On Being a Theater Parent

Parenting is tough. I'll put that out right up front.

Parenting when you work a job that is not necessarily during traditional "work" hours is even tougher.

Parenting when you are doing this as either a single parent or in a relationship with someone who also juggles a non-traditional work schedule is even tougher than that.

I'm not writing this to get into a spitting contest. It's not a pity party either: a career in arts administration was my choice, much like my husband chose a career in retail management. We both knew what those choices meant as far as schedules and child-rearing before we had children.

I'm writing this to shine a light on what it is like to be an active parent working in theater management. Mass Media gives us a disjointed view, if any at all, of a career which resembles a luxurious soap opera. Much of what is written about our field in either scholarly or journalistic blog posts is written about the million-dollar companies with staffs and commensurate budgets so a mom could actually afford a babysitter rather than bring her child to the theater to clean before and run the box office of a show.

And all too many of us know parents who simply dropped out of the scene when they had kids of a certain age, entirely avoiding the struggle to both honor their artistic need and be an emotional support to their family.

Every year, the theater field loses amazingly talented people--men and women--who cannot continue working for a pittance with no health insurance or childcare benefits. My hypothesis is this is the very reason why there are no longer more women at the helm of regional theaters: the feminist movement opened more lucrative doors for them in other fields. What was once a power position to run a theater in the 1950s and 60s became a low-wage job in the 1970s and 80s. And we have not recovered from this.

My hope is that by sharing my story about being a theater parent--not the stage-mom of current lore, but an adult, a mother, who is making a career in theater--talking with other theater parents about their experiences, and shedding light on the situation for the rest of us in America who are called to theater even as we have another job (or partner) to pay the bills, we can stop being ashamed of our artistic needs and instead find ways to support each other and our communities in sharing them.

Comments

High Art vs Low Art

“The masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator.” - -The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin, 1936 Is there any more contentious question in the art world than the concept of “high” versus “low” I like venn diagrams. And shouldn't art really be in the middle? art? Who gets to judge? What are the parameters in which to judge? There is no standard definition for either concept and personal explanations range from simple to incredibly complex. One common theory about how to explain the difference is high art is “popular” and low art is “unpopular”, that is, appealing (or not) to many people. This also links to another version of the difference: that high art fosters the widest connection between people while a smaller subsection enjoys low art. This is in direct contradiction, though, to the idea of low art being part of mass culture (raising yet another question of “is art culture” or merely a com

Death & The Theater

I was listening to a recent episode of the Tim Ferris podcast and the guest, happiness scholar Arthur C. Brooks, was discussing death meditations. And the little lightbulb in my brain turned on with the thought, "We need to talk more about death in theaters." I know, I know, that seems like an illogical statement because it feels like we're always talking about the death of theater. This whole summer has been filled with articles and op-eds from across the country about how large regional theaters are dying in major cities. But that's not the kind of death Brooks was talking about, and in reality, it isn't death these articles are complaining about, either: they are trying to stay alive in a “E’s just resting” fashion, to find some kind of life-support for the theaters, to keep them going, receive new money from new audiences or donors, new shows, new gimmicks to draw more or different people in the door. Anything to keep from dying. We don't talk about death

Pass the Collection Plate, Please.

Various sizes of buildings, with some sort of seating arranged in rows, facing a slightly raised platform. may have curtains around the platform. people --primarily men-- take the platform to orate to the audience seated before them. A plea for donations is made at some point, either before or after the show, which may have music and will definitely have directives masked as stories on how to be a human in this day-and-age. children will be seen, maybe, but definitely not heard. the men in charge will believe they have been given a special gift for leading this particular group of people. and the people, for whatever reason, will also believe this. and this group of people will believe that their building and person and each other are completely different and somehow better than all the other exact same groups around their town/city/county/state/nation. If theater wants to be treated as church and church as theater, then both are getting exactly what they have been setting up for the p

Perpetually Curious

Search This Blog