What’s Next?

5 min readApr 19, 2024

What’s Next?

There are probably some artists that aren’t utterly flummoxed by the question “What’s next?” but I am not one of them. It’s usually an inner cascade of “Oh dear god, I don’t know! How will I go on with no real plan! This person just wants a simple answer. I have nothing. No plans. Nothing is next! I’m doomed!” This is not because I don’t have any possibilities on the horizon. I’m just not ready to look at the horizon, particularly if I’m in the middle of a project. Maybe to regular people, with regular jobs, “What’s next?” seems like a perfectly normal question — but to me, and a lot of artists I know, it is fraught with challenging uncertain questions.

I think, for a lot of us artists, particularly theatre artists, we are a fairly present oriented people. We focus on what is in front of us, not what may be in front of us way down the line.

Even artists who go from gig to gig, who somehow have their next show lined up for after this one might tense up at the question of What is Next. We are a superstitious people and we know nothing is a given. Sure, we could have a show scheduled now but there’s no guarantee that that show is going to happen. Even if we know what’s next, we might not necessarily want to talk about it. I think this quality is particularly exacerbated in theatre people since 2020 having seen our entire field shut down. We rarely feel certain of anything.

With one another, we generally learn to tread carefully in this arena. We don’t ask each other what’s next. We ask what we’re up to. If the person is doing a show or working on something, they’ll tell us. We don’t tend to pry because if it’s a dry spell, no one really enjoys talking about that.

For me, my work moves in cycles. I don’t often run quickly from one thing to the next anymore. As a young person, I went from show to show to show and sometimes did multiple shows at a time. That’s just not possible in a professional context. It’s not sustainable and there’s just not a mechanism for making that happen at this stage. Even the most successful artists who do manage to move from one project to the next still have fallow periods.

I know maybe two artists who could tell you what’s next with no trouble. Even Kristen Wiig, who is an enormously successful actor, writer and creative person, recently said in the Hollywood Reporter, “I was living day to day and had ideas of things I wanted to do, but with this business, you can’t predict. I don’t know what I’m going to do for the next year.” Even Kristen Wiig doesn’t know what’s next!

For many of us, “What’s next?” can look like a cliff we’re about to fall off of. It’s a void. It’s a crevasse.

And for the most part, we’ve adapted to a life of regular encounters with the void — but somehow someone asking, “What’s next?” can feel extra confrontational. It feels like someone asking, “Have you stared into the void yet?” (Yes, yes, of course I have. I still have some more void staring to do, thank you.)

And yet, hilariously, weeks after writing this, I closed a show and found several people on my team asking me this same question. I was shocked. But I recognize — for some of them — asking me what’s next is not so much about what I might be up to but asking what projects they might find me casting or hiring for. It’s a way to see what might next for them, too. I get that. But their work was done when we closed, while I still had six more episodes to edit. There’s no next yet! It’s still this for me! Ask me again in six weeks. Or, actually, make that eight. I need at least two weeks of void staring.

“What’s next?” can be a hard question for an artist, especially one who generates their own material. Are you asking because you don’t want to miss my next thing? Don’t worry. When it comes time to share our next project, I will. I won’t be able to shut up about it, what with the crowdfunding and the publicity and the marketing. Ask me about those projects then — not when they’re just theories hanging out past the void. I promise you that hearing about what I’m doing NOW is a much more interesting conversation than what might be next.