On Quitting Theater, and Other Things I (Might) Do This Year

I don’t remember the first I read a “Why I’m Quitting the Theater” essay, but I’m confident my first response was the same as all my subsequent responses—

Good riddance.

Up until recently, I can’t say I was very sensitive to people wanting to give up doing theater.  That’s because my entire life has been about my relationship to it.  I did my first play when I was eight and right away a little voice in my head whispered—

“This is it, you Clumsy Future Homo Who Can’t Draw and Will Never Play an Instrument, this is your destiny.”

I always felt lucky that I knew at such a young age where I belonged, and even though I’ve never been very religious, I had the kind of faith in theater that you usually only see on Dateline Specials when they’re interviewing members of a cult.

“Oh Diane, just because it shatters my self-confidence every two weeks, that doesn’t mean I’m giving up on it.  You just wouldn’t understand.”

So imagine my surprise last year when I suddenly started feeling…uncertainty in regards to whether or theater was actually something I was supposed to keep doing.

For those of you who’ve been through a divorce, please pardon me comparing what I’m going through right now with that, because I get that divorce is a truly life-shattering experience for most people, and what’s happening to me is mundane in comparison, but it just makes for a good metaphor, so here we go.

Basically, I was watching tv with Theater one night, looked over at it, and realized—

I’m not in love with you anymore.

I don’t know when it happened.

I don’t know how it happened.

And I’m definitely not happy that it happened.

But…it happened.

So what did I do?

Well, at first I went on the offensive.

I started lining up projects that I knew would excite me.  Big projects that would motivate me and help me remember why I’ve been doing this for the majority of my life.

Those projects came and went, and I enjoyed doing them…for the most part.

But the love?

The love didn’t come back.

I started reading acting books.  I did deep-dives into technique and craft and autobiographies about artists way more talented than I’ll ever be who could maybe help me understand why my passion was waning.

Do you know what most autobiographies of actors tell you about being an actor?

It sucks.

It hurts.

Run.

Run away.

Run fast.

So…that didn’t help.

Every rehearsal I attended, every performance I went to, every time I went onstage, it was all the same—

I don’t want to be here.

And it wasn’t like I was in pain or anguish or hated every minute of it.

It was just…that feeling when something used to mean everything to you and then doesn’t.  Like, walking through a school you used to go to.

You think, Wow, this place used to be my whole life.

And you sort of try to force yourself to feel that again, and the more you force it, the faster it slips away.

Now, maybe I could have overcome this malaise over time if that’s all it was.  If it had stayed internalized.  After all, even the best marriages have rough patches, but people work through them sometimes and come out on the other end of it even stronger than they were before, right?

Right, except it wasn’t just me.

I’m certainly not the Grand Historian of Theater, but having done it since I was in grade school, it’s hard not to notice when things start to…evolve.

Or devolve.

Or whatever you want to call it.

It could just be me and everyone I know getting older and grumpier, but…

Doing theater is, at least for me, mostly a social endeavor.

That’s not to say I do it purely to socialize, but if you’re not at least something of a social creature, then I honestly don’t know how you excel at the interpersonal minefield that theater has become.

I guess it shouldn’t be a shock to me that with the world on the brink of total chaos, it’s reasonable to assume that people, especially artists, are no longer interested in hierarchies, including the ones that help sustain what theater is.

In other words, it used to be that a director could say something to you that, hmmm, maybe you didn’t like so much—their tone, their wording—I’m not talking about somebody saying something sexist or racist or anything, because we should all absolutely still get pissed about that stuff.

I’m talking about a comment that maybe…rubs you the wrong way.

It used to be that you’d shrug it off.

Remember when we all, collectively, as a society—used to shrug stuff off?

Boy, those were the good old days.

I can’t remember the last time I saw somebody shrug something off.

Or maybe that’s not fair, because the whole point is that you don’t notice when people shrug stuff off.

But man oh man, I can tell you numerous times—in rehearsal, backstage, in an e-mail, at a meeting—when I think things should have been shrugged off and weren’t.

And this is coming from me—a bigmouth who will pick a fight over which brand of mustard somebody prefers.

Now, I don’t want to turn this into a diatribe that bemoans the world as it is today, but it’s just my way of suggesting that doing theater is not easy even in the best of circumstances.

So when you’re trying to do theater in today’s world, it’s…

Well, I think everybody’s just on edge, and on edge is not a great place from which to create art.  A little tension never hurt anybody and a broken heart is good for songwriting, but when Nazis are back in the mix and you have to listen to your Uncle Pete explain to you at Thanksgiving how most women make up stories about sexual assault, the idea of spending six weeks of your life on a production of The Wild Duck seems insane.

Why are we doing this?

I used to have so many good answers to that question, the first one being—

Well, why do we do anything?  What a stupid question.

But then I’d follow up with—

Theater is important.

Art is important.

Storytelling is important.

It makes us better.

It makes us compassionate.

It helps us empathize.

And I really believed that.

But now…

I sit in theaters full of—

Okay, this might be a strictly New England experience, but—

I sit in theaters full of rich, liberal, white people most of the time.  And we’re all sitting there watching some variation of Republicans Are Monsters and it just feels like the very definition of an echo chamber.

And I can’t help but think—

Why are we doing this?

Or more specifically—

Why am I doing this?

And it’s not to say that I still can’t find instances where theater can be life-changing.

Those who work in theater education are probably our last great hope for humanity, and I say that with absolute and total sincerity.

But as far as me and my latest play—A Bunch of People Arguing About Something That Only Affects 2% of the Population goes, it’s just…hard to see the point.

Now, as someone who identifies as an actor, writer, director, and Artistic Director goes, there are levels of pointlessness.

How do I feel as an actor?

Why am I doing this?

As a director?

Oh god, I never want to do this again.

An Artistic Director?

Are firing squads still a thing and how do I sign up to stand in front of one?

A writer?

Well…

I still do love writing and find it therapeutic.  But then again, it’s possible to be a playwright and not engage with theater at all.

Write a play, send it out, hope for the best.

That’s been sounding better and better lately, and it’s probably dangerous that there’s still an area of theater where I feel comfortable, because it seems to be lulling me into this idea that giving up everything but the most isolated job in theater would mean that if I walked away, I still wouldn’t really be quitting.

But I know that’s not true.

When I’ve told friends how I’ve been feeling, I always get the same question—

Where do you think this is coming from?

And, I mean, you’re not at all interested in my list of grievances anyway, but even if you were, I don’t think there’s any one thing or even one list of a hundred things that would accurately capture what the problem is.

It’s just a broken thing I don’t know how to fix.

I’m also not naïve.  I realize that when you start to get a little older, you see certain goals you had drifting further and further away from you, and that’s bound to bring on at least a little sadness.

Of course, sometimes it hits you really hard all at once.

The other day I was watching television and out of nowhere, I had the thought—

I’m never going to win a Daytime Emmy.

I have no idea why this bothered me.  Daytime Emmy’s might not even be a thing anymore as far as I know, and I can’t say it’s ever even really been a goal of mine to win one, but—IT REALLY BOTHERED ME.  LIKE A LOT.  LIKE WAY TOO MUCH.

Because, at some point in my life—and this is just youth I think, but—anything seemed possible.

And now—

Well.

I’m not writing this for sympathy or to declare anything.

I have a theater company and I take running it very seriously.

I guess if the idea of doing theater is a marriage, then actually running a theater is the child I had with theater, and she’s not eighteen yet, so I’ve still got some things I have to tend to before I can make any decisions about what happens next.

I’m writing this because I used to make fun of people who wrote stuff like this, and I think that was wrong and that I was a jerk and that what I’ve learned is that if you ever make fun of anybody for anything one day you will do or be the thing you’re making fun of so…

Be careful about that.

I used to quote the tried-and-true "If you can see yourself doing something else then you shouldn't be doing this," but the truth is, even though I can't see myself doing anything else, I can also see myself really enjoying doing nothing at all.

Waking up.
Going to work.
Coming home.
Having nights off.
No lines to memorize.
No scripts to revise.
No e-mails to send.
No arguments to mediate.
Nothing to cast.
Nothing to promote.

I'm sure after a week of it the grass-is-greener syndrome would wear off and I'd start climbing the walls, but...

It still sounds nice.

I think in a theater community that is so big on optics and bragging and spinning and social media and looking like you’re perfect all the time and killing it and nailing it and booking gigs and touring and all that bullshit, it should also be mandated that we all start to get very vocal about the times when we’re struggling.

I don’t mean to sound like a hater here, but the fact is, nobody benefits from you talking about how well you’re doing.  I mean, they might be happy for you, but it doesn’t really do much for them, unless you have an inspirational story like that cat with two legs that won a gold medal for curling in the Olympics.

But when you talk about a hard time you’re having and how you’re working through it, that could actually really help someone.

Hell, it might even save their life.

So that’s why I’m writing all this down as I read plays that I might want to work on next season, and edit another draft of a new play I’m working on, and start to memorize lines for a production I’m in later this year, and mark up a press release, and look at a schedule, and and and and and…

And hope that the voice I heard when I was eight-years-old, standing onstage, looking at a cafeteria full of people looking at me, and realizing for the first time, that I was good at something, that I had value—

I hope that voice comes back.

Because I’d really like to know what it has to say.