Tuesday, April 16, 2019
Dialogue: The things that make you fall back in love with theatre
Exeunt Magazine: It’s April, and it’s surprisingly cold, and Fun Home STILL hasn’t got the West End transfer it so richly deserves. So what happens when everything feels a bit grey, and you stop feeling passionate about an artform you’ve spent large portions of your adult life waxing lyrical about? And what makes that feeling come back? In this group piece, Exeunt writers talk about the shifting emotional landscape of their relationship with theatre, and explore what it’s like to fall in, and out, of love.
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When I first came to CMU, I remember Kevin very early on gave us a lecture on reminding ourselves why we are here. When something becomes your job, it becomes very easy to begin hating it. I have definitely fallen out of love with it for many reasons, much of which are echoed in this article, especially by Tracey Sinclair. Theater in hypocritical and it is inherently classcist, but it also one of the few careers that actively fights against that nature. I fall back in love with theater when I watch certain shows that do what I want to be doing with theater. In terms of actually loving theater as a career, I think it has little to do with how I feel about the industry, and everything to do with my passion for my particular job. I love being a facilitator of creative teams more than anything and that extends past theater and into all places within the entertainment industry. That is why I do this.
I identify with a lot of what this article talks about, because I’ve gone through this journey during my four years here at CMU. I think a lot of us come into this program being in love with theatre. We’re young, we’ve only ever done it for fun, we have no reason to not love it. And then the workload gets heavier, and people take advantage of you in internships, and you get jaded. Or worse, you start to think it’s cool to be jaded. We all know the “I do theatre and I hate it” crowd. And at the end of the day, it’s not worth it if you’re not in love with it. Plus no one wants to work with a someone who hates what they do. But I think, once you start to get the hang of what you do, and you start to realize there are ways to do this that don’t suck, you start to find the love again. I think that’s where I am now.
The whole “falling in love with theater” conversation is one I have found myself having a lot recently. It’s been hard keeping sight of why I chose to do all this in the first place amidst all of the crew calls and projects and lectures that sometimes, in the moment, seem so irrelevant when I could be spending the time on passion projects and work that makes me feel fulfilled. However, at the end of the day, the big picture is important. And all of these sometimes-frustrating things are building a very solid foundation for a career full of passion projects. So, I relate to a lot of the stories that were told. Theater is such a go go go industry that it’s insanely easy to just forget what the point of it all is in the first place. It kind of ties back to the conversation we had in production planning today about working your ass off and never taking a break or eating or sleeping or seeing your family, and for what? To get it done? Getting it done isn’t love for the craft, but we get some sort of masochistic pleasure from working ourselves to death in service of a project, when in reality we just have this need to prove that we *can* do something. And we often put the “I can do it” before the “why am I doing it?”
These stories remind me of Kevin’s lecture in Production Science at the beginning of the year, which I believe Kaylie also mentioned. Kevin touched a lot on separating the work we are required to do from whatever it is we love about theatre. Everyone got into this industry for some reason or another, and because of its fast-paced, stressful, and inconsistent nature, it is important that we hold on to that reason and create new reasons to love it in order to stay sane. It was interesting to read these personal accounts, and especially interesting to see how an overload of theatre (especially at a festival, it seems) can have both an exhausting and rejuvenating effect on its observers in the industry. It looks like a good portion of the people in this article have one production that changed their perspective or saved their opinions about the industry. Hopefully I will be able to fine one of those for myself if I am ever in a slump.
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