My Love / Hate Relationship with Theater

 

Sometimes I hate theatre.

I’m sure you do too.

No matter how much we say we love it — the collaboration, the creativity, the excitement of seeing our work go from page to stage, it can be as much of a pain as — you fill in the blank. Sometimes, especially on long hot summer days, I feel I don’t have it in me to keep going.

It takes a long time to create. It takes longer to submit. It takes a village to produce. It takes grit and stamina and persistence. And that doesn’t include the many coffee dates, chance meetings on the train, or zoom chats, seminars, or panels, or networking events we attend to improve our chances of getting our work noticed.

Then there’s submissions. Since the end of 2017, when I started keeping track, I’ve made over 456 submissions. How do I know? I keep a list in Excel. I have a color code system: Red for declined, Yellow for follow-up, and Green for accepted. But most of the cells are white, meaning no response or follow-up. Crickets.

And yet, there are those 39 yellow and green cells indicating some sort of response.

Let’s do the math: that’s about one in twelve or an 8.5% response rate. For every twelve submissions that I tracked, I got some sort of positive response. And every time that happens, I do a victory lap, have a celebratory beverage, and my mood lifts in anticipation. Some of these lead to a simple script submission and end there.

 But every once in a while, one of those yellow cells turn to green, and an interesting project takes shape: a table reading, a zoom reading or a staged reading, or at best, a full production.

 And once again, I’m full in, heart and soul. And I remember why I love theatre.

 

Melissa Bell’s work has been featured in the New York Times and nominated for Best Adaptation & Modernization by New York Shakespeare and awarded Finalist for Henley Rose Playwright Competition for LADY CAPULET and awarded Honored Finalist for the Collaboration Award by the Women in Arts & Media Coalition for COURAGE. Read and review her work on the New Play Exchange.

 

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