State of Play(wright): where the hell have you been loca?
Let's get Real for a second.
Hello! In this article I’m going to be getting pretty vulnerable and personal about some things I’ve been going through. If you’re not into that, I totally get it, and I’ll see you for my next post!
While I have been keeping up with my weekly NPX reviews, some of you may have noticed that my State of Play(wright) updates have fallen off in recent weeks.
I started the series as a way to not only show myself how much work I was doing and to hopefully create some sort of intrinsic motivation, but to show others that the work of an emerging playwright can look different week to week and playwright to playwright. A lot of you have responded, saying the series was a refreshing look at the life and creative process of a theatre maker who still, like most of us, has to work a non-theatrical job. And I truly, truly appreciate all the comments and likes and messages I have received about this.
So, in that spirit, I’m going to get real with you all for a second: I lost out on two amazing job opportunities recently, and began to do what my lil ADHD self does best— spiral.
We are not defined by the work that we are paid for. We are not defined by our work at all! And yet, in a late-stage capitalist society, that notion is consistently battered by our need for work in order to sustain ourselves. It’s something I’ve been battling with heavily since graduating grad school in 2020. Sure, I won this and that award or was a finalist for such and such festival, but that doesn’t pay my bills. This is a thought that’s been a constant thorn in my proverbial side for over five years. And it didn’t help that, until last year, I had a partner that was obsessed with money.
I’ve been living with my parents since March of 2024 in an effort to recoup some savings in order to be able to move into NYC this year. I have a roommate picked out and everything now, and I’ll be NYC bound by late August, so this plan has been largely successful. The problem now is…getting a job.
As I said above, I lost out on two amazing job opportunities recently— the NYTW 2050 Admin Fellowship, for which I was an interviewed finalist, and a Teaching Artist position at Roundabout. The latter I actually flew up to NYC on short notice to interview for— but I digress. The point is that both of these positions were about as close to a dream job as I think I could get right now, and I didn’t get either. This comes after a months and months long stream of interviews for jobs that would’ve been a great fit for me that I lost out on for one reason or another: a high school Theater teacher position at a charter school (they decided not to hire anyone); a library clerk position in the Performing Arts library at NYPL (overqualified); a paid Resident Artist position with a brand new company in Pittsburgh (they also didn’t hire anybody, long story there); a middle school Theater teacher position (my workplace had shit cell service and I missed their call); and more.
Honestly when I got the email from Roundabout that, despite nailing the teaching demo, they wouldn’t be hiring me, I fell into a pit of What Is Even The Point Of Trying Anymore. I had lost out on job after job after job where I had thought this will finally be the one. I flashed back to when I got laid off from my theater job down here in North Carolina, and how it took me seven weeks just to find one, part time job that paid like ass. I thought about how, back in graduate school, a lot of retail stores wouldn’t even interview me because I was “overqualified” in being a master’s student.
Essentially, I started to panic.
What if, despite hundreds of applications and an MFA I went 40k into debt for, I couldn’t get a single job at all, let alone one even vaguely attached to theater?
All my loved ones consistently reminded me that I was currently a semifinalist for Wild Imaginings: Epiphanies, that I had just been published, that my SubStack was doing pretty good for someone who never promotes it on social media (oops), that I wasn’t a failure, and all I could say back was that infernal line my brain couldn’t stop repeating: But those things don’t pay my bills.
Because in my mind, I was already broke in NYC with no prospects and having to move back in with my parents again, now at the age of 30+. And in this prospective future, these circumstances meant that everybody who had ever wronged me, who had ever told me I couldn’t do this, had won.
Now, I won’t get too much into that— some things really are best left for my best friends and my therapist— but I will say that I have, unfortunately, had a lot of experiences with people belittling me and my aspirations. I am someone who is, because of this, fueled at least partly by spite and a need to do better than the shitty people I have encountered. While this can be a fine thing sometimes, it doesn’t work 24/7. One cannot, unfortunately, be moved through life on spite alone.
In this case I have found that, to my chagrin, I need to motivate myself to do things for myself. Because, now that I’m truly on my own again after almost a decade of losing myself to a shitty relationship, I like myself again. The person I am is someone that, as I am constantly reminding myself, deserves to succeed and be happy. But sometimes that feels too cringe to admit and I’d rather growl and hide in a corner. Trust me— I’m working on it.
All this culminates into a realization I had while practicing a tarot spread for a gig I had at a bookstore (I’m gigging hardcore right now). As I pulled the Four of Cups (The Bell Jar in my Banned Books deck) I realized that I couldn’t keep doing this. I couldn’t just wait around in North Carolina, hoping people would want to interview me even though I didn’t live in NYC yet. I couldn’t, unfortunately, keep playing everything so “safe” and “smart”. There is a time in our lives for risk taking, for determining “what will I regret not trying?”. And that time, at least for me, is now.
I can’t put all my self worth on a partner, I know that now. And I can’t put all my self worth on a job, or a career, or anything else like that either. Even though a part of me will probably always cringe to admit it, I have inherent worth as a human being, and I need to put my bullshit aside for my own good. And for me? That means getting my shit together with my roommate, getting an apartment, and just fucking going. Because yeah— maybe I’ll fail spectacularly, barely last a year, and have to move right back in with my parents. But at least I’ll know I fucking tried.
So yeah— I had a little stumble. I didn’t write much besides my required PIETA revisions (which turned out so good I think) for about a month. It doesn’t help that right now I don’t have a concrete job, just a bunch of gigs and a very small crochet side hustle, which requires a lot of scheduling and prep and way more work than I thought. But now that I have my head on straight again, I’ll be back to State of Play(wright), and I hope you’ll keep your practice up too. Even if sometimes, you trip a little bit.
That’s all for me— happy theatre making, friends.
~Brynn