Theatre Doesn’t Have to Be Toxic

7 min readMar 27, 2023

March 26, 2023, 11:50 pm
Filed under: art, community, Creative Process, dreams, economics, theatre | Tags: academia, graduate school, NYC, sustainability, theatre, theatre company, theatre making, toxic

Once upon a time in New York City, my friends and I started a theatre company. We’d have readings and rehearsals at our apartments. We made molds for masks in my kitchen. We had snacks and drinks and a generally lovely time. We wrote our first fundraising letter at Yaffa Café in the East Village and rubbed one of their buddha statues’ bellies for luck. The bumps in the road were quickly smoothed and we threw some fun post show parties. We also made some pretty kick-ass magical shows, if I do say so myself.

It went like this for a few years but then issues of sustainability started to become more serious. There were the questions of how we could sustain the work as the city got more expensive — and the questions of sustainability in our personal lives, in the things we did for money, or our relationships got very loud. I could see that my career as a teaching artist was not going to be sustainable either so I decided I needed to go to grad school so I could bring myself and my company to the next level.

But what WAS the next level? Was it a particular marker of success? Was it financial stability? I hoped those things were possible. I thought they would be — but I think I was looking in the wrong place.

I went to graduate school thinking that a credential might offer me the possibility of a life in academia where I could bring my company along with me. Part of why I chose the program I did was because one of our teachers was doing just that there. She ran the dance department and her company, in residence, performed there at least once a year. I was interested in that model. But then I went there and saw what was happening and a couple of months in academia killed that dream fairly quickly. It was not for me. Somehow I’d imagined that making art in a college would be intellectually rigorous and artistically supportive — instead it was lazy, petty, toxic and insular. And hardly anyone was having any fun.

If there’s one thing that I relied on heavily and enjoyed pretty consistently when I first started making shows in New York, it was the abundance of good will. We didn’t have a lot of money to pay our people but we worked hard to have a good time and we really had a good time. We generally really liked and admired one another and lived in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

In graduate school, every decision I made was challenged and not in an artistically interesting way — more like everyone constantly questioned my judgment and respect was in short supply. I had to fight for even the smallest things. There were power struggles — like when faculty members accused me of “stealing” their actors. There were issues with the shop. There were issues with the teams. I heard that the entire design department discussed if I “knew what I wanted’ because the costume designer had given me capes and tights in her designs, over and over again when I explicitly reiterated that I wanted no capes and no tights, over and over and over again, every time we met. I was open to a lot of things but if there was one thing I knew for sure it was that I did not want to see any tights or capes. Despite my best efforts, my actors were in capes and tights in a terrifying array of rainbow colors for their fittings. None of us were happy about it. I let the designer have a couple of capes in the end because I was so sick of fighting. Every good thing begun there turned rotten eventually.

I’d gone there hoping to figure out a way to make my life and my company sustainable and I came out ready to quit theatre entirely. I didn’t.

And in the intervening years, I have made a lot of things I’m proud of but it’s been a long time since the spectre of toxic theatre-making hasn’t haunted me.

When I first started in NYC, I really felt strongly that enough good will could over come any hardship. We had issues here or there; they weren’t a big deal. But my immersion in toxic methods and patterns in grad school and beyond made it hard to create with any kind of genuine optimism. Even with the nicest, safest people, I was braced for disaster.

It’s taken a long time to clear my system of all the disorder that my time in grad school created. The program was only two years but it has taken fifteen to sixteen years to re-set all the damage it caused. If I had it do all over again, I wouldn’t go. The degree has done almost nothing for me. It gave me a handful of underpaid college courses as an adjunct and that’s about it. It did nothing for my personal sustainability and almost killed my company entirely.

But I didn’t set out to write about why going to grad school was a bad idea for me. I’m here to tell you about those magical first years when we were awash in possibility and confidence and love and hope and how this year, for the first time in a while, I could remember what that felt like.

I know from this side of things how incredibly rare sustainability in theatre is. I know a lot more about the business of theatre making and what it takes to make a living wage from it. The landscape for the arts has changed a great deal over the last 20+ years. I have a much clearer sense of how all of it fits together and where there is space to hope and dream and where there is opportunity to advance and where there is not.

I have become wildly less ambitious than I used to be — at least, less ambitious in the usual way. I no longer dream of a big Broadway debut. But I suppose I have become more ambitious in that I am striving for a kinder, warmer, more human and more fun way of doing things.

When I started, I really thought that the way it worked was — you made something really cool and a big shot (or a big shot’s assistant) came to see it and then good shows would be magically transported to Broadway. It was a very sweet naïve sort of dream. But not harmless, though — because I kept feeling like I failed when I made things and they didn’t “go anywhere.”

The thing that I’d like to go back in time and tell myself was that the thing itself was the gold. The process, the fun, the parties, the rehearsals, the hanging out and making something we were proud of — THAT was the miracle. I’m sure the me of twenty years ago would have rolled her eyes at a future me coming to tell her to enjoy every minute. But it’s not so much that I’d want that earlier version of me to enjoy it while it was happening, because I WAS enjoying it while it was happening. It’s more that I wish she could have continued to enjoy it while she was on a roll, to have continued to make work with people she liked in an atmosphere of mutual respect and appreciation, even if it meant giving up some of her ambitions or getting a different kind of day job. If I had it to do over again, I’d have let my hopes for sustainability and professionalism drift away and just luxuriated in our process. It’s possible that might have actually led me to the success I’ve found so elusive. But if it didn’t, I’d have had a lot more years of very pleasurable art making. That’s the dream for my younger self now. And maybe this self too.