Well. That election happened.
It’s hard to know where to begin, and we are not short of hot takes, analysis, calls of despair, and confusion. And I don’t want to add to the noise. Because it is all noise. The reactions and emotions immediately after a seismic shift are valid but do not always point to solutions so readily as we would hope.
This is a theatre blog and so to just focus a little on that…
It’s not going to get easier to be an artist or writer. Most of us spend our lives working for the perfect situation in which to create — quiet time, your own space, DAYS of empty time to focus. But most of us have to carve our work into stolen bits between our obligations and work and life. And when big, overwhelming societal, climate, economic, etc. shifts happen…it becomes harder to find that time and harder to find the point.
Why am I so upset about my story being rejected from a magazine when there’s a genocide in progress? Why am I inviting people to the reading of my play when I should be marching for reproductive rights? Why do I have to work on new bylaws of the tiny theatre company I’m a part of when there are hurricanes and pandemics?
The perfect time to create doesn’t exist. And we will not be afforded a utopia to write our little plays any time soon.
I can’t sit here and say what we do is the most important thing. The more I saw posts this week about how THIS IS THE TIME FOR ARTISTS just made me feel more sick and lost and frustrated. But as the author Charlie Jane Anders said this week on Bluesky – we are in a culture war. And artists are the culture makers.
Culture and our media system has helped spread misinformation, radicalized people. These are the things that those in power try to control because digestible narratives are more often the thing that sway folks rather than deep understanding of policies.
Even saying this feels like I’m just parroting the reactions I’ve seen all week. But I think it is true that while a play will not save the world, what we decide to put into the world does matter. If some things that are put into the world make folks feel less seen or less safe, it stands to reason that we could put something in the world that does the opposite.
We can take the advice of life-long activists and find the one cause that we can dedicate our time too — if we focus on all the things wrong, we will get burnt out. If you’re not sure where to start, here’s a comic book version of Project 2025 that has been confirmed to be generally the incoming administration’s agenda. If there is something there that hits the closest to you — perhaps that’s where you put your energy.
There will be a lot of smart people sifting through the drudgery that is actually needed to keep a democratic experiment from slipping into authoritarianism. Much of our society has been shaped by the Chosen One narrative and so it is easy to imagine that “revolution” looks like us single-handedly punching all the nazis into oblivion. But real change is bigger and more boring than that. And depending on where your privileges and powers fall, being active, being an ally, working for change may look very different and may not always be easily posted to social media or framed as a hero narrative.
The last several months have made me do some serious reflection on what leadership truly means to me. I think as a society we tend to think that strong leaders manifest as aggressive, outspoken, stubborn — they tend to be the people we perceive as the ones who get-things-done-no-matter-the-cost. And these qualities have a gender-bias spectrum that cannot be ignored. Certainly there is a time and place for a force of will and hard uncomfortable decisions — but I think having a vision is not the same as having an ego, and the work toward that vision can look a lot more like care and collaboration than a single-minded drive. In the end, how we govern ourselves on the micro scale (in our theatre community, perhaps) reflects so much of what we aspire to in the macro.
You do not have to give up theatre in order to fight the fights important to you. Theatre is part of the practice.
So what stories do you want to make?
A father friend of mine wants to write a environmental socialist utopian novel. As a father, leaning into hopeful futures feels great.
As an auntie, I’m embracing my horror phase. I’ve been writing four plays this fall that all land on the horror spectrum. I’m okay with my role as the angry auntie.
A friend of mine told our group chat that a professor of hers once gave this advice: Find the thing that makes you feel alive and then become ferally protective of it.
So, go do that. Don’t stop doing that. Just as a baseline.
Also always helpful to get some dialogue advice:
