As Promised: My Utterly Sincere (and thus out of character) Rationale for Doing This:
or Why I Love StageSource

I moved to Boston in 1994, fresh out of an undergrad BA theater program with a lot of opinions on Chekhov and no idea how to turn that into a check. I was under the impression that I was setting out to do something impossible: support myself in the arts while living in the city I love. Honestly, I figured I’d give it a go for a couple of years, give up, go to law school or something and get a “real” job.

But right before graduation, a friend of mine’s mother, a singer, gave me a StageSource card. And that made all the difference. I went to a resume workshop through StageSource and figured out how to present myself on paper. I met with an audition coach that I heard of through StageSource and learned how to present myself in auditions. And I went to auditions posted on the audition hotline.

 

And I got work. I was in some great productions with great companies. I was in some terrible productions. I got jobs that paid pretty well. I got jobs that didn’t pay at all. But I was working.

Every important professional connection I made and opportunity I was given I can trace back to StageSource.

I got a job my first long-term acting gig with Pastiche Productions, with whom I got to tour the country with a domestic violence education program, from a StageSource audition.

I met Dan Milstein, with whom I founded Rough & Tumble Theatre on a job I got through StageSource, a production so bad it inspired us to go out and make our own theater.

I met Irene Daly, my long time friend and collaborator when I saw her being brilliant in another theater company’s production I attended because of a free ticket offer for StageSource members and vowed to steal her from them.

I decided to go to grad school at Tufts after meeting a Tufts grad in a production I was cast in through an audition I heard about through StageSource.

I could go on.

What I mean to say is that StageSource has been incredibly important to my career and to me personally. But is also helped to define and refine the community that I now call “home” – the Boston Theater Community. Here’s the thing about theater people: most of us are painfully shy and fearful of rejection. (You don’t want to pretend to be someone else for several hours every day because you are comfortable in your own skin. You don’t lurk in dark theaters painting sets because you are awesome at parties.) Add to that the reserve of your typical New Englander, and we in the Boston Theater Community aren’t so great at opening ourselves up and making new friends.

But StageSource creates events, environments, workshops, forums, blogs, social media outlets, where this rag-tag group of control freaks and borderline personalities and the occasional out and out nutbag can become a community with one voice, one vision and one shared passion.

And if there are two things I love, its theater and community building. (Many people who know me will wonder if I am being facetious. I am not.)

I love this organization with all my heart. It taught me to be the professional I am. I am so proud to be a member, to able to give back to it with service on the board and with my small but heartfelt financial contribution. Which I am hoping to bolster by doing a Marathon. 

Do give me some money, whydontcha.