THE SEASON IN REVIEW by Craig Joseph
I'm a pretty serious and intense navel gazer, sometimes to my own detriment, but at the end of major initiatives, I often find it helpful to review and recap what I think I've learned. I spend some time reflecting and then try to jot down my major takeaways in a black leather book that I return to time and time again when I want to recall what I've gleaned in the 25 years that I've been doing this practice. As I near 50, it's always fun to pull this book out because I'm reminded that I'm actually growing and transforming as a human being - and maybe not the hot mess that I often feel like.
The end of the 2024-2025 theatrical season has been my most recent time of reflection, so here are a few things I think I've learned as the Artistic Director of a small professional theatre company, offered up here in the hopes that maybe you'll find these ruminations useful as well. In no particular order:
1. Producing new work for the American theatre is costly (not just financially) and risky, but totally worth the effort if you can push past the many compelling reasons to just do something safer and easier.
2. There may be times when you don't want to pull the "I'm in charge card" for fear of squelching someone else's ideas, creativity, or agency. But if you've searched your heart and mind, if you're clear that you're not just on a power trip, and you still feel like you need to "pull that card," you should pull it. You possess that card because you have experience, expertise, intuition, and wisdom that others don't in this particular arena, and you're letting the group down if you don't bring those insights and authority to the table. Chances are good that if you're worried about seeming like a dictator, you're already behaving more conscientiously than dictators do.
3. There's a limit to how much you can take care of, coach, train, and develop other people if you're not allowing yourself to be taken care of as well. Strive to find the balance of being a leader, but also being a human being who is comfortable speaking needs and wants aloud, and asking for help when necessary.
4. There's considerable joy in inviting and empowering others to help raise, speak into, and share ownership of "your baby." There's also quite a bit of fear. Ultimately, it's super rewarding to see others use their skills and gifts to excel and make something better than you could have done on your own, but the path to the point almost always includes some false starts, bumps, disappointments, frustrations, and wondering why the hell you ever thought starting this thing would be worth it and if your friendships are going to survive collaborating with these people. It will be - and everyone will survive intact.
5. If an artistic environment ever becomes miserable, you have to leave or quit - regardless of how heartbreaking that might be. There are too few reasons to stay in the arts; it's not lucrative, you rarely become famous, many folks don't recognize their import, etc. So you have to do it for the joy and passion of it. If you're somewhere that kills joy and passion, get out, and preserve your love of artistry somewhere else.
6. I get better and better as a director in the rehearsal room the more willing I am to relinquish control and let magic happen. My job is NOT to have the "best" or "right" ideas, but to create an environment that helps release the "best" and "right" ideas that are already inside all of my collaborators. The best gift I have to offer is my undivided attention to their work, followed up by questions, observations, and suggestions.
7. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE eat before you come to meetings or rehearsals. You're gonna get hungry and it's not the stage manager's job to feed you. And for Pete's sake, remember where you set your wallet and keys down before you began to work.
