theatre

What’s old is new again (?)
The 2006 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe

Coming home…

Sometimes a piece of art in early stages is filled with a certain kind of special newness.

It’s a fluttering, butterfly feeling, a buoyancy that fills me with brilliance and space. It feels like being full of something delightfully lemony and bright. It feels like opening a door a crack and peaking into a possible future full of light.

It can be with a person – an actor or co-creator. But it just as easily could be a bit of writing, a song, an inspiration, the kind of process you’ve just discovered.

It’s a creative crush, this affinity and affection. I think of this thing, the who or what I’m falling for, and it starts to feel like a piece of me. Or rather, it feels like I am beginning to know it, and I like it, and I want to be even more a part of it. It feels like it could become a piece of me, lifting me up and making me better. I want to mesh these two separate things – the work and myself – into a single whole.

In the wanting to be filled up with this deliciousness I treat my memories of this bit of text written or character choice. I do it over and over. I listen to the same snippet of music or replay in my mind this or that scenic choice. I take it out when I’m blocked like a secret piece of candy, mining this tiny taste of sweet for sustenance. And through this replaying of little moments, obsessing and relishing in the details like a gushy teenager, I think of where this thing might go in the future. I think about our potential happily ever after.

It’s sort of like falling in love. Falling in love the way one would with a potential lover, but instead with my work, with my own capacity for creation.

And while it does feel that way, like love, I think that love is not exactly the right way to describe this feeling. I think it’s closer to desire, infatuation. Closer because the feeling gives a glimpse at something perfect and mysterious without letting one in on all the arduousness of specificity, of actually having to do the work of completing the promised outcome.

Perhaps in art as in life, infatuation and love feel confusingly similar, but are not quite the same.

Desire, need, infatuation are emotions based in hunger and lack. They are shadows, mere glimpses at potential. And I think it is only possible in absence of the whole where one can maintain an imagined perfection.

As I once heard someone say, there are two kinds of art works – perfect ones and finished ones.

Love is something different. It grows out of actually weathering through the test of stress and time. It is a gathering. Of knowledge. Of familiarity. Of fault. Of history. It is precise in a way that infatuation cannot be, because it is built on actual details and shared experience.

I think that our artistic work is like a romantic partner. It is a relationship we have to manage over time. And I think that in our art, as in our personal lives, we need to define what kind of partnership we believe in having with our companion. Do we seek a turbulent but intense bond that is unknowable and always elusive? Or do we work our way to a cozy if duller comfort?

Perhaps this is where the myth of the wild art of youth comes from. The work of our 20’s is like the kind of boyfriends one had right out of college. They are a bit messy and dangerous. They hurt you and teach you where you need to keep yourself protected. But they mean so very very much. They have moments that seems so impossibly intense and lovely that even if they turn out terribly, you love them for their failures.

Are these early plays the ones we settle down with? Or do we instead slowly grow into our art? As we grow we begin to revisit things we initially passed over because they weren’t shiny enough. We tackle subjects and modes of working that we couldn’t quite grasp the depth of in the first go round. And we stop trying so hard to impress and begin to steep ourselves in tenderness and support, in a making that is deeper and perhaps more lasting…

Is one better? I don’t know. But I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

The first full piece I premiered in Philadelphia was a show I created called The Ballad of Joe Hill. I made that work in 2006. And this fall I will be presenting it again after seven years.

This seems a little impossible – seven years for a work to come to fruition. That a thing I started during a time in my life that was intensely uncertain will find a new form when so much of who I am and what I do is now known. This piece, which is one that examines what a life is worth and how we make it so, is one that began a relationship with so many of the people I now think of as home. And it is one that I have often looked back fondly on for the sheer creative ineptitude and blind luck and intuitive spirit that guided its creation. It was a piece born out of those infatuated seeds. It was a piece I wept and worried and laughed over at every step of its creation. And in watching it again, in thinking about what was there that first go round, I see so many things that still lift me up with light. And I wonder what it will mean to go back there.

Can I find love within this thing borne of infatuation?

Or perhaps I’m simply framing this all wrong.

If desire is steeped in anonymity and vulnerability and love in recognition and protection, perhaps my question ought not to be whether one is better than the other. Perhaps I do not need to assume that the thing must be one or the other.

Maybe my question should be whether they must be mutually exclusive.

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.

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

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.

It’s never what you think it is

Sticking with it: it’s where we separate real artists from the people who used to make art.

Because real art making is not about your amazing idea. It’s about not stopping. Real art making is about learning that ideas are only worth their executional salt. If you only dream it, if you never do it, you haven’t actually made anything.

And that’s as it should be, no? A cook who dares not near a stove can’t really claim his title. A swimmer who never hits the water doesn’t have much credibility. And plumbers are only made so by, well, plumbing things.

Do you feel despair, my dears, as I do between those long stretches of making anything? It’s because until you create again, you are just another person who used to make art. It’s because you can feel that impulse, that inertial force, that ease in which you just might stop and give up. Unless you’re making some art, you aren’t actually an artist.

And isn’t it just the bitterest of pills to swallow?

I look at the people younger than me and I want to ask them: How many of your fellow artistically minded graduates really hunkered down and decided to make a life in the arts? How many incredible creative compatriots decided to do something else? How sure are you that you’ll never give up?

I look at the people in my own age bracket and I want to yell: Think of all the people you’ve made work with in the last decade? How many of those people are still doing it? Isn’t that scary?! Aren’t you tired like me? Do you worry that you will keep going?

I look at the people a generation ahead of me that are still doing it and I want to inquire: How? How are you still here? Can you promise me it gets better? How did you make it work? Do you still worry about giving up?

In those times between being someone who used to make art and being an artist, how do you keep summoning up the energy and effort and love and vulnerability?

I don’t mean to say that if you aren’t cast in a show you don’t count. Art work is not limited to the opportunities that others afford us. Our work is so much more than the moment of performance in front of an audience. Our work is reading about the subject we want to create from. Our work is learning a new monologue or asking a friend to come and read our freshly written scene. Our work is discussing an idea and creating a plan of action. It’s searching out objects and finding inspirational images or writing 500 words a day to figure out what kind of stuff we actually want to make.

Our art is so much more than just an outcome. But it also must be more than just an idea.

The art in our mind – the play imagined, the painting visualized, the text  to be written – is always perfect. And the actual work we make is always something short of that ideal. Ideas are not art. Art is when the wheel hits pavement and starts to generate friction. It’s when reality begins to pierce the perfection.

Want an ever bitterer pill?

Your good ideas and intentions simply won’t matter if they never get implemented.

Your beautiful dreams are of no substance if you do not hang out long enough to get them done.

There is a new push in teaching and child development to stop telling kids how smart they are and to instead praise how hard they work. Turns out that when someone is praised for being good at something, they are incentivized to keep this image of themselves intact. If you think you are smart, if you want to keep this idea of yourself intact, doesn’t it make sense that you won’t want to put yourself in a situation that would prove otherwise? And it turns out that when you tell children they are “smart” they are a lot less likely to try something beyond their current capacity to succeed. When you are afraid of failure, you play it safe.

What to do? Tell them they are good at working really hard. Teach them that they will get a lot from trying really hard. Tell them the amount of effort and work they put into something will reap an equivalent reward. The difference between being smart and working hard is that one is a state to maintain and the other is an action to perform. Which one do you think is more productive?

You young ‘ens, with your amazing and fancy new ideas! Oh! How can I express how much I know where you are? Your artistry is like clay in your hands. You feel its heft and weight and shape. You know you are capable of making it into whatever you need it to be. You are strong. You are artistic potential incarnate, if only you could just get started. You know you can make awesome things. You just don’t have the right tools yet to shape this beautiful raw material. You just haven’t been given the opportunity to present what you can do.

Forget that opportunity. It’s never coming. Just throw that clay on the floor and start making whatever you can in the best way you know how.

I spent a year out of school waiting for the moment to become the artist I knew myself to be. I worked for others and held my own ideas tight inside myself. I waited and waited for the right place to display myself, to unveil what I knew I had to say. In that waiting I kept thinking “Oh how surprised all of you will be when you see what I really am!” In that year that I waited and dreamed and hid myself I wasn’t just less than the artists I wanted to be, I just wasn’t an artist. And it took me realizing that I’d spent a year working in a coffee shop and a cheese store (and that this was NOT going to be the sum of my very expensive education) to realize I needed to stop waiting and start doing.

That play you’ve been half working on for the last six months? You know, the one that you’re already not that excited about?  You know that essay you have been meaning to write but just can’t get into? That painting that’s already a little underwhelming?

All those works of art, the ones that feel like they are already imperfect and kind of one dimensional and boring and maybe I hate them and this isn’t the art I was really meant to make…

Go finish it.

Not because it’s going to be good. (It probably won’t be.) Go finish it because it teaches you how not to give up. Go finish it because it teaches you to soldier on in the face of your own limitations. Go finish it because it teaches you the value of “working hard” and not “being smart.” Go finish it because this kind of work is the lesson that will teach you the most about what it really means to succeed, which is not leaving the work undone and unfinished.

I defy you to show me any company that you love, any artist you admire, whose cannon does not include some seriously stupid and poorly executed crap. I look back at the things I’ve done and I cannot help but wince at over-long and flowery writing, at “dramatic” directing choices that now simply read as amateurish and scene work that I intended as intense but simply came off as inane. There are essays I have written in the course of this writing project that I seriously hate, but I published them anyway. And truth be told, the ones that I deemed most perfect are not the ones that have flown into people’s hearts. They are often the ones I might have sat on if I hadn’t forced myself to put it out there.

Folks a bit further on in your careers, correct me if I’m wrong here, but as far as I can tell, the need to succeed only gets worse. As you develop better taste, you’re that much more aware of the gulf between what you want and what you actually are.

But isn’t that better? Would you actually want to know that there is some pinnacle of artistic prowess and you’ve achieved it? That what there is to learn is something you’ve already gleaned?

Artists that survive are not the most brilliant or the most talented or the smartest. They are the ones who don’t let the idea of their work get in the way of the work they’re actually doing. They are the ones that do not look at failure as referendum on their worth. They look at process and see if they did they best that they could do. Artists who are successful are the ones that keep making art.

Here’s a hint: some of your work will suck. No matter what you do, some of those babies you bring into the world are big fat ugly stinkers. And even if they aren’t, even if they’re great, even when they’re earth-shatteringly groundbreaking, they’re likely never as good as they were in your head.

Let me repeat that for emphasis:

It’s never going to be as good as it was in your head.

We all might as well get used to it now.

(I’m looking at you.)

Stop making excuses. Stop waiting for the impulse to appear. Stop waiting until you are as capable of execution as your idea is worth.

Stop waiting. Start making.

A

PS: You folks who’ve been around the artistic block a few times, help some of us feel better. What’s the worst thing you ever made?

Are you climbing up the mountain?

There’s this thing that my friends and I used to do in college while we were eating.

“Oh my God, I am so fucked right now. I have a biochem lab write up and a Theatre History paper AND I need to read three chapters for sociology.”

“Well let me tell you that I am so f-ed right now because I have to do the Theatre History paper, memorize two scenes, complete three comp sci projects that are all past due and I have an a capella rehearsal until 10.”

“And can I just say how totally and completely screwed I am because I have a poly sci exam tomorrow that I haven’t even started studying for, a 10 pager for linguistics, the Theatre History paper, the scene memorization, two rehearsals and I said I’d tutor my roommate in French for an hour.”

This can go on ad infinitum.

There was a perverse glee with which we detailed and enshrined our over committed-ness. It was pandemic across the student body. It was our mascot, this looming specter of the impossible tasked to us. We wore it with pride the way we might have worn out maroon and white had we been a school with more traditional means of displaying pride. (Perhaps it’s why something as lame as “The Garnet Tide” was allowed to continue into perpetuity. Really? The Garnet Tide? Though, for such an extremely liberal school, a vaguely menstrual symbol of our collegial devotion is also sort of fitting. But that’s a side note.)

Anyway, in thinking a little deeper about the writing that I did last time I was in this space, I was trying to suss out the exact difference for myself between useful frustration at one’s limitations – the kind that leads to progress and growth – and shame and anger that pulls one back and gets in the way. I started thinking about that habit, one that I took to so easily along the route of higher education. And I started to realize how this parasite of “I am so fucked” has found itself quite a number of comfortable hosts here in the artistic community.

How many times when you talk to people about their work do you hear them bemoan their over-full schedule with stuff it sounds like they aren’t really excited about? When was the last time you asked someone the dreaded “What are you working on?” and received a calm and happy, “Just this one amazing project that I love”? I notice in myself a weird feeling of not enough if I answer that I am simply doing one show for months (years!), rather than rehearsing one, finishing off the run of another, while prepping three for the next coming months in the span of a few weeks.

Why is that?

To be sure, there are financial pressures that force us to do more than we ought. But if it were money alone, why are there are an awful lot of projects that I see people take on for next to no pay or exposure? Projects they don’t even like. Projects that they seem to refer to with disdain.

“If you hate the work and you aren’t really getting any money, why are you doing this?” I often want to ask.

But I don’t. It doesn’t feel like my place to tell someone that they seem to be making some pretty artistically self-destructive choices. And who am I, with my measly one or two projects a year, to say anything at all?

What if we all took a step back? What if we all tried to cull the herd and take on things that really serve at least two of three purposes – artistic growth, making money, or real  enjoyment.

I used to have a day job that was just a money job. I hated it and it felt like it was actually making me stupider. It was also really easy. And over time, I realized that even if this job paid me double, triple, ten times what I was making, I would still resent being there. And that’s when I quit.

I’ve also had artistic projects that felt like they were so fulfilling and so happiness inducing that I would find a way to make time to make them happen even if I had no cash. So I kept doing them, because they feed enough of the other parts of me at that moment to make the little money worth it.

Sometimes we start things because we love them and they make us happy, and we forget to check back in and see if that’s still happening. Like any relationship, the way that you are when you first start seeing someone/something has to change over time. A job that at one point in life was a real step forward, ten years later might feel like a step back. That only makes sense. But it’s tough in the moment to remember that, that sometimes we outgrow the things we once wanted.

Here’s the image that I have in my head. (PS credit where it’s due – I first started picturing this image for myself after hearing an amazing speech by Neil Gaiman from a commencement at UArts). Imagine the artist you want to be, the life you want to lead.  That life is the top of a mountain. With each step you take, are you going up the mountain or down? Are you getting closer to the top, or walking away? Even if the thing you’re considering seems like a good idea, is it still getting you closer to the peak?

If it’s not, why are you doing it?

Coming back to the original thing for a moment: Taking on too much can be a way to distract ourselves.

If we are so busy that we don’t have time to stop and think, when we are so busy looking at the road just in front of us and hacking through the brush just to move ahead, it’s actually easier in some ways. We don’t have to evaluate choices. The work to get ahead is so strenuous, so effortful, that the prize is simply moving forward, having done it at all.

That forward motion may be exactly what you need. Or not.  You have to look at the mountain to know.

When I was in school, I had a moment where I realized that by committing myself to a Chemistry thesis, a devised acting piece, an original directing work, a voice recital in four languages, not to mention the choice to shed dorm life and learn to pay bills and cook my own food all at once, I was giving myself an out.

The out was this: If I do all of these things, no one of them has to count.

If my concert was under prepared, that was only understandable, as clearly I had no time to rehearse. If my thesis was a little sloppily slapped together, well that’s alright, because I was balancing so much else. If I wasn’t the actor I imagined, that was because I was too busy not because I didn’t really belong on stage. If I paid my bills late, who could blame me, no one else in my peer group was acting like such an adult.

All these things together meant that no one of them really reflected back on me. Their shortcomings were the limitations of my time. Their successes were the “real” me.

As a life long perfectionist, this has always been a struggle – finding ways to keep hold of this “real” me fantasy. But these days, when I have actually set up my life in such a way as to actually have that stuff, the time and money, I find myself strangely more bottled up than ever. As I found ways to have more control over my life, it was more difficult to keep pretending that given infinite time and resource I would someday make those amazing things that I kept promising myself about.

I think it’s because there’s finally no excuse. There’s not much left between “real” me and myself. And it’s hard look at the things you’ve done and say, “That is the best I could do.”  Not because I was busy, not because I was under funded, because it was actually just the extent to which I was capable. This is why we (definitely me!) procrastinate. Not because we are bad. Because we are scared that we might be less capable than we wish we were. So we over book and over commit so we never get the chance to measure the “real” thing, and so we can keep the fantasy.

The times when I have most found myself climbing down the mountain are the times when I was afraid to come up short. They were the times when I let myself be measured by other people’s expectations (and hated them for it!) because I feared myself incapable of succeeding by my own. The times when I have most despised theater and myself in it are the very times when I’m carrying all this crap I didn’t want, when it feels like it’s holding me back, like some kind of gravitational inevitability. That time and energy were conspiring to keep me from my best self.

There is a real sadness in giving up the idea of the “real” self, and as Americans I think it’s especially difficult. We live in a culture that teaches one to dream, dream, dream. BE YOUR BEST SELF, we are admonished. And while I am all for dreaming, the flip side of that tendency is get so comfortable with the imagining of one’s best self, that we never actually bother to get it. You have to give up the ideal to make something real.

I think more likely, more often, the thing holding me back is me. Me struggling to be ok with being less than perfection.