Why I’m never working in theater again, part 1
I got my dream job. It sucked and almost killed me, but it was cool for a minute.
For the last six years I worked at what I thought was my dream job. Theatre was a passion of mine that I’ve had since I was old enough to consider myself an adult. It might have been the most consistent thing about me. It gave me a lot of the good parts of my life. Also it took a lot from me and very nearly killed me. Now you couldn’t pay me to go back.
I guess we should start with the good stuff.
I loved theater. Almost every aspect. Performing, directing, backstage work, producing, administrating, writing, even making costumes if you’ll believe it. I found every bit of it rewarding. The highs are extremely high. The lows never really bothered me until I realized there are lows way lower than what I thought was the low. Even after everything there’s a good chance I could be convinced to go back spelunking if I could physically do it. That’s addiction, baby!
I met my wife doing theater. Made some great friends along the way. At times I really felt like I was making a difference or doing something special. I was even good at it sometimes. Not great. But good enough, and I got to facilitate and take part in the work of people I still consider to be Great Artists in the grandest sense of the term.
I never meant to get into theater as a career, or at all. It started because I was a latchkey kid and I needed an after school activity that wasn’t doing my homework. Then in college I joined the student-run program to make some friends (there wasn’t a major and I likely wouldn’t have picked it if there was). Being a straight guy in theatre is cheating when it comes to getting laid, and I discovered I was pretty good at it and enjoyed it besides. The theatre, not the getting laid. I’d make a joke about how they’re the same thing but theatre is a lot more like masturbating.
Something about creating ephemeral art cooperatively is really rewarding to someone like me. It’s kind of the same thing you get from cooking. Yes you get to experiment and create like with any art but when the work is “done” you still need an audience willing to see it and then you need to be able to recreate it. And, like a good meal, once a show goes down the only remainder of it in the world is in the memory of the people who participated in it or saw it (though I count the audience as participants but that’s another essay). You can still make something similar, like a recipe, but it’s never going to be exactly the same. To paraphrase Mario Batali, kind of a prototype for the problematic but undeniably good chef: you can cook and fiddle and experiment all you want, and it’s ok to have a miss here and there, but if someone likes a dish you made, and you don’t serve them the same dish when they order it the next time, then you’re a dick.
Anyway after college I did some community theatre, which is it’s own thing. Just for fun - I had only ever flirted with working in theatre professionally. Then, as it happens, a girl I fell in desperately in love with after a showmance left me for another showmance.
And so I quit. I quit for all of a couple months. Then, still nursing a broken heart, I got asked by a friend to fill in for a roll for a couple weekends of late night performances.
It was a small role in a play by a local playwright, just a couple lines of cursing in Spanish. The show was late at night in a small theater without air conditioning in the middle of summer. It wasn’t a very good show. It was ambitious and experimental, but it took a lot of risks and not a whole lot of them paid off. It was really poorly attended. It was an hour away from home. Still, it scratched that addict’s itch and then some. It took me right out of my funk.
Also, for the first time I got paid. It was a cut of the door and not even close to paying for gas one way to do the show, but still I got paid. Getting paid will make you tolerate a lot of things and gives you incentive to ignore other things. You know how when you’re in a new relationship or have a crush on a person you give them a huge benefit of the doubt and fill in the blank spots with positive things?
So there I am, directionless, working at a job I hate for barely north of minimum wage, and suddenly there’s place with an undeniably cool space (a converted rail repair station) where a local playwright, even a new one, could get their work produced and 70% of the proceeds go directly and equally to the people involved in its creation. Not to mention it’s in Portsmouth which at the time was new to me and seemed exploding with art and creative people, and not like community theatre people.
Theatre kids have a well-earned reputation for being annoying and embarrassing, but these people were not like that. These people were serious. These people were in it for the art. Some of them even majored in theatre. Some even did shows in New York City (off off off off Broadway). I saw some good work, not like good-for-the-area but for real good. And they wanted me. They wanted to work with me and cast me. Plus they were into straight plays (that is plays that are not musicals) and I thought that was a more pure form of theatre. Plus there was great food and things to do and what passed for an industry bar where everyone from the seven or so different performance spaces around town would gather after their respective shows to unwind and throw hot goss. This was Jerusalem. This was Bohemia. This is what would fill the hole in my heart left by my ex, or our absent god, or Barack Obama or whatever. Yes I realize now that this was semi-professional theatre in a gussied up podunk town. This wasn’t professional, although there’s way less of a difference between this and that than you think.
Yes I was awful and pretentious. So were they it turns out. So is the entire industry top to bottom. I realize that now, and I might have realized it before the end of my ‘career’. But then - sweet, sweet then - it was a new high and absolutely super dangerous to a person like me. Holy shit did I fall hard.
So I did another late night show, then another. Then I went to their cattle call auditions where I auditioned for my future wife. I got the role in her show, my first in a regular slot with a juicy role that was just right for me.
We had hung out with the cast at bars and stuff. I drunkenly held her hand at one gathering after she mentioned her marriage was open. Our first datey date just by ourselves was me getting my head shaved for the part before going to see some other show at the same theatre. We got dinner on the water on a gorgeous day and talked a bunch. She was fascinating. While I was just getting started she had lived a whole life already, left acting and directing entirely, and had just recently decided to come back to it. She had lived in New York and LA. Her husband worked for People Magazine and had covered Donald Trump (this was when he was just a rolling failure and not a danger to the world order and all human life). That’s a story he can’t tell, but I can (not signing NDA’s is a recurring theme in this and also generally good advice. Maybe I will later). She co-directed a short film starring Lisa Edelstein. Jeff Goldblum tried to pick her up at a bar. She liked and had been with men and women separately and at the same time. She was as ambitious as I was if not more so. She laughed at my jokes, which is the biggest indicator of whether I’ll like someone or not. She was kind of like the walking avatar of this place that I was already in love with. All of the good things about her, luckily, are as true today as they were then. That can’t be said about nearly anything else about that rotten place.
Now I remember this exact moment precisely, where it happened, what the light was like, the color of the flowers. Killing time before the show I asked her why she was hanging out with me.
“I’m attracted to talent.”
Can you imagine? So we kissed. I don’t remember a single thing about the day after that. I don’t even remember what show we saw. We carried on after that, which was complicated considering she was married and I was seeing someone (someone who I never apologized to or told about this even after we broke up). We got married in a theatre. The pictures of our wedding were taken by someone we met doing theatre. The artistic director of the theatre we ran, who later did the worst thing any person has ever done to me, wrote our procession music. I’ll tell the story of us later. We’re still together and I love her very much. She’s still my creative, romantic, and business partner. I’m only telling you this now to give you an idea how thoroughly I went all in on this.
The year after this kiss I did sixty performances, directed a couple shows, and even helped write a couple. After work I would commute an hour home, quickly shower and eat something, and then drive another hour to Portsmouth. When I directed a show they gave me a key, so I started sleeping on the floor upstairs when I was too exhausted or drunk to drive home. Eventually I lost that job and she got me another one as an insurance agent in Portsmouth. Eventually we were able to find an apartment there. She started a marketing business so she could stop working for her terrible boss (who is responsible for the most morally reprehensible thing I’ve ever done by accident but again, that’s another story). I followed. We built a schedule around being able to do theatre. Things were good. We won an award, then another. We created an improv show that met with a lot of success and even toured, which got us the attention of another local theatre, a non-profit professional operation with a better scale of resources, more seats and a more thorough appreciation and fit for the show (or so we thought).
Then, Kathleen was asked to join the board that administrates that theatre. Turns out things were not exactly great there. Their staff had dwindled along with revenues, show quality, performer pool, savings, and community good will. Not even the board really knew how bad it was though until their artistic director (who also served as executive director, master carpenter, music director, performer, bartender, development director, and janitor) suddenly resigned without notice about three months after Kathleen joined the board.
Someone needed to step in at least perform the basic functions of the business, even if that meant closing shop. Nobody else on the board wanted to touch that with a ten foot pole, but we figured we could. After all, we just got here. Nobody could possibly blame us for what happened before we were even in the room. We could always fall back on the marketing business and even keep it running for a bit if we had to. Since theatre was not our entire professional lives, we had experience and skills we could bring to bear that artistic types don’t tend to develop. Sure we might fail but the stakes were so low as to not matter. If we succeeded though we’d have a chance to create the type of theatre the way we wanted to. We could make the changes necessary in the community that we felt were holding it back. We didn’t have to be held back by entrenched ways of thinking or the petty tyrants that creep up in these communities. This was the possibility for legacy shit. This could be the leg up to something even bigger.
These opportunities don’t come around often. So we took the gig on a volunteer basis. Then, when we discovered you fix years of neglect and systemic problems in your free time, we shuttered our marketing business entirely and joined as interim administrators - her as Executive Director and me as Director of Marketing and Development with the understanding with each other and the board that we were a package deal co-equal administrators. Then, after we managed to turn things around we made the case that our interim status should be removed and we were reluctantly given it.
What luck! I graduated college in 2009 with no professional theatre experience, and by the end of 2014 I was a co-head of a 220 seat professional theatre, entirely pliable for shaping, with an amazing woman who would soon become my wife. Sure there were challenges and some warnings we should probably have heeded a little harder, but we were there.
Totally unrelated side note: You know how we like to think that people arrive at decisions and conclusions rationally? We weigh the pros and cons and take guidance from our wisdom and values and then we arrive at a perfectly thought out course of action or conclusion and then maybe a bird alights on our finger as we glow with the light of logic and righteousness? If not other people, at least us because we’re different and somehow more alive. At least me. Of course it’s total bullshit that doesn’t stand up to a minute of scrutiny. What really happens is we start at the conclusion or result we want to arrive at and work backwards to justify it. If you want something enough and the timeline is long enough you can justify nearly anything. ‘I can fix him’. ‘She deserves it’. ‘This is the lesser evil’. ‘I didn’t have a choice’. Usually there are limits to this - justifications that are too insane for you to believe are good or correct, even if you pretend to. The ones that are really good at this don’t even feel that. My wife and I borrowed a phrase from Orwell to describe this phenomenon: “winning the victory over yourself'".
I don’t know what made me think about that. Anyway that’s how I got my dream job, and things were good for a bit. I stayed for six years, which you’ll notice is longer than what can be considered ‘a bit’. Now with some distance and perspective I’ve realized not only that theatre isn’t for me, not only is that specific place evil along with most of its participants, but that the whole industry and maybe the art form itself is poisonous all the way down to the bedrock. Even though I’m still mad and sad about it, what I said isn’t hyperbole. The tick almost killed me, but my ‘dream job’ made me want to fucking die.
I have no idea how many parts this whole story has, but it’s best done in chunks probably. A lot of it is still very hard to talk about, and I’m not the kind of person that thinks there’s anything necessarily therapeutic about revisiting and expressing trauma. I also don’t believe we’re defined by our specific collection of traumas or that suffering is a romantic and necessary part of life. I want to write about other things mostly - happier things, funnier things, more accessible and universal things. . If you’re looking for closure or some conclusion or lesson, you’re going to be disappointed. The bad guys win. The good guys are worse off. Nothing significant changes. If there was anything to be learned from it, and I’m not sure there is, it came at too high a price to make it worth it. It’s not good for revenge because for this to have any effect whatsoever the bad guys would have to respond to shame and embarrassment, which I highly suspect they don’t feel, or for people to hold them accountable, which they won’t. Ultimately I decided that this was a large enough part of my life and how I approach it that to not express it would be dishonest or confusing.
This may worry some people, and I may inadvertently hurt some people who don’t deserve it. I did meet some great people during my time. I know I’m not unique in being fucked by this place. I also know that not everybody wants to reprocess all of this just because I got sick and decided to write about it now. If you’re a fellow traveler or you one of the good folks that got caught in the gravity of this place, you don’t have to worry. If there is something that I share here that is unfair to you or harms you in a way I can fix or help, I’ll do my best to make it right. If you’re not one of those people, sorry. I’m not going to lie for your benefit. If I say something untrue there are remedies out there for you (just to warn you though one of those remedies is not an NDA. I didn’t sign one ever and I’m not about to. You probably did though. You won’t be the first one to work there to regret signing something). If you’re a friend or family member of one of those people and this makes you uncomfortable I’m sorry for you and I may even like you but odds are I don’t feel obligated to preserve your good feelings.
If you’re negatively impacted by descriptions of sexual trauma or workplace harassment, this may be a series to skip. Homophobia, revenge porn, sexual assault, victimized children, substance use, credible accusations, false accusations. It’s all going to come up. Do what you will about it I’m not offended if you skip it. The story also kind of necessarily contains bits that are ‘problematic’ in the academic sense of the term. I’m happy to talk about all of that but I’m not here to debate or discuss it really. This is just what happened.
I’ll write about it as I go and feel like I can. I’ll post this one as a freebie but subsequent installments are going to be for subscribers only because if I make even five dollars off of this whole experience it will be the most worthwhile thing my dream job ever gave me.
Anyway. Subscribe for…more?