Nobody Knows Anything

I'm borrowing the title of this post from the name of the first lecture in the Steiner Speaker Series at Carnegie Mellon by prolific Broadway producer Nelle Nugent. Her lecture was a candid talk about the process of getting a show off the ground and how difficult it is. I won't spill the beans on the talk, because she asked us not to (and honestly I don't remember the details at this point), but what I took away from it was that creating theater is a highly collaborative process full of incredibly talented and passionate people, and that more often than not when the process succeeds it is in spite of everything those people do.

In my "decommissioning report" for Scotch'n'Soda, I commented that it's a truly amazing organization, in that it shouldn't work. It shouldn't be that for 73 consecutive years a group of tired, overworked students should be able to mount successive and often successful theatrical productions with little more than passion and gumption. I'll be honest, most of my theatrical experience is with S'n'S, and my professional experience is all of 3 weeks old, but I think I can say rather definitively, Scotch'n'Soda, you're doing alright.

It's truly fascinating to me to see the creative process at work. If you've never partaken in theater any more than being an audience member, you probably don't know anything about the the utter chaos that can go on behind the scenes while trying to get ready to do a show. That's certainly not to say that every show is chaotic, and certainly most of the 10 x 25 performances are really quite calm before the audience arrives. But it's really something special to be a part of the swarm of activity that shifts into a studied calm as the audience files in that blossoms into an amazing show. I'm realizing more and more that I'm in the right field, and that my job is pretty darn cool.

And it really gives me hope when I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing or how to put on a show when I think about the fact that no one else really knows how either. They may have more experience doing it, but nobody really knows, and it's constantly being reinvented. I think being willing to embrace alternate ways of doing things, and always being willing to try something new and better while still honoring methods of the past is really the key to success in creative endeavors (or really any endeavor, I guess).

So perhaps you've noticed that my blog posts have become much more thoughtful and much less update-ful. I'm trying out a new format, in the hope that this blog will be more interesting for both you and me. You'll have to forgive me for it being a little scatterbrained, but I hope that there are some insights here that are worth reading.

Keep calm and carry on.