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The Awesome Lady Coefficient

When I was growing up my mom, a family therapist, used to talk about the problematic representation of women in The Muppets.

I’ve felt a lot of ways about this at different points in my life. On the one hand, I totally get that it’s super crappy to have the extent of a gender be portrayed as mean/bossy, blonde/ditzy or chicken. This is why I advocate so hard for gender parity versus representation. Some women are blonde and ditzy or mean and bossy or chickens. But when you have so little room in our cultural narrative space, when this is the only version of women we see, these limited categories that appear again and again get really problematic. This “tokenism” and its cousin The Smurfette Principle are pernicious and pretty widespread in many parts of our cultural consciousness. So in that sense I am one hundred percent with my mom.

On the other hand, The Muppets.

And this is the thing. It really sucks to be the person who has to fight the silly, sublime and nostalgic force that is this thing that Jim Henson made. It’s so freaking difficult, in the face of something that you agree is wonderful in some ways and that you see is wildly commercially successful and popular, to try and fight for conversation space about the other ways in which it’s hurtful and plays into larger forces that harm women and misrepresent them. (Shout out to Katherine Fritz who wrote a lovely essay about this.)

Harder still, is the moment you have to decide if you want to be the proverbial Smurfette. Or direct her in a show. Or sign on to light her. Or whatever your part in the larger creative system might be.

This is the sticky place where our theoretical desire to stick to our Awesome Lady principles is put into real conflict with our day to day artistic and professional goals.

It sucks.

There’s misogyny for you. Pouring a big bucket of suck on everything.

And part of that bucket of suck, part of what sometimes happens, is that it’s super hard in the moment to figure out how to balance those two conflicting considerations.

Obviously, if there’s a project where you make a million dollars starring in the most artistically fulfilling role but there’s a tiny imbalance in the casting ratio (let’s say 5 dudes to 4 ladies), you might figure it’s still worth it. And just as obviously, if there’s a crap no-line female part with no pay and no audience and the play is about how stupid and terrible women are and the director likes to point out how much he thinks this is true, you might realize there’s really no reason to do this horrible thing.

Actresses out there, can you feel the tiny niggle inside of you that is still considering that second option? Just sayin’…

I think this instinct to jump at any and all work is part of how a perceived lack of agency pressures us into doing things that are against our ethics, don’t give us artistic fulfillment, and don’t even pay us. It’s as if any work is better than nothing at all.

I don’t buy that.

I think there is a reasonable estimate we can make of the artistic and/or professional merit in a potential project. I also think that it is possible for the problematic ethics of something to outweigh that artistic and professional merit if the problematic nature is problematic enough. What we need then is a living artist’s guide to figuring out how to measure those relative merits and ethical levels of importance – within ourselves and for individual opportunities – and come up with a way to help us gauge the overall worth.

Which brings me to the most recent meetings of The Awesome Lady Squad.

We started with exactly this question. We have internal values we want to uphold. We have a lot of factors to consider – factors of age, demand, opportunity, etc. that all play into how we make choices.

So we began by trying to define a methodology for determining the merit of a project divorced from our Awesome Lady ethics. We looked at Neil Gaiman’s great speech that includes the metaphor of a “mountain” that artists are climbing. We tried to come up with concrete categories for this inner intuitive sense about whether a project is taking you “up the mountain” or down. We chatted about the ways that different things matter at different times in one’s career, how a solid day job may make the “money issue” shift, and how we each differently balance the relative weight of artistic merit versus professional development.

We came up with four factors that any opportunity can be evaluated under:

Professional Development (P) – i.e. street cred. Will this be a high profile gig that leads to more work? Is it with a big name company that will look good on the resume? Is it an internship that might not pay well but will give you access to a desirable new skill set?
Financial Compensation (F) – i.e. money. Does it pay well (especially when broken down by the amount of money for the total time you will work)? Is it a job that might bring in income over a longer time frame?
Artistic Merit (A) – i.e. art. How much do I respect and get behind the vision of this work? How much does it allow me personally to fulfill my artistic expression?
Interpersonal Dynamics (I) – i.e. people. Do I like my collaborators? Who is in charge and how much do I trust them? Is this company one that’s easy to get along with? Are there non-artistic partners I need to interact with and do like them?

We had everyone rate the relative importance of these areas for themselves at this moment using 20 “value” points to create relative weights for each aspect of influence. We each used 20 poker chips and had to divvy them into piles for each category. The total chips in each pile became coefficients (i.e. fixed numerical values) that were used later in our larger equation.

Even doing this caused some of us to rethink. I thought my artistic merit category would be far and away the highest. But when I really thought hard about choosing a project, I realized that personality and chemistry with my collaborators is nearly as important and that I feel like I can’t get to that artistry without an ability to groove and talk to the people I’m creating with. Either way, these numbers gave us constants that would stay the same, standing for our core values when it came to evaluating a project.

Armed with this info, we talked about people’s actual upcoming opportunities and tried rating them in each of the four categories. We used a scale from 1 (perfectly advantageous) to -1 (totally detrimental) with 0 being neutral. While it was easy to freak about what we didn’t know, we made our best guess with the info we had. In some cases it also spurred the person to see where they really needed to find out more (about fee or the company’s street cred) to be able to make a more informed choice. We found it helpful to start from the middle and move up or down based on subjective factors you consider.

And then we created an equation that uses these numbers and pops out a score. To do this yourself multiply your four personal value numbers for each area (each some portion of 20) with the specific project’s strength or weakness (from 1 to -1) and…

Voila! An objective measure of whether you should do this thing or not! Like a pro and con list on steroids. For you math heads, here’s how we wrote it as an equation:

(P * P’) + (F * F’) + (A * A’) + (I * I’) = Overall Project rating
NOTE: In the above P = Professional Development value to you generally and P’ is the value for the specific project.

And then we came up with a scoring system:

Negative: Don’t do it unless you can adjust something to bump the result positive
0 – 5: Only nominally worth it. Might be worth considering saying no if you’ve got a lot of these on your plate so you don’t end up at burn out.
5 – 10: Decent. Barring another great project this is likely worth your time, so long as it’s in balance with other stuff and your life.
10 – 15: A pretty sweet spot. This is where the work is satisfying and sustainable.
15 – 20: A mountain-climbing fast track. Chase this stuff as fast as you can.

“But, wait!” you might be saying. What about all that Muppet and Smurf stuff from the start of this blog post? Where’s that factor for Awesome Lady ethics? How do we include the value of projects that advance or detract from our Awesome Lady principles?

I thought about one project in particular, the statistic project I did a while back analyzing data on female creative professionals in the Philadelphia theater community. This project, if looked at only in terms of the equation, would be massively negative, a definite no-go. It made me no money and took time away from finding projects that might. It offered no professional advancement because if anything I was a little nervous it might put people off of working with me if I’d criticized them. It had no interpersonal reward because I was all alone and had no obvious artistic merit because it was all admin.

Using my value numbers and the equation I came up with a -5. A total no, right?

Well obviously (Awesomely) not. I loved this project. I talk about it all the time. It is still super meaningful to me as a female creator, even if some part of me saw that it took time away from all those other things. At the moment I did it, advancing the Awesome Lady cause was front and center in my mind. I was doing a lot of writing. I was feeling really frustrated. I felt a strong need to make a dent in the artistic world for Awesome Ladies.

Clearly there’s something else bumping my equation into strongly positive territory.

And what about companies where the people are nice, the money and professional advancement is good, and the shows have lots of artistic merit in most respects but you just can’t help noticing that all the folks running things and all the writers being produced are male, most of the designers and actors are guys and the voice of women in the artistic process feels shut out? Clearly, even though there’s lots going right in a situation like that, there’s something else that needs to weigh in to reflect this complicated picture.

How do we rate such a thing?

By using the Awesome Lady Coefficient!

Without it, a max score for an opportunity is 20. This is a project where everything is perfect. So let’s say you are in a theoretical world where you rate the project a 20 in the money, professional development, artistic merit, and interpersonal categories, but the project is undeniably misogynist. If you could shut your eyes to that one aspect, you’d love doing this, but the message, the gender makeup of the cast/crew/production team, the way that females are paid compared to men, and/or all the little ways we subtly make female creators feel less than their male counterparts is glaring to the maximal degree.

The way we’ve defined the Awesome Lady Coefficient (ALC) is to say that at its maximal level, a project at a perfect 20 when confronted with the maximal frustration of gender inequity and discrimination becomes neutral. In other words, the max of the ALC is 20. And you can rate a given project or opportunity on that same 1 to -1 scale. When you add it into the equation it looks like this:

(P * P’) + (F * F’) + (A * A’) + (I * I’) + (ALC * ALC’) = Overall Project rating including assessment of project’s gender equity ideals.

Knowing how to factor in your desire to make that ALC value something specific and as quantifiable as money is important. It allows you a chance to look clearly at the hidden cost of projects that make you feel like you’re compromising your ethics. You may not rate the coefficient at 20. For a lot of people they might want to but find that doing so is just too tough right now. We’re not here to judge, but we do think it’s useful to note that if a project doesn’t come up positive unless that coefficient comes down near 0, there’s some thinking to do. And if you are consistently in a place where you never raise that ALC number into positive territory but say that you’re an Awesome Lady ally then there’s some thinking to do there as well…

It also means that if you REALLY want to say yes for the other reasons, maybe you might have a conversation that shifts the project or your role in it in a way that helps raise up the ALC factor so it’s more agreeable. That might be requiring conversations around problematic stereotypes in rehearsals or with audiences, asking to audition for a part that doesn’t include a rape scene, requiring a female AD or dramaturg to be a part of the show’s development so there are non-performer female perspectives in the room.

And maybe, sometimes, it’s a way to help justify the saying no to something that seems so logical but for the fact that it really messes with your internal sense of ethics. It’s a way to validate that inner voice that often gets sidelined with other people’s “rational” choices.

It’s a way to help yourself clean off that bucket of suck and grab back your own agency.

Even in the face of powerful forces like Muppets.

Or Shakespeare.

Or artistically stellar companies that overwhelmingly produce male playwrights.

It’s a way for you to own your own values and figure out what part of these complicated legacies you want to be a part of.

Just another day’s work for the Awesome Lady Squad…

– A
PS – We’re thinking about expanding this into an interactive app that will let people adjust these numbers and calculate the math automatically. If you know of someone that might be interested in designing such a thing, hit us up at swimponypa@gmail.com

In the interest of honesty, or, Can we all just agree to stop beating ourselves up?

It’s always this time of year, as the early cold and un-springlike “spring” gives way to the actual warmth and sunshine of early summer that I think back to my days at the end of college. I often think about this time with a rose-colored view of myself – highly engaged, copiously productive, and focused in a way that I often long for in the present tense.

I think back on the way I think I was back then and I get jealous. Of myself.

There are days now where I wonder what I exactly I’m doing with my time. There are days that I think about other artists and I am certain that they are getting so very much more done than I am. There are lots of days where I think that I am wasting the precious little life I have available to me by not doing more and getting more and being more than I currently am.

Are you an artist who thinks this? Probably.

Because chances are if you are a creator there are a million more idea seeds then there will ever be emotional, physical, mental resources to carry out those initial impulses to conclusion.

This, despite all emotional evidence to the contrary, is as it should be.

I was watching some show the other day on successful show runners for TV and listening to people talk about the insanity of that process. In one case a showrunner described the schedule for the creative product he worked on and then concluded by saying that humans have the capacity to do 90% of what he just explained. The last 10% were fumes and exhaustion.

You know what my first thought was after watching that?

“God you’re lazy.”

You know what my second thought was?

“You’ve only taught a class, written an essay, and spent 45 minutes on a creative project today. This is like a vacation day. Tomorrow you’ll do a real amount of work.”

Can I just say, what the fuck is that?

Because the other part of the show, the one that I think is the most perverse kind of pride, is the strange way that these creators talk about being miserable. They talk about loving the show so much that they sacrifice their lives, their loves, their actual in the moment living for it. What exactly is all of it for then? What kind of art will you make when you have no life other than art to draw from?

This is possible in short term bursts, perhaps. Maybe sometimes even preferable. But this is not a plan of artistic longevity. I don’t just mean that you’ll be tired and exhausted. I mean you literally will have no time to fill your creative research stores to make anything else worthwhile.

I don’t know about you but I want to be creating in 10, 20, 40 years. I don’t want to burn out at 35. To do that I’m going to need some opinions and stories beyond the ones I have now. If I miss all of my life and use up all the creative stores of inspiration in a mass and panicked frenzy of making, what will be left?

There is a complex, I think built in some part by our own internalized sense of worthlessness mixed with a Hollywood idea of fame and success, that tells us that the only version of productive creativity is one that exhausts the creator. We aim for the stay of constant producing, of being pushed to the very limit of what is possible, of working and working in a fevered dream state until we are used up and left empty husk shells at the side of our works.

This is the idea of creativity as inspired and frenzied genius – that it is something that possesses us, that we are nothing without it, that it is only through work that we can prove our value and work.

I know exactly zero people who actually work this way all the time.

I know about a million who work really really hard, then fart around watching bad television and doing nothing of “substance” for big stretches in between.

Of those million I’d say, oh, ALL percent of them feel shitty about the downtime.

Even writing these words, right now, I am thinking about the myriad of actual things I could be doing. I could be writing something that will go towards a brilliant novel. I could be practicing my piano and vocal improvisation skills. I could read one of the giant pile of books on game theory that I’ve amassed on my shelf. I could grade the mountain theater journals sitting next to me.

I could theoretically do all these things and if I try to weigh what I am doing in this moment against all the potential things and their potential values and usefulness, I will always always always come away thinking I haven’t done enough in enough time for enough people.

Does this sound familiar?

As you read this are you simultaneously saying, “Yeah, sure but she can say that because she’s actually doing a lot and I’m actually lazy” because my guess is you are.

I have been busier this semester than I have been in almost any time in the past 10 years that I can remember but I still watched a lot of bad TV. I still found time to fart around on the internet. I still found time to play video games.

And I think that part of the reason I was able to do so much wasn’t in spite of the down time but because of it.

We need to give ourselves a break once in a while.

It’s actually necessary for the work.

Seriously.

I look back at that person I was in college and if I am honest with myself I realize a few things. The first that I never worked as hard as I want to remember. There were long days of producing nothing, of taking time and cooking meals or searching match.com. I also know that I worked hard, but often far less smart. I spent hours and hours on things I can knock out in 20 minutes now. This is what comes with experience, the ability to get down to the heart of something and really do it and be done.

So in the interest of honesty, I’m going to stop pretending like it’s possible to work all the time. I’m going to stop pretending like a 30-minute lunch break is for quitters. I’m going to stop acting as if I don’t have phases where I just need to mess around on the internet. This is actually part of the way that the creative work gets made. The farting around is part of the work.

If I step back and really look at my body of work, I can see that boredom is a necessary part of the process. It creates room for new ideas to form. It allows space for us to consider something we don’t already know.

If you’re perfectly productive, you’ll never get bored.

So next time you think you should be making or doing something but instead you take a walk or a Netflix, don’t get so mad at yourself. I won’t.

Because if there’s one thing I really shouldn’t make time for in my schedule it’s the constant self-flagellation.

– A

Amateur is Latin for Love

Over the past six months my life has taken a radical shift. I went from the intensive grinding gears of two large scale projects – one a gig for Shakespeare in Clark Park in which I worked as a director for hire as wells as The Ballad of Joe Hill a work created and produced by my own company Swim Pony – into a far more predictable series of teaching gigs – a new post as voice teacher for Pig Iron’s APT, a residency at Drexel, coaching a mostly non-actor set to coach med students interpersonal skills at UPenn’s school of Medicine and directing a production of Midsummer at Arcadia.

As I headed into the summer I felt a sense of relief and apprehension. Relief that my time into September was booked with work that I both believed in and had found a way to appropriately compensate myself for. I felt a sense of pride at having booked myself solid for the first time ever with 6 months of artistic work alone while still paying a mortgage and socking away from money for savings. I thought and felt, “Finally, we are approaching a place of stasis, a solid foundation upon which a life can be built.”

And as I left the month of September, reasonably compensated, well received by press and peers and patrons on my work over the past months, I still felt somehow just a little unsettled by I can’t say exactly what: a sense that I’d done well but… With a feeling that I’d created two works of which I was proud, one that I felt was the first appropriately resourced self produced piece I’d ever been in charge of but… That I’d made shows that I think showed my professional skill, that highlighted many aspects of my expertise, plays that made me proud as a professional creator, and yet…

Yet, still, something niggled at me. The audiences were a bit timid at one. The energy not quite right in another. The joy, the abandon, the feeling, the… what? the… love.

Yes. That’s it. The love was what I felt missing. That underneath the polish and skill and work was just a little bit less love than I went into all this seeking. Somewhere in this summer of incredibly hard work and tiring hours and beautiful images and incredible ideas I was missing a little bit of amore.

Look. The people with whom I created my last two professional projects are ones that I adore. They are my core creators, most of them, the people that I will work with in many cases for the rest of my life. But something about these last two shows left me a bit cold. Not through any fault of my co-creators, but perhaps because I myself allowed myself to be swept up in the accomplishment of professionality, of the implied self worth that doing a thing at a “meaningful” level of competence and expertise did I let myself hide a little of the messy and silly and sometimes uncertain and ridiculous person that I love myself to be in a process. I doubt these co-creators would admit it, but I bet deep down they felt it.

I could not have spoken this to myself then as I do now. But I think I knew it. We all wanted a bit more of that love in our work.

So it was at this juncture that I looked into that stretch of fall to winter months with no “professional” work in sight. Here I found myself in a sea of students of varying ages and skills sets and talent levels ahead of me. It was here, with a chip on the shoulder and a block of doubt in the stomach that I set off into the wilds of “amateur” theater. I went to auditions and first classes and training session with zero expectation of artistic fulfillment, looking instead to do a decent job, make some connections, steel myself against the antsy feeling being out of “real” rehearsals. I intended to let life be simple for a bit in order to plan my re-emergence back into the “real” theater scene soon enough.

So I went to my classes with their small number of students in order to get them on board with the weirdo piece I wanted to create. I went to rehearsals to direct play that I have loathed for a very long time expecting to wade through language I could care less about. I went to work to train folks on characters and skills I have repeated ad nauseum over the last few years. I went to these things expected a heavy heart and soul. I went there ready to be frustrated with amateurism and a lack of professional rigor.

I went there expecting these things. And I found that I was wrong. I found myself, suddenly realizing that I was happier than I have been in months, possibly years. That heaviness and weight of proving myself and my worth had been freed from myself and that for the first time in a long time I have re-found a kind of love. Yes amazingly, I find myself at the near end of this time more inspired, more buoyant than I have in perhaps years. I went expecting amateurs and what I found was love.

So often we define the amateur as the absence of talent skill or training. Back in late October I read an article by Todd London about innovation in which he points out that the word Amateur comes from the Latin root for “love.” When I read this, something dropped in me. An “Ah ha” kind of moment. A moment where I realized that the amateur is not solely, as is so commonly assumed, defined as one who does something at a “non-professional” level but one who does it for no other reason than a deep and abiding love. The amateur can have no other reason for doing the thing other than the pure and true love of it, for they have no other compensation to reward them. How often we degrade it, define ourselves in opposition to it, in order to prove our own worth. How often, I realized, I myself was working, creating and doing things in so many ways simply to prove that I was most certainly not an amateur but a professional, a person worthy of time attention and thought. Worthy to be seem by foundations to presenters to peers this need for professionalism had infected my spirits. It had stopped me from silliness. It is true that over the past several months I have created things and worked with those that on almost any level one would not call “professional.” But in exchange I have found something that might be worthier still: Love.

And after months away from it there are moments that I cherish

– The act of creating ritual, silly and ridiculous and childish

– The moment of discovery for the very first time in a scene or a word or a movement

– The undaunted display of failure, the expectation that one is at the beginning of a journey, and the sense that one is not worth less because they have not yet mastered the way how to do something

This thought, this core of the work as an exploit of love has lifted me. And now that I find myself nearing the end, I wonder how I take these with me back to the land of professional living. I wonder how I take the happiness and joy and love that I have lived with over these past months back to my work and my life and my collaborators.

And were this any other post here, I’d find some way to neatly wrap all this up into a perfect bow of professional conduct and meaning. But I don’t think I’ll do that just now. I’ll leave it ragged and happy and unfinished. And just be satisfied with that.

On Valuing Age, On Appreciating Wisdom

I find my thoughts drifting these days to my almost three year old niece and the fact that any day now she will become an older sister. She’s decided on her name for the impending baby. I imagine is as excited as an almost three year old can be about such a thing, understanding it about as much as an almost three year old can.

I keep thinking, “Man kid. You have no idea how much everything is going to change.”

Then: “You are about to feel so grown up.”

When my thoughts drift this way, I think about how much my identity as an older sibling has meant to me, shaped me, and shifted who and how I am. My earliest memories start around the time my own sister was born – at that “almost three” age. So for as long as I’ve had a remembrance of myself, it’s included the sense that I was older and more experience than at least one person in my little world.

It had a profound effect.

It meant that even when I was a “little kid”, I was still the “big girl” in the family. It meant that I always saw myself in the light of being the first to pioneer new frontiers. It meant that I linked being older with being wiser, stronger and more powerful. Getting bigger meant I would be that much more the holder of experience that I could pass along. It became a deep value of mine, the acquisition of such wisdom, and it’s become a huge part of who I am and what I want out of my life. So I’ve always reveled in “grown up-ness” and deeply appreciated what each increasing year has given me. And I still look forward to getting older with excitement and anticipation.

Of course, there are plenty who would tell me I’m a young pup. Which, of course, I am in many respects. While many days I feel like I’ve done a lot and lived a fair amount, there are certainly times when I see myself in context of those that are ahead of me and feel young and inexperienced indeed. But unless you have just been born NOW! or are Jiroemon Kimura you always have someone younger and someone older than you. And that means that you always have the ability to view your identity in the context of being more youthful than someone ahead of you, or further along than someone behind you.

The arts in general (and the performing arts in particular) aren’t always the best contexts for celebrating experience. While we pay some token homage to great masters, anecdotally it feels to me like we tend to reward the promise in a young savant painter, the grace and beauty of a youthful dancer, and the charisma of the impish new actor far more than we do the earned and learned skill of decades long practitioners in these same mediums.

And really, that’s too bad.

I think fetishizing the early work of artists is damaging to art as a whole. Not that such young work can’t be beautiful and moving but it’s often much simpler and straight ahead than the stuff we make later on. In art as in life life, we generally learn that things that seemed so black and white once upon a time are much more complex and mysterious. Things that we held positions on in unilateral unyielding ways we start to see shades of gray in. Things we never ever believe we were capable of, both good and bad, we suddenly realize we have completed. Our creations cannot help but reflect our deeper and more multifaceted views of the world.

So though I can appreciate the promise in the early works of a budding artist, it’s usually in their mid and later stuff that I think you really discover the complexity and depth of what a creator has to offer. It’s in the complexity that you see what these makers are really made of. It’s these kinds of works that may not be so easily digestible that challenge me to be a deeper and better art viewer. It’s in the stuff that reflects all the life that others gained that I see the kind of artists I want to be. I believe we should be treating this like gold.

And I try to remember this when I sometimes fantasize about my early creation, try to caution myself from forgetting its value. I try and stop idealizing an approach and attitude that lacked the decade of making I now have and remember how easy it is to forget what was tough, rough and messy.

I’ve had the luxury of re-working shows that I started creating 3, 5, 7 years ago. And with each of them I have had a moment in rehearsal where I think:

“I am so so much better at this than we used to be. We are all so so much better now than we were before.”

Not everyone gets that chance and sometimes a slow building of skill and experience can seem to have always been there. Which is why it’s so important to remember not just what you have learned but that you have learned, that value of age and experience.

The arts are a punishing field. If you’ve lasted a while, you must know something that others who haven’t stuck it out don’t. But there aren’t enough voices out there that tell you that.

Recently, I’ve seen a number of companies with variations on apprentice/young professional programs. I’m often struck when I see them in action by the distance between the actors with years of well earned experience and where these fresh faced folks currently are. I jokingly say that I keep seeing babies on stage. Sweet, wonderful, babies. But babies nonetheless.

These lovely eagerlings are the promise of artistic potential, but they are often not the delivery of that craft. At least not yet.

And that’s a great thing, so long as the attitude of our community is that as an early career artist, the work ahead of you should be what you have to look forward to. It’s a wonderful place to be so long as you know you will be rewarded as your depth and skill and knowledge increases from here. It’s a lovely path to look ahead to when it means that someday you can turn back to the road traveled thus far with pride and not a sense of burden.

It’s important to remember.

I don’t want to be part of a profession where people don’t need to wish they were babies again. I want to be part of medium that rewards me because I want to keep growing up.

– A

Fifteen years

I’ve been talking a lot in generalities lately. Big warm and fuzzy ideas that I think need to be guiding us as we make our way forward as creators. I think these things are important. I believe in them.

There are also times when the in your face, nitty gritty details of working in the arts hit me with a force and vehemence that is surprising and overwhelming.

Let’s get a little bit into the gritty and nitty today.

Last night I sat in the audience of a show. It was in a big high-end theater. I helped usher so I saw every single person that walked into the theater on that Thursday night. I exchanged pleasantries, I tore their ticket and I watched them walk into the theater.

I swear at least 80% of them were 65 or older. It’s probably closer to 90%.

I swear this is not hyperbole.

Of all the people I saw working at the theater that night (Literary manager, actors, crew, bartender) only one person that might be in that age bracket. All these young people working at the theater and a much older subset coming to the theater.

That’s weird, right?

Also, I did not love this play.

It was not, for the record, the actors’ fault. They were doing the job. They really were. They were doing their very best to justify some really horrifyingly inane stuff. Things that I took a lot of issue with as a feminist, as an artist, as a –

Look. I’m gonna stop there. I don’t want to rail on this performance. Because the particulars of what I didn’t like aren’t really the point.

The point is I came home fuming. I was mad at this thing. I was mad at the theater. I was sad for the actors that I saw that night, who probably got paid well for this gig, but who I doubt much like what they were saying up there. And I felt this looming thing, of the work that we make that we don’t totally agree with but we do anyway because we think it’s the stuff that audiences will like. I was upset that I feel like I see so many works that people are just slogging through for a paycheck. Work they have resigned themselves to because they don’t see any other way.

And I thought a lot how often I see so few other people that are my age in the audience around me.

Let me say right now that I am not trying to rail on people older than me. This is not an ageist argument. Because youth is not better. People who are younger than 65 are not better or worse people that those that are over 65. But they are only 12.8% of the population in the US according to the 2010 census data. So there’s no reason that they ought to be 80 or 90% of the patronage. I don’t think this is just the particular theater I happened to be at. I think this is mostly true across the non-profit theater world.

The average life expectancy in the US is currently 78 years. Which means that statistically in 15 years almost everyone in that audience I was in will be dead.

Something in theater needs to change.

Because if we don’t do something as an art form, we’re going to be dead too.

I’d like you to think for a moment about the example of Sleep No More.

I think what they’ve done with this show is a revolutionary achievement of a play. Not just because this is a massively successful experimental show. Not because it requires a ton from its audience and they can’t wait to participate. Because the night I went there were SO MANY KINDS OF PEOPLE SEEING IT.

Whether you like its particular style and form or not, and I had plenty of qualms with some aspects of it, you have to admire, support and love the idea that something so weird and avant-garde has managed to hit a chord in so people that has re-energized the desire to go to see a play, often multiple times. This thing has made it fun and exciting and cool and not just “good for you.”

Can we learn from this? Not that we should copy them, but that there is hope that such people are out there. We just need to get to them.

I think model of buying tickets and parking downtown and big lobbies and concession stands and long programs with dramaturgy notes and season subscriptions and paying a lot of money to leave a plaque on the seat is over.

I think it’s been over for a while.

I think there is an ever-shrinking base of people with more money than most that like this system just the way it is. But I don’t think they are our future. Let me be clear: I don’t think they are bad. And I don’t think everyone who is over 65 wants that old way of seeing theater. But I think more of them do. And I don’t think we should be making theater only for these kinds of people. Because if we do, I think we will exclude people who don’t care to take in performance this way. And if we don’t figure out how to get in those other people, soon we won’t have anyone left.

I think most of us kind of know this already. I think most of us are really afraid to admit it.

If you are a theater maker, for just this moment, be really honest with yourself: When you are in rehearsals making your art, who is the person you imagine in the audience? Are they like you? Do they think the way you do? Do they have similar interests and concerns? Do they look at the world from a similar perspective?

Is everyone in the room somewhere between 25 and 45?

Are those the same people that you see in the audience?

And are you ok with that?

Are the people you spend so much time courting, the people around whom we start to tweak and change our work for, the same people we most want in the seats? Or are they the ones that we think we are likeliest to get?

I’m not just talking about age. I’m talking about real diversity of audience. Of perspective on what performance can and should be. Of people who come to what we make from a variety of classes and income levels. People with a variety of facility in technology. People seeking different genres: action, suspense, horror, western, romance, comedy, science fiction, magic realism.

Is there a large swath of the country that simply don’t listen to music? No. Everyone listens to music. They listen to different kind of music. They take it in through different kinds of experiences. But they don’t avoid the genre of art as a whole.

We need to find a way to do the same with our performances.

We need to find a way to get more people interested in what we’re doing.

This is not an option.

This is simply a fact.