What I Learned from Theater
Recently, I made the decision to leave my full-time position as Content Marketing Manager at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park in order to nurture my freelance career as a writer, storyteller and content creator. To say it was a bittersweet decision would be an understatement. Simply put, I loved this job.
I started working at the Playhouse without having much experience with theater. I’d worked with theater students on film sets and I’d attended performances here and there, but I didn’t have the yearslong (or lifelong) immersion in the medium like many of my Playhouse peers and colleagues. I was coming from film school by way of a creative writing degree, and I’d been hustling as a freelance content writer for several years. I realized, by the time I earned my M.F.A. in film, that I didn’t necessarily want to work on film sets or move to L.A. or New York. I wanted something that had a steady and reliable income stream, and I couldn’t bring myself to relocate to either coast (for reasons both personal and professional).
As Content Marketing Manager, I read play scripts, created a seasonal communications plan, wrote blogs, managed publications, produced video content, interviewed artists, attended rehearsals, assisted with community engagement events… I did a lot, and I had a lot of passion for what I did. Here are just a few things I learned about theater as an arts marketer.
It’s the birthplace of storytelling.
English and history classes have been telling me this all along, but nothing emphasizes the ancient art of oral storytelling quite like working in theater. I’m always amazed and awestruck by professional actors who funnel their focus, energy and talents into delivering a message with profound depth. It never, ever, ever gets old. What’s more, reminding myself that some variation of theater has been around for as long as humans have been humans grounds my optimism in its inevitable, post-pandemic return. You can read more about what that looks like for the Playhouse in a recent article I wrote for them: “New Play Commissions Guide an Eventual Return to the Theatre.”
It takes an artistic village.
Telling stories for me has pretty much always been a solitary act. This changed when I attended film school and learned how different departments come together to make a movie. But given the setting (which was basically a bunch of stressed-out grads learning how it all works and running purely on anxiety and caffeine and a little bit of artistic ego), the beauty of this lesson got lost in translation at times. Working in a professional theater re-invigorated my appreciation of the “artistic village.”
At the Playhouse, I interviewed a lot of folks on a pretty consistent basis. We always requested content from artists via video interviews, Q&As, artist notes, blogs, etc., for marketing and digital purposes. It really drove home the idea that every artist (from director to playwright to performer to designer) takes their own slice of the pie and applies their creative expertise as a contribution to the production. I absolutely loved getting to know their individual perspectives. There’s so much research and inspiration to chew on, and for an arts nerd like me, this is like a buffet of desserts. I could listen to professional artists talk about their work for hours. Here’s one of my favorite interviews from 2019 with the set designer of Once on This Island.
And there’s a whole other village behind the scenes.
I’d say the average theater-goer doesn’t realize how many people it takes to make a production work. I don’t even have a ballpark estimate. Every single light/sound effect/actor entrance/set movement/musical piece is called by a stage manager for every performance and made possible by a crew of professionals who work backstage (and above the stage and underneath the stage). Also, these jobs seem cool as hell, if not a little dangerous and thrilling at the same time. Take a look at the behind-the-scenes video tour we did last year to get a better idea.
The arts are essential to the economy.
I grew up with a desire to work in the arts in some capacity, and I always got off-the-cuff feedback from adults like, “That’s more of a hobby, you should really learn management/business/IT/some other profession I couldn’t care less about.” When I was taking creative writing classes for my major in college, friends and adults alike would tell me my degree wasn’t real. After earning my B.A. in my supposedly not-real degree (Creative Writing with a minor in Film Studies), way too many small-minded people made comments like, “So, you’re just going to be a server/work in retail/work in sales/be poor/be broke/live with your parents?”
Maybe it was the community that I grew up in, but the resounding sentiment was that working professionally in the arts is a waste of time and creative outlets should be hobbies, not careers. Responses like these really deserve a few four-letter words in rebuttal, but instead, I’ll just articulate the reality that the arts contribute literally billions of dollars and millions of jobs to the U.S. economy every year. The quickest/simplest Google search nets straightforward evidence:
“The sixth edition of the Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account (ACPSA) finds that arts and culture contributed $877.8 billion, or 4.5 percent, to the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2017. That same year, there were over 5 million wage‐and‐salary workers employed in the arts and cultural sector, earning a total of $405 billion.”
Working at the theater, as one of those salary workers, alongside the development department really amplified that reality. I send all the kudos and never-ending standing Os to the folks who write the grants, secure the sponsorships, raise the funds and go to bat for arts organizations so that they can sustain themselves.
Attending a performance is a lot like going to a religious service.
The physical setting is similar, and the objective is similar as well: We gather in-person to think and feel deeply so that we can make sense of the world, each other and ourselves.
Performers project words and songs that tell a story with themes and sentiments organized in a creative manner against an artistic background. I felt this the most when I watched August Wilson’s Two Trains Running. Wilson, a theatrical legend, wrote incredibly rich monologues for his characters, like the one he wrote for Holloway in Act Two:
“That’s all you got: You got love and you got death. Death will find you. It’s up to you to find love. That’s where most people fall down at. Death got room for everybody — love pick and choose. Now, most people won’t admit that. They tell you they love this one and that one. Most don’t even love their mother. You can see that by the way they treat her. But they’ll tell you anything. But they got to know in their heart. I believe West loved his wife, and Bubba Boy loved his woman. Them’s the only two people I can say found love. The rest of us play at it. That’s ‘cause love cost. Love got a price to it. Everybody don’t wanna pay. They put it on credit. Time it come due they got it on credit somewhere else. That’s what I done learned all these years.”
You can watch a clip of actor Michael Anthony Williams delivering this monologue in the Playhouse’s production here.
In my opinion, experiencing the stories of others, even when they’re fictional, offers a wealth of insight not unlike the way a religious figure interprets a sacred text and presents it to a congregation of believers. Once I made this realization, it was easy to deduce that my personal religion is, quite simply, the arts. I consider myself an empath and humanitarian who shapes their values and principles through that framework, so learning how others view the world through the perspectives of characters, monologues, parables, tales, music and song is sort of like a spiritual practice for me. The arts teach us how to be human.
Theater literally connects people, physiologically.
In 2017, researchers found that when an audience watches a live theatre performance together, their heartbeats synchronize, even if they’re total strangers. The research was led by Dr. Joe Devlin and conducted in London by the UCL Division of Psychological and Language Studies. Here’s a succinct summary of their findings:
“The team monitored the heart rates and electro-dermal activity of 12 audience members at a live performance of the West End musical Dreamgirls. The team found that as well as alongside individuals’ emotional responses, the audience members’ hearts were also responding in unison, with their pulses speeding up and slowing down at the same rate. […] Dr Devlin said, ‘Experiencing the live theatre performance was extraordinary enough to overcome group differences and produce a common physiological experience in the audience members.’”
My two thoughts on this: 1. I can’t imagine a better piece of evidence to underscore the importance and potential of the arts as a vehicle for empathy and connection, and 2. it further deepens my belief that the arts are my personal manner of spiritual practice. Honestly, I’m just a Hufflepuff who wants the world to be a better place and loves a good story.
All this is, of course, just a brief overview of my time working in theater. It doesn’t take into account the many other lessons I learned, skills I acquired and knowledge I obtained. I don’t ever want to live a life without theater (which has made the past year all the more challenging).
As a freelance writer, I aim to stay immersed in the arts by way of content marketing, documenting and reporting, and creative storytelling through fiction, nonfiction, film and digital content. Maybe I’ll soon combine everything I’ve learned into a hybrid production of sorts. We shall see.
