HowlRound: One of my all-time favorite questions to ask in a job interview is, “How do you evaluate success, and can you describe a situation where you feel like you really succeeded?” The answers are wildly disparate and run the gamut from happily quantified box office totals to a grimace quickly flashed before a long story that ends with, “...but we opened, so we made it.” The metrics for success for theatre artists change from show to show.
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This article creates an extensive laundry list of the definition of success as defined by different types of theatre companies and programs around the country. Often times ticket sales are what dictate success, and the more sophisticated and educated theatre people judge their success by the social impact it has on the world. These change varying from what type of company is producing the show, its important to acknowledge the people around it, the location its in, the demographics, and if its respectful to all of those, its then that a sense of social success. Since the article does such a great job of describing definitions of success, I want to add what my definition of success is. Success in a theatrical sense to me can be defined as a production process that surpasses simply getting the job eventually done, a company is successful when they have a process and an organizational system that can easily be modeled and repeated.
This article is really interesting because it is probably a question every student in the school of drama asks themselves, "Am I successful/Am I doing this well?" The article takes a solid approach by saying the measure of success depends on the goal of the production company by highlighting different theatre companies as case studies to show ways theatre companies succeed. This can easily be shown by the shows produced/types of actors being cast fitting the mission statement or ticket sales or type of programming offered by the company but how can this be measure be equated easily for students. Yes the obvious answer is a grade, which measures performance rather than knowledge, which isn’t the point of school. Is writing a long-term paper a way to measure or a survey? Does school success only get realized when it comes time to apply for jobs and see what jobs you get? Jane Cox writes that at the beginning of each show everyone working on the production is asked their expectations and can evaluate success by meeting goals. This should be an expectation in the education world. Students should create more specific goals than just wanting to learn and milestones that they would like to hit and use that as a tool to measure success rather than comparing yourself to a grading scale. Rebecca Noon points out that reflection is just as important as having an outcome. This is something that needs to be emphasized more in grade school education where the culture is getting a grade and feedback and move on instead of reflect on feedback to look at how to improve. This would help to get people out of the straight A’s are success mentality.
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