You want to make anything happen? A wedding? An overnight pitch deck? A medical proposal for a strange new drug trial? Hire a former theater kid.
Editor's Note: Joey Parsons is co-host of the thebigda Podcast, where she and Dan Abbate explore authenticity, creativity, personal growth, and the often messy journey of becoming who we're meant to be.
A lot of my actor friends have sort of laughed about this for years, but the older I grow, the more I believe it: if you want something done, hire the former theater kid.
I’ve needed trigonometry a lot less than I’ve needed to know how to manage difficult personalities. Theater taught me the latter. The former only taught me misery.
Christmas Lights, Coat Hangers, and No Budget
Theater people know how to memorize overnight. Theater people know how to take a coat hanger and a string of Christmas tree lights, and turn them into magic. Theater people know how to organize, how to manage expectations, and how to decompress.
We deal well with constraints because normally that’s all we’re given. No time to hem that costume? Try to not trip. The props department ran out of money? Mime away. The sound board just crashed so… just pretend there’s thunder when the script necessitates it, okay? (That last one happened to me opening night of a one-woman show. Brutal.)
We Run Toward the Fire
You want to make anything happen? A wedding? An overnight pitch deck? A medical proposal for a strange new drug trial? Hire a former theater kid.
It isn’t sneaky. It’s not deceptive. It’s simply that we run toward the fire, and figure out how to best extinguish it. Because ultimately, it’s us up there on stage, or wrangling backstage chaos. We know the stakes.
We’ve held the hands of castmates too terrified to go on. Because at one time, we were that kid.
Low production value? Zero time? Negative budget? We’ll make you forget it with boundless enthusiasm. We will pick up the slack.
The Play Where Everything Went Wrong
I was cast in a play about a year into the pandemic. I was grateful the industry was opening back up. But my joy was fast replaced by panic.
Absolutely everything that could go wrong, did. The usual four weeks of rehearsal were inexplicably cut down to three. The play was promising, but had not been trimmed by the playwright. Our first read-through was four hours long — twice as long as it should have been. Our director got COVID the first week, and was out for ten days. The playwright was begged to make cuts, but it was impossible for the actors to keep track of what was in and what was out in so little time. There were a ton of props and so much stage business, with no one keeping track of it all. The lighting designer got COVID during tech, so an intern programmed the lights to basically turn on at the top of the show, and off at the end. The run time was agonizingly long.
And yet… the audience leapt to their feet every curtain call.
It was not a fun time for me. I disliked that we were never given time to find our rhythm. But we made it work. I ate a cake a week as consolation. A full sized chocolate birthday cake from Wegmans. Every. Week.
One Hour, No Money, and Creepy Marionettes
One of my favorite experiences in grad school was a second-year exercise called The Shakespeare Projects. I looked forward to watching them every year. I loved seeing how different casts overcame challenges created by constraints. Some were more successful than others, but they were always captivating.
It went like this: we were assigned groups of four or five, assigned a play and assigned roles. That was the extent of administrative involvement. From there, we had a month to cut the play to one hour so that it still made sense, and we had to produce it on little to no money.
This meant costuming out of our own wardrobes. This meant absconding with clip lights and furniture we could scrounge off load-outs from other shows.
I went to the local music store, explained the dark tone we were going for and purchased a few off-the-radar industrial CDs. I found appropriate songs to score the play, and had a friend in the sound department burn a master CD for me.
At one point we were confronted with an uncuttable scene with more characters than cast. It felt impossible. At our wits’ end, and with time running out, a castmate suggested we make puppets.
I scoffed. Indignant. Absolutely not. We wanted to be taken seriously by making serious theater. I put my foot down. We were not solving this problem with sock puppets.
He insisted, “I mean like marionettes. Creepy marionettes. Let me make one tonight and show you what I mean tomorrow.”
Overnight, he created a puppet — a sort of paper-mâché, Slender Man out of cardboard and Mardi Gras beads. It looked strange and frightening and fit exactly the bleak tone of the show we were doing.
I volunteered to help him make the remaining marionettes.
The production was gloomy and fraught. Perhaps not entirely successful at telling the story. But we took big swings. Made bold choices. And created a fascinating show. In the end it was very rewarding.
The Show Must Go On
That’s the thing.
You want someone to make it happen? Looking for a solution? Want bold choices? Hire a former theater kid. Because the show must go on…
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At Clotine, we're fascinated by people who choose authenticity over approval, curiosity over convention, and growth over comfort.
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