The Interval: Over the last few years, my therapist has learned more about theatre than she ever wanted to know. I frequently tell her about some interaction or event that has left me feeling confused, unsure, and more often than not, terrible, and I’ll ask her, “Am I crazy? This is a weird thing to have happened, right? This isn’t normal, is it?” And she’ll say, “None of this is normal.”
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I had never really considered how much harder working in theater might make staying mentally healthy. To me, theater is how I learned to compartmentalize and de-stress. Working in the shop in high school was pretty much the only time I wasn't thinking about my homework and insane schedule. I am doing the same thing right now with my work study. Like Halley says, the fact that my mental illness comes in waves is what keeps me in the shop and gets me going to the gym. Keeping a strong routine is what keeps the health issues at bay a lot of the time, and the fact that working out is healthy for your body is just a nice perk. I also really like what Lauren says about counseling for actors who have to portray more disturbing scenes on stage. I had never thought about how those things might make it necessary to seek therapy. I never really avoided therapy because of the tortured artist myth, but I have avoided it because I think my issues aren't bad enough and that without them I wouldn't be me. Its a really bad thought process that I am still trying to bring myself out of. Generally, I am just very happy this article exists because it embodies a lot of the things I think about myself, but think that no one else could also possibly be thinking or be able to help me with.
One of the comments I always heard when I said I wanted to go into theater was "Is that stable?" The answer is clearly no. You might be able to find a steady job, and that's great, but there's going to be a lot of instability too, and that thought is incredibly stressful. As the article was saying, with some mental illnesses it's important that there be a routine, but with the landscape and expectations of the business that's not quite possible. The other point that really spoke to me was the call for aid for actors/anyone else who deal with incredibly tough content. When I worked on the opera Dead Man Walking, the material was so tough that it became necessary for our stage manager to arrange the bringing in of therapy dogs to rehearsals. Now, seeking an actual therapist might better benefit someone in the long run, but it was a way for all members of the team (singers, musicians and production team) to take a break from all of the harsh, disturbing themes that are present throughout the show. I think it's important that we address how we care for the mental wellbeing of our teams, because theater is meant to show the rough stuff, it's meant to bring the disturbing to a public eye and comment on it, so we can't get rid of that content. If it's rough for the audience, it's definitely rough for the actors.
Mental health is so important, but it really is a neglected topic in theatre. We get frequent reminders to “take care of yourself” or “get eight hours of sleep,” and then we get scheduled for 12 out of 14s an calls until midnight every night with eight thirty classes the next morning. I point this out because Carnegie Mellon is one of the more conscientious theatrical environments. Conditions here are better than most places, but they are still not good. I have struggled with several different mental disorders, and I still have very bad days or weeks on occasion. Increasingly, theatres are moving in a direction of having resources on hand to help when these issues when they arise, but theatres consistently fail to provide preventative care standards. One of my mentors in highschool made a point of making sure that everybody took breaks to eat during rehearsals and tech. Partially because of this, he is widely considered someone who goes above and beyond to take care of his employees. That shouldn’t be the case. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a great guy and a skilled professional, but making sure employees eat shouldn’t be above and beyond. It needs to be the new normal.
Theater is supposed to be a form of catharsis, but I have only seen the audience benefit from that and the artists that create the work keep going down into this black hole of mental illness. It is a shame that as an industry, there is no structure put in place to handle things like this. One of the ladies (Lauren Villegas) in the article talked about romanticizing the idea of tortured artists producing good art. This is a recurring theme in the industry, it not only applies to the professional world but to the education world also. People are expected to work no matter what and can't complain or they will be seen as not grateful for where they are. The part of the article that resonated with me the most was when Lauren Villegas talked about being a first generation immigrant and stability. I am an immigrant, stability has always been something that was instilled in me from childhood as a measure of success. Lately, I have really been thinking about what that is going to mean for me continuing in this as a career. Just like Lauren's mum worries for her, my whole family worries for me and sometimes in all honesty, I worry for myself.
I’ve come to realize that as artists we are more prone to have mental health challenges, just because of the way our brain works. From anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive disorders, to impostor syndrome. Everyone has their own coping ways and some of us don’t even know we have those challenges until someone else points it out. We have made some improvements as a society. More and more often this type of conversations are popping up, and more companies are understanding the value of their employees mental health. Taking a day off for mental health reasons now is a valid excuse that 30 years ago, people wouldn’t even dare to bring up. Because admitting that you need some private time to regroup and recover was not seen a positive thing. Keeping the conversation going destroys the taboo of mental illness, but also allows other people to understand that they are not the only ones facing a battle with their brain.
I am guilty of using the word diva on some actors. This article made me realize that when I used the word with my coworkers, I was not being considerate enough for the actors. It is probably not this simplistic, but now that I look back, I could have been thinking more from their perspectives. Just being in the rehearsal room, observing the directors and actors study and enact conflicts, toxic masculinity and all other kinds of problematic moments was triggering enough for me, and I can’t imagine being thrown in the situation over and over. So much intense emotions fly in the room and they are repeated over and over in front of many people. Being more considerate and giving the actors more space would be the least I could do for them. There were so many other points in the article that I truly resonated with as well. I also go to therapy regularly. It has been greatly helpful in keeping my sanity and perspective. Every time I walk in I usually think I have nothing to say but end up filling up the whole session with so many new discoveries. But that is largely because the CMU health insurance covers the therapy 100%. Mental health, insurance and finance issues are too real, even for me. I appreciate that people talk about the issue and make them more visible.
This article was very interesting to me because, this is a topic I've thought about a lot - but not often through the eyes of a performer. Getting up every day and dragging myself to high school was always really hard for me because I was depressed, exhausted, and had lost my love of learning. I had no desire to do anything I knew I would have to do, so I didn't want to go. I realized that the random moments of each day when I would get to do art and be creative, were my few really happy moments of each day. This is how I decided I wanted to go to art school. I realized that for me, an everyday same schedule life was not for me - regardless of what my anxiety says, I know that deep down I love the constantly changing life that theatre presents to me. I don't get bored, I'm doing something I love, and every day I wake up excited (still tired, but excited) to see what my day will bring. While I, as a design and production student, have been able to go through this journey, I realized I rarely thought about the daily life of an actor. When I was in high school, I acted on occasion but eventually stopped after doing a show that was particularly traumatizing to me - because it depicted a scene that was very similar to something that had happened to me in real life - and reliving it every night was very hard. I do not understand how actors can perform in so many different ways, while having to pretend so many different terrible things are happening to them, and then wake up the next day and come back to do it again.
Oh man. It has been a long time since the first paragraph of an article really stopped me and required me to read it a couple times. This article did that. Victoria Myers starts off this piece by recounting a conversation she has frequently with her therapist. "Over the last few years, my therapist has learned more about theatre than she ever wanted to know. I frequently tell her about some interaction or event that has left me feeling confused, unsure, and more often than not, terrible, and I’ll ask her, “Am I crazy? This is a weird thing to have happened, right? This isn’t normal, is it?” And she’ll say, “None of this is normal.”" I can't tell you how many times I have heard some iteration of this conversation from people I have worked and studied theatre with. Mental health is indeed a broad topic, but "the challenges of working in theatre... [involve] dealing with depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions. A life in theatre involves instability, rejection, lack of financial resources, lack of workplace protections, competition, questionable loyalty, intense emotion, intense community, intense isolation, confusing social mores, and more. In other words, a lot of things that aren’t normal, or, as my therapist would say, “It’s a foundation of quicksand.”" So many of the people I worked with when I first moved to DC that were doing the freelancing life have either left the theatre business all together, or have transitioned to full time gigs and do theatre when they can on the side. We need to figure out how to do better, and address what our "normal" is and fix it. We can't rely on young people as our source of labor, and see them/us as replaceable and move on.
With everything I have gone through over the past year in regards to trying to find better ways to live a healthy life with my mental illness, this article was both difficult and extremely validating to read. One of the issues they addressed is something I have been thinking a lot about since I decided to leave theatre behind in my professional life, and that is the romanticization of the tortured artist. It is, of course, an extremely unhealthy to perpetuate the myth that in order to produce true and real art you must not seek treatment and instead solely grapple with your mental health through your art. I believe part of this comes from the conception of "being an artist" as a way of living rather than just a job, and in some ways it is, but if the art you create is tied to a mental illness or past trauma, than it's also ok to have parts of your life that are not tied to those things in any way, you express those things in your work so that you can step away from them, not so that they necessarily perpetuate every part of your life. But outside of oneself, it is also problematic as someone working in the arts to be around people who do buy into that myth. That combined with the stigmas around mental illness can make you feel weak for not being able to just live with your illness and deal with it solely through artistic expression, and not things I have found much more effective, like therapy and medication. Just because you are healthy, does not mean your art will be less meaningful, and just because you are trying to be healthy, and perhaps need some help achieving that goal, does not mean you are less of a true artist.
I found this article very enlightening. I am not an actor or a writer but I do struggle with serious mental health issues which is difficult to say. I also have the privilege of being a white cis woman who has access to therapy and am young enough to be on my parents insurance. I think everything the people in this article talked about was very apt. Theater is a difficult industry and you have to show up and do your best work regardless of how you are feeling and how impossible it might feel to get out of bed in the morning. You have to go to classes, get your work done, and go to crew. The goal is to succeed and to personally, to prove to others that despite what you may be going through you are able to succeed in a high stress environment, which is what theater is. That is hard. It takes time and there is no time to do it.
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