“Why do you do theatre?”
I’ve heard a lot of answers to this question. For me, a lot of it comes down to the way the artform pushes us to trust our own instincts and explore heightened states of being. There’s also a humanizing element to live performance that I think is incredibly powerful. But one answer that I hear over and over, and one that also holds true for me, is community. It’s being an integral part of an ensemble and being fully seen by both the cast and crew and the audience.
A couple of years ago, I was fully, 100% ready to quit theatre for good. I was tired of the rigid hierarchies, of petty politics and fragile egos, and of being told that my basic needs had no place in the rehearsal space. When I eventually dipped a reluctant toe back in, it was the feeling of community and being wanted that brought me back.
At the same time, that particular production was laden with the same tempers, toxicity, and director’s-desires-over-human-needs mentality that made me want to quit in the first place.
Theatre is one of those places people go to feel seen and to be part of something. At its best, it’s a place where people can be valued and welcome and exist in wholeness in ways they can’t elsewhere. I do believe that theatre is sacred.
But that doesn’t mean we have to cling fearfully and unquestioningly to its norms and power structures.
Ideologies that tell us to “leave our baggage at the door” and that the “show must go on” regardless of our needs deny us humanity. They insist that our main value is to the show and that our value and needs as people are secondary. In denying accommodations for needs, these ways of thinking can also become incredibly ableist, and even if accommodations are given with relatively little pushback, the labor of getting needs met still falls disproportionately on the marginalized and minoritized people in the room.
We all know that commitment and heightened expression are hallmarks of theatre, and they do have tremendous power to elevate a scene and affect an audience. But no human being can be at 100% plus all the time. Perhaps this is a byproduct of a late-stage capitalist society that doesn’t appropriately value or fund the arts, but thespians don’t always get a lot of rest. On top of juggling day jobs and the realities of gig work, we’re expected to come and do sometimes demanding emotional and physical work for hours more on top of everything else. Where’s the conversation about balance? And where’s the respect for varying capacities? If somebody has a health condition or even just life circumstances that limit their capacity to explore that 100 every moment of rehearsal, are we just going to write them off as a bad actor and take away their place in the industry? All that does is lose us good storytellers, and closing out unique talents and perspectives just limits the craft as a whole.
And then there are the hierarchies. The egos. Maybe it is actually a good idea to listen if your stage manager says “places,” but is it also great to not be able to question the director if they’re offering a potentially harmful or problematic interpretation of a story? Or what if a direction is being given that isn’t possible to follow, whether for reasons of ability, mental/emotional health, or because it increases marginalization of the actors or the characters? We probably all have blind spots, but that’s why we have to be accountable to each other and continually do the work to educate ourselves. Not everyone steps up and does that work, and even for those who do, we’re human. We can’t know everything and we always have to be open to learning, and that’s especially true for those of us with privileged identities.
Theatre itself may be powerful and sacred, but it’s just as corrupted as anything else by the colonized, carceral, capitalist society we live in. Questioning rigid norms is not a disservice to the artform, it is the ultimate form of respect. Taking steps to ensure that every artist in the room can show up in wholeness and complexity, without erasing any part of themselves, maintains integrity in storytelling and ensures that valuable voices are not shut out of the room. Ignoring needs only prevents people from accessing their full potential. The greatness of theatre is dependent not on upholding every industry norm, but on asking tough questions about what the artform is capable of and how our unwillingness to change may be holding it back.
Theatre is absolutely a place where people can go to be whole, seen, and part of a community, but that only remains true if we commit to keeping it so the same way we commit to our objectives onstage. Examining power structures and community norms based in scarcity, unnecessary urgency, and privilege does not diminish excellence, it is a commitment to it. When we hold power in the room, whether because of our identities or our role in the production, we have the responsibility to put checks on that power, and doing so serves both the production and the theatre communities we love and that love us back. But that does mean stepping into the discomfort of questioning entrenched industry practices. It’s hard, it’s uncomfortable, and in the case of directors or producers who prize compliance, it can even be a career risk, but it is necessary to keep theatre sacred.
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