want to wish into being. Write about the art you want people to say you made. Write about the family you want to have been surrounded with. Write about the places you know you want to have seen, the people you want to have met. Write about your work in a way that makes you think proudly, feel flamboyant and believe in a future unchained by any expectations other than your own.

And then when you’re done, type it out and save it somewhere safe.

This is your map.

Let it rest for a few days or a week or even a month and when you’re ready take it out. And start to think about the distance between here and there. Plot your course. Do it concretely. Give yourself an estimate of time and fuel and direction and cost. Think about which doors you need to walk through and which ones you might even need to pry back open. Think about detours and tolls along the way that might pull you from the straightest path.

Know that you can always still get there, you just might have to be craftier.

Then think about all the routes you’re wasting energy on holding onto.

And if you don’t need them, let those doors close.

A

PS – Full disclosure: I’m stealing this from Creative Capital’s wonderful strategic planning workbook. But I think they won’t mind. And I hope you’ll enjoy.

Grad School

How is it possible? Can it really be that I’ve been writing here this long and I still haven’t made it to the subject of Grad School?

Well, ok. Let’s dive into this sucker.

Let me start off by saying I am the product of two pHd’s.

My parents met at a small college in southern Illinois where they made up the majority of the psychology department. On my father’s side, all eight of my grandmother’s living children graduated from college, many going on to terminal degrees in their field. While my mother’s mother may have chided me about not being able to getting married if I got too fat, she was also very clear that a girl goes to college for more than her “MRS” degree.

I say all of this for context. I say all of this because I suspect this decision is  difficult because I have a serious lack of perspective. Education for its own sake is a value that made its way into me at an early age. And the idea of evaluating whether “higher learning” is “worth it” feels a little weird.

Full disclosure: I had the luxury of a college education search in which the academic quality of institution was the only consideration. It never occurred to me not to go to the place in which I would learn the most and hence become my best. It was deep in me that learning is something you do for its own sake, not because it is a means to justify the ends. I am lucky to have had a mother that was willing and interested in devoting hours of research and travel to help me make my way through the educational application process. I worked very hard, but I did so in a context that valued the effort I was making.

Similarly, the kind of knowledge that I chose to pursue was always something that I felt free to follow with an uncomplicated curiosity. Love chemistry? Awesome! Feel like shifting into classical music? Totally cool! Decide at the end of the day that theater is where you belong? A-ok.

I have never had to understand of the kind of sacrifice that people who love art so much they have to betray their parents’ wishes to make it. It never occurred to me that anyone would think less of me if I picked one learning path over another. So long as I loved and excelled at whatever I wanted to learn, that was all that mattered.

So ultimately, though I had offers of scholarship that would have meant far fewer student loans for both myself and my mom down the road, I picked a very expensive, very demanding, very very very good and small liberal arts school that had the perfect mix of intense theater studies and undergraduate research opportunities in science.

It remains one of the most formative experiences of my life. Simply, and unequivocally put, I would not be the artist and thinker I am today if I hadn’t had that opportunity.

It is a really lucky and wonderful thing to have been given.

And it puts me in kind of an awkward position now. How to explain why… This may take more than one post I think. But this is definitely part of it:

The only condition that my mom gave me on school selection was that I was definitively not allowed to go to an arts conservatory. She believed, and in my opinion rightly, that there was plenty of time for me to choose my path but that the college years were a chance to broaden my exposure to knowledge rather than to deepen a specific narrow channel.

I can’t speak for every artist of that age, but I can speak for myself, and I know that my taste and sensibilities at 18 were terrible. Or rather, they were unformed, uncomplicated, and driven by external forces that I didn’t yet have an eye to look at critically.

“Mom, I don’t know if I can go to a school that doesn’t have a musical theater program.”

I said these words out loud.

More than once.

This is my karmic retribution for putting up that fight over a decade ago: I now have to remember saying them and how much I really deeply meant them.

The person I was then couldn’t know that some day it wouldn’t be Sondheim and Bernadette Peters that inspired me to create every day. That person didn’t know that she would be so much more opened up and fulfilled by the prospect of creating her own voice and vision rather than stepping into someone else’s. She couldn’t know that all the things that seemed so important and special about those high school productions of Into the Woods and Steel Magnolias – the fancy costumes and glare of lights, the audience oohing when she cried real tears in that last scene – would ultimately become symbols that she would question on a regular basis in an online blog for her experimental “should I even call it theater” company.

It was the context of the learning, the people she met and the teachers she had and all the experiences that place gave her, that made her change. It was all those things that made her believe in the arts as more than a hobby or entertainment, but as an avenue of expression equally important in the larger scheme of the world as science. It was that place of learning that did that.

And because it did, now she is me, and I sit imagining the future in which I do appropriately narrow and deepen the specific aspect of art-making that I want to pursue. I think about the learning environment that I have created in my work and life. I think about how it would change if I allowed myself to spend a lot of time working towards someone else’s definition of what theater should be. I think about whether the work that those institutions teach is work I think is useful to the field. I think that even at places where it is work I believe in, is it the place or the people that make the work that way?

And I wonder things. Things like:

“I love learning. I love being in academic institutions. I love the idea of taking time to sit and think deeply about things. I would love grad school. I should go!”

And then:

“But it’s so expensive at so many places. Can you really justify the cost? Can you really say that it’s worth putting that strain on the rest of your life? Do you really believe that what you will receive is worth that much money?”

And then:

“Well there are places that don’t cost as much. There are cheaper programs. You could do one of those. Also, you have to think about the potential positive outcomes. You could teach more. You could make more doing the teaching that you already do. Education is not just learning, it’s also a tool.”

And then:

“I have never thought about learning that way, as a commodity. It was always just for its own sake. That makes me uncomfortable. How do I evaluate cost/benefit analysis in this context? Are cheaper programs a better deal? What if they take me away from my career for two or three years? What if everyone moves on? What if no one cares when I come back?”

And:

“So maybe I should just go to the program that I really love, one that I think will make me the best no matter the cost. But what is that program? There aren’t a lot of super experimental devising academic programs. And the few I’ve visited so far seem, well, not so awesome.”

And:

“Also, do I even want to do more teaching? Do I then have to get a pHd? That takes forever! And those jobs are super scarce and hard to come by. And even if I got one, none of the people who are academics in a full time way really make enough art. Not as much as I make now, and even that feels like WAY too little.”

And on and on and on to the point where it seems absurd that I’d even consider more education.

But then I think about how much I loved that context, that stretch, that drive and push that I got the last time I was in a setting where I was forced on constant basis to deeply examine what and how I make and the cycle begins to repeat.

Here’s what I fear: I fear I will get a degree that is cheap but doesn’t help me much and that in the process I will become a worse artist.

I think that is literally possible. I think that being around too many people who make their work without depth, without questioning or thinking hard enough will make you like them. You cannot help but acclimate to your circumstance. The world you are in becomes your standard. And if the standard around you is low so eventually will become yours.

I also fear that I will spend a lot of time on something that is rigorous and demanding but that is ultimately not what I want to do.

This is why I have stayed away from some of the big names, the places with the awesome reputations and decent funding programs. The ones that make the best work in the standard traditional model. The ones that in a way I blame the most for taking the best and brightest and reinforcing aspects of theater that I think are dying a painful death and need to be revamped.

I also fear spending all the money I have and will ever have for an education I could love but will be chained in debt to for the rest of my life.

This is why I haven’t entered the few programs that seem totally right but so very expensive. The ones with the world famous experimental mentors and alumni that are the exact kind of people I want to emulate. Or the ones that allow you to design and direct your study however your process dictates but require you to pay your own way. I went to an info session for one of these last kind of schools and asked someone how much debt they would have after they came out. They couldn’t say. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. I think they literally couldn’t let that number stay in their heads or it would so overwhelm them that they wouldn’t be able to enjoy the experience. The number must be huge. A hundred thousand, maybe more. Maybe a lot more.

So that’s where it has sat for years now. Me running from these different specters of grad school future. Continuing to soldier forward without them and wondering if it’s needed, what it’s use is and then feeling sad for needing to define the use of knowledge at all.

Each year I feel just a little bit further away from exactly what in my career I think grad school could change. And every time I go to one of those info sessions the potential applicants seem less similar to myself. Earlier in their artistic path, eager to pick up the traditional model, needing that paper for some specific reason.

I always assumed it was somewhere I would head.

But every year I seem not to go.

A

PS:  If you’ve gone, are you glad? What did you gain? Are you poor? If you haven’t yet, why? And do you think you will? If you know you won’t, what‘s the reason?