The Director Sector

One of the biggest problems that I face in my local theatre is a large sense of apathy. Most of the people here bitch and moan about how they didn’t get cast in this, they didn’t get cast in that, the theatre’s screwing them out of this, screwing them out of that. They complain and complain, and the department looks the other way. Why? Because they won’t help themselves.

The solution, obviously, is to produce their own shows — do what Scott Walters’ suggests, and work together and do small scenes together, monologues, 10 minute plays. The solution is to do their own work. The theatre doesn’t owe them anything. The theatre will, however, help those who help themselves.

A good example is a few years ago, one of the seniors embarked upon her senior project. She proposed a drama camp during the summer for kids. The rest of the department loved the idea, and so it happened. She ran it almost entirely by students, with only one faculty member assisting in scene painting. By the end of a week, the kids had performed a show for their parents. It was a huge success, raising the student drama society about $3000. Naturally, the department picked this up, and now it’s a departmental, annual thing run fully by the theatre (with assistance from students).

So, clearly, the theatre itself will assist a project, and maybe even take it on permanently, if the students, actors, and crew will start it and it proves to be successful.

Unfortunately, nobody wants to get off their asses to do so. In the past two years, there have been a handful of attempts to encourage and provide acting opportunities, including: three student-directed plays (including two by me), an improv theatre troupe (failed), and a cabaret (failed). The latter two failed largely because of a lack of participation. Everyone (well, in general) would rather sit around and bitch to each other than get off their butts and participate.

Which brings me to my conclusion. I’m going to echo, once again, Scott Walters. He has a brilliant plan to inspire change in local-actor hiring practices, but he makes a point, too: people don’t want to put themselves at risk if they don’t have to.

So, obviously, the trick is to provide them with an appropriate desire-to-laziness ratio. That is, the desire to participate must overcome their laziness. This worked in the two shows that I directed, because the students involved were sufficiently motivated to perform on stage — they were small shows and almost everyone had what could be termed a “lead role”, which motivated them to perform. Unfortunately, those kinds of shows aren’t the kinds of things that can be easily repeated. They would need to be something that worked so well that the theatre could pick it up, but similar enough that you don’t need to do an entirely new creative process every time (like, say, the drama camp). In addition, you need to have one person who is willing to do the vast majority of the work and is able to delegate the small tasks to their friends who are helping.

To summarize:

1) People are lazy
2) We need projects to do
3) The projects need to be low-risk, short in time-span, yet still produce results
4) They need to be easy to participate in
5) They need to be repeatable with minimal supervision

So what kinds of things can we do? Hmm.

I’ll get back to you on that.