I am once again employed by Performance Network. For those unfamiliar, PNT is a professional nonprofit theatre in Ann Arbor, MI, and I recently gave it a year of my life, more or less. A sudden departure threatened to leave the staff shorthanded, and so I'm helping pick up some of the slack.
Funny, when the guy you trained five months ago gives you back your keys.
I'm also helping to find a replacement, of course. With any luck, I'll be giving the job to someone else within six weeks, so the theatre will have a reliable full-timer and the newbie will get their learnin'. (Also, in February, Barefoot in the Park will make a lusty power-grab for my time and energy.) In the meantime, I suddenly feel some nostalgia coming on. Wait, it might not be nostalgia. It might be a late-dinner-induced flashback. Whichever, here it is.
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One year ago: January, 2009.
-I am house managing, pre-show: standing at the counter, wearing a tie, trying to remember things. Mike is at the box office window. He has just burned out for the first time, and is affably counting the many months, out loud, to his last day. I can't blame him. While I had a few days off between Christmas and New Year's--during which I wrote the first 40-something pages of Thorstein--he was in tech rehearsal as the ASM of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, possibly the most energy-sucking show of the season. (Note: This is wrong. Fences would be the most energy-sucking show of the season, but that was months away.)
-I have not yet burned out even once, but I will. Both of us have just recovered from some horrible flu that has had its way with most of the staff this month, the microbial whore. Rosencrantz is a Big Show, in just the way Geoffrey and Jeffrey wasn't, for all the heartwarming cheer it radiated. (Except among Michigan's staunch anti-gay community, certain members of which I encountered while postering. You'd think they'd never seen a picture of two happily married dudes before.) The cast is large, audiences are large, and the set is large. The show will extend.
-There is the usual shuffling of actors and staff at the box office counter, as everyone weighs addressing Important Issues against the reality of how little time there is to eat dinner. I continue trying to remember things, which is important when you're house managing. I've done a lot of house managing recently, and I'm settling into a routine. It involves coffee, books from Aunt Agatha's, and bouts of creative innuendo with Boss, the technical director. And, y'know, getting people their tickets and whatnot.
-For a moment, I focus: I have recently begun writing another play. This means freaking everything, because I'm spending nearly all my time working for, with, and around people to whom I really, really, really want to prove myself. I'm not sure I like admitting how much that factors into my creative process. I have a small book of Icelandic Sagas, and I bring it with me everywhere. It is my primary research and inspiration for this project, and it's not even mine. Some weeks ago, I found it among Zach's books and took it along so I'd have something new to read while house managing.
-Mike mumbles something about not seeing his fiancee; I counter with something about not seeing the girl I'm seeing. We mess with the thermostat, and Mike gently reminds me not to refrigerate the rehearsal space this time. This is us at a low point. There will be high points, but this isn't one of them.
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I suppose it's a bad idea to blog about a rough moment in the job while seeking someone new to fill it. I think I wandered back to that point because I had a pleasant day at the theatre today, and all current and former apprentices responded to my presence, or the news thereof, by asking me if I'm off my nut (with the exception of Chelsea, who is now the Marketing Director). So I instinctively think of my least favorite stretch of the term. I'm funny that way.
Yeah, these things are tough, and often unfair and slow to reward long stretches of hard work. I like to think that mine was necessary, though; some of the ass-kicking I received would have had to come from elsewhere if it hadn't come from PNT, so it's just as well that I got the experience at a place where I can feel that my work meant something--with a small staff, during an economic downturn, in the most depressed state in the nation, yeah, everything counts.
I wrote all this bearing no ill will towards PNT--much the opposite, in fact--and felt like tonight was a good night to get some of my thoughts on the experience down. There's no need to sugar-coat this sort of thing, and the way I see it, it'd be a disservice to do so. In short: Go forth and suffer, reap the benefit, blog about it later.
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