The Balancing Act

I’m crazy, I think that’s been established (my name probably helps confirmed this). I’ve done some pretty insane workaholic things in my years of doing theatre, but I’ve now topped my own level of craziness. In one week’s time (Sunday to Saturday), I had four premiere’s of mine happened. Four different shows, literally opening in less than a week (three of those four being back-to-back-to-back)!

So one just might wonder: how can anyone balance all those things? Well even after it all, I have to say that it takes a serious amount of planning and a lot of work all at once. Especially since asides from 4 shows, I still have my job (I now get to do theatre with kids in an after school program), interviews, reading plays and preparing for shows to work on for the rest of this year and for 2014. On top of that full plate of work, I have that happy nearly 2 year relationship with one of my favorite theatre artists to keep going with (which I’d consider to be my dessert plate 😉 ). So it takes hours of planning literally every move. I needed to plan when am I going to be at what place at what time. After one rehearsal, show, etc. ended, I had to quickly move on to the next. Taking my time wasn’t an option.

One really cool thing about was that I was able to see one show of mine, take off right afterwards, and see another show of mine. Because of the performance times being different and from all the theatres being amazingly close together, I never had a problem going from one to another. It’s also feels good to know you can be so accomplished. Especially for me being in my mid-20’s, being able to say that I had 4 productions of mine happen within the same 7 days as both a writer and a director is a pretty nice thing to be able to say (particularly right after two award nominations from the summer)!

While of course the good outweighs the bad (and the fact that there’s any bad in this at all is shocking), but there were a couple of down falls to having so much happen at once. It’s harder to let it all sink in when there’s so much happening. Asides from the extreme planning that I mentioned earlier, I almost felt like I was in robot mode, since my logic was throughout “ok that’s done now time for this.” Also from having so many cool things happen at once, now that it’s all over I only have 2 staged readings for the rest of 2014, along with half a dozen scripts to read for me to work on next year (OK, certainly that’s not a down fall as I love reading plays). I do feel that if it were more spread out, I would’ve not only still been able to do it all, but also be able to appreciate it in a different way.

Ultimately, I loved having this experience. It really feels good to have so much theatrical work to do! While I never want to have 4 shows go up in the same week again, I feel like I learned so much about my own work as an artist and even how I as a human being works, from this crazy but awesome experience!