Vintage Advice contains reprints from the history of USITT Northern Boundary Section. Sometimes sage wisdom, often times revelations about what remains true or useful through the years and always a window into history.
from DesTech News Summer 1988 Vol 8 No 2
Who's In Control?
(The following is an excerpt from the keynote address delivered by William J. Flynn at the 9th Annual Alberta Section USITT conference in Edmonton, Alberta, April, 1988. Reprinted with permission from the USITT-Alberta Section offices.)
In many ways, what we do in theatre is antithetical to many tenants of common sense, reality, logic and enlightened self interest. Consider what some of us do. We create things of beauty that have a limited life span. We work in an art form designed to give pleasure to others, yet rarely do we share that art form with the people for whom we create it. The composite art form to which we contribute lives for several hours, then dies, only to be laboriously recreated the next day. We painstakingly work to create reality in an environment of make-believe. We create exquisite props so that they may be destroyed in a production. Many designers go to endless lengths to create lighting, sound, scenery or costumes for which the highest compliment is that their work was so appropriate to the production that it blended in seamlessly and went unnoticed.
When our audiences play, we work. We become night people. We live by deadlines, on the edge. With few resources, we become resourceful -- we make more out of less. Our spouses try to arrange a marriage or a family around impossible, illogical schedules. We don't eat out, we eat on the run or while working. We look at a theatre poster for a production into which we have poured our soul and don't see our name. We run together like pack rats, because only other techies know what we go through. We are one of the few species that finds some perverse pleasure in staying up all night. The real business of the annual USITT convention takes place at myriad bars where people see each other once a year to commiserate and complain.
Now another thing a keynote speaker is supposed to do is give you some hope, and after what I've just said, some hope might be appreciated. So I reflected, and came up with some suggestions that I want you to take with you. And maybe, just maybe, you might try out one or two of them and see if they work.
1. If you have someone in your life, give him or her equal time. If you don't, find someone or simply enjoy the chase. Don't ever be married to your job.
2. Identify some activity or process that has no theatrical affiliation of any kind and cultivate it. The more contemplative it is, the better.
3. Make a careful plan for what your next job will be and start finding ways to obtain it. Update your resume every three months even if you are deliriously happy with what you are doing. Constantly solicit current letters of recommendation. Your career plan is an ever shifting document that requires attention and nurturing. It should be for one-, three- and five-year modules.
4. Learn to become a better financial planner. Have enough money put away so that you can take six months off without worrying.
5. Give your current job quality time and when the work day is over, leave your job at work -- don't take it home.
6. Develop tolerance for people. Understand why people do things and learn how to get along with them, motivate them and forgive them. When you suddenly wake up at 3 in the morning with your mind racing or your teeth clenched, it's not a procedure or a thing that has you upset, it's a person. If you let people get you upset, find out why and take the time and means to solve the problem.
7. Study how to be a better manager of yourself and others. It can be done on a scale consistent with what you want to achieve through self instruction. Management studies can be complex, convoluted and boring.
8. Stop joking about what you want to be when you grow up. Grow up.
9. Identify what you do best that is legal and devote a regular period of time to improving your skills. We may not have chosen our talent or ability, but we have the capability to improve it.
If you detect a thread running through my recommendations, it is a simple one- we have the power to control our lives, rather than having them controlled for us. It's not too late to step back from the punishing schedule, the self-induced stress, the caffeine-alcohol syndrome, the compulsive behavior, and have a larger share in our own destiny.
We are in a profession that gives so much pleasure to people, yet we are often unhappy, many times miserable. We spend long hours in hard work at strange hours at low pay with no visible recognition and our response is usually the very old punch line about the man who cleaned up after the elephants at the circus. When asked why he did not walk away from a demeaning smelly, unpleasant job, he replied "What, and get out of show business?"
Life is too short. Its rewards are directly proportional to the investment we make in it. Think now for a moment- suppose you were to die and your tombstone could only have only your name and the phrase “he or she was ____________.” What one word would you want to be your identifier, the summation of your life's work, the most striking impression you made on everyone you came in contact with, or worked with, or lived with? What is it you want people to think about you, and what are you willing to do to live up to that reputation.
We are in a grand and glorious profession. Theatre is the king of the arts, the oldest, noblest, the most exciting, most rewarding aesthetic experience one can have. Like the players in Hamlet, we too are the abstract and brief chronicles of our time. But we have no Polonius to see that we are well bestowed. We have only ourselves to look to, rely upon, to bolster us in both the darkest hours and the elusive moments of triumph. We must conserve our talents, not squander them – make our lives more manageable and civilized, not chaotic and dependent.
Perhaps the best tombstone epitaph we could hope for is “He was sane”.