All the World's a Stage

My parents did not want me to major in theater once I got to college, even though it was what I loved to do most in school. They were cruel and terrible people.

I’m kidding. They weren’t. I was totally on board with their thinking. I loved theater, but I always planned on majoring in English, which, back in the day, was considered a perfectly acceptable thing to study in college. Study English; do lots of theater. That was my plan.

It was a good plan. My college didn’t even have a theater program when I got there. My freshman year, everything was extracurricular (and pretty bad). The next year, a very small academic department was launched, producing innovative (and pretty strange) plays and offering a handful of classes, most of which I avoided until my senior year, in some weird fit of anti-elitism. I stuck with the extracurricular stuff and started writing my own plays, which was unheard of at that time.

By the time I graduated, I knew that this was what I wanted to do. I spent the next two years working for the newly installed Artistic Director, after which I went across the country to get my MFA. I had succumbed to a life in the arts. Or so I thought.

For about 11 years after getting that degree, I took a variety of day-jobs while trying to establish myself as a playwright—first in Atlanta and then, with my friends, in New York City. At the end of that time, recently married and with a baby on the way, I found myself no further advanced in my career or vocation, with a theater company that was rapidly decomposing as people peeled off to pursue other things. It was time for a change. I found myself a curriculum writing job (on the theory that teaching and writing were the only things I knew how to do), and thus began my 25-year journey in the Education Business.

Was my life in theater a waste of time and effort and money? I don’t think so. (Okay, maybe the money.) I learned some valuable skills and habits of mind while in that world—things that have benefitted me in life and in work. You can major in theater and not make a career of it, just like you can major in psychology and not become a psychologist. There’s nothing wrong with that. There are many lenses through which you can look at and learn about the world. Some ways just resonate more with you than others.

Here is some of what my years in theater gave me, that outlasted my time mounting plays.

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Efficient Storytelling

You can meander and digress to your heart’s content in prose; on stage, you have to be strategic with how you use your time. You can honor Aristotle’s unities of time, space, and action, or you can try to violate them, but either way, you’ve got to get your story across cleanly and efficiently. Audiences can’t turn pages back to re-read a section that confused them; they have to be able to follow your thread in the present moment. And when they can’t make sense of what you’re saying, they have the option of walking out.

Given how expensive and time-consuming it can be to mount a play, you have to be clever about how you use your resources. Working with a small company of actors for several years, the most important thing I learned was how to cut: dialogue, stage business, the set—saying only what was necessary and letting the dialogue drive the action.

Where has that mattered outside of theater? In every proposal I’ve written, every internal meeting I’ve led, every client presentation I’ve delivered—even in the products I’ve helped to develop. It’s not just about effective writing (though that’s in short supply in the business world); it’s also about how you use people’s time when they’re gracious enough (or forced) to give it to you.

Empathetic Imagination

The old philosophers wrote dialogues instead of treatises, because it forced them to imagine a real scene of persuasion, ensuring that their ideas were presented compellingly. When you’re writing any kind of story, it’s good to try to understand what every character is thinking, but when you’re writing a play, you must. You have to speak for every one of them, and if you’re going to create interesting drama, you have to give everyone their due. Characters who exist on stage only as foils for the leads, or to provide exposition, are beyond boring. As one of my teachers once told me, every person on stage has to have their own reason for being there; every one of them has to want something. And it’s your job to figure out what that is.

It’s hard to engage in dramatic writing without developing some empathetic imagination. It’s your job not only to create scenes and characters, but to breathe real life into them—to think about what that kind of person, in that kind of situation, would truly feel and think and do—even if you find them disagreeable or hideous.

Remembering that you’re not surrounded by NPCs is really important in any human setting, and is especially important if you’re trying to lead a team. Remembering that you might not have all of the information, or the best idea, or the most relevant perspective—all of that helps you become a more successful (and pleasant to work with) creator or problem-solver. Everyone at the table has their own reason for being there.

Are there other places where you can learn this? Sure. But drama allows you a unique opportunity to imagine yourself into completely different worlds and into the lives of completely different people—even more viscerally than reading great literature. Atticus Finch talks a good line about walking around in other people’s shoes, but he means it figuratively. Being onstage makes it literal.

Collaboration

This one is obvious, right? Theater is a collaborative art. As a playwright, you may think you’re writing a play, but you’re actually just writing a blueprint, because the real play doesn’t exist until it’s mounted on stage. A play is a live event, not a piece of prose. You can’t bring it across the finish line by yourself.

Learning how to work well with creative people, who can be prickly, feisty, opinionated, maddeningly difficult, overly sensitive, and tremendously talented, is essential in the arts. And it’s just as important in the rest of life. There are some grown-up jobs that allow you to work in pure isolation, but not many.

Schoolteachers generally do a poor job of teaching kids how to work in groups. They try, but the bias in academics is towards “doing your own work.” Where most kids learn collaboration is on the athletic field, in the orchestra pit, or on stage.

If you don’t participate in any of those things, collaboration will usually mean doing “group work.” Everyone is given a job and is meant to “carry their weight” in isolation. The whole is somehow (magically) expected to be greater than the sum of its parts, though it rarely is. And sure, there are grown-up work projects where that happens: you have your bit to do, and you go off and do it.

What I learned in theater was stronger and more valuable than that. True collaboration means that everyone feeds everyone; everyone makes everyone stronger. People come to the table with unique perspectives and skill sets, and those things can help you do your work better, if you’re willing to be open.

There were times, back in my theater days, when I had a story problem that I couldn’t solve—or that I didn’t see as a problem, because things were simply happening in the only way I could see. That was me, working by myself, doing the best I could. But when the designer started sketching out ideas for the set—envisioning the world of the play slightly differently than I had, because she had a visual imagination and a visual language and a set of design skills that I lacked—a door opened up that I hadn’t even considered (a literal door, in one case), that allowed me to rewrite the play more elegantly and, just…better. I wrote better because of the set design. We elevate each other. That’s collaboration.

Project Management

The most important job of a theater director is not to have a brilliant vision; it’s to get the play to opening night. Collaborating with crazy people (see above) is one thing; pulling them all together in common cause and getting them all across the finish line on time, doing good work, and in reasonably good health, sometimes feels like a miracle.

In my first corporate job in Big Education, I moved fairly quickly from writer to editor to project manager, without any in-house leadership training (of which there is scarily little in most places), mostly because of the work I did directing plays and helping to run our little, not-for-profit, off-off-off-off-Broadway company. A company is a company and a project is a project. Learning how to make complex things happen is a skill that can pay off anywhere.

Leadership

I was being a little disingenuous above, denigrating “brilliant ideas.” It’s true that a mediocre play that opens can have more going for it than a brilliant play that no one ever sees, but logistics and project management are not what hold people together and make them work hard. They need a vision that they can believe in, that they feel is worthy of their blood and sweat and toil and tears. Whether you’re leading as the writer though the words on the page, or as the director or the head of the theater company, it’s up to you to give people something to aspire to, something to get excited about, something to make it all worthwhile.

That is another thing no one ever taught me in a corporate training class. It was years of assisting directors on various plays in high school and then college, that gave me opportunities to see different models of leadership—good models, bad models, and sometimes really ugly ones. I learned a ton—and then learned even more when trying to direct my own productions, or when the time came to take on leadership of our little theater company.

I got my first inkling of how important this was back in college, when I produced and directed a ridiculous play that my friends and I had written. There was no playwriting program, and mounting your own production was not something anyone had done before. Why we thought we could do it, I have no idea. But we did it, and when it was all over, and we were striking the set, several of the actors and crew came up to me and said, “What’s next?”

It had never occurred to me that something might be next, or that anyone would care, or that it would be my job to decide. But people had come together to do a thing—a thing I had instigated. They had trusted me to make it happen, and had trusted that it would be worthwhile. I hadn’t thought for two seconds about what a responsibility that was—to say, “let’s do this.”

When you’re willing to put yourself out there and say those words—when you ask people to join you in some crazy endeavor—people put their trust in you: the people you work with to make the thing, and then the people you invite to come share in the thing. To honor that trust and deliver on it is no small thing.

Does that matter outside of school—in jobs and in life? Come on.

But sure—cut funding for the arts. Winnow down your schools to nothing but reading comprehension and mathematics drills so that kids can pass their standardized tests. Drills, not real content. Real content might get political. The skills are what matter—dry, clean, disconnected skills. The rest of it is just a frill, just a luxury, for soft people, for silly people. It doesn’t have anything to do with real life.

What fools these mortals be…as someone once said, somewhere.

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