Los Angeles Times: Column: How John Proctor and #MeToo helped cure my ‘work in progress’ theater phobia
"The Devil Ties My Tongue" by Amy Seiwert performed for the SKETCH Series, 2013. Photo by David DeSilva. Courtesy of Amy Seiwert's Imagery
Los Angeles Times: Column: How John Proctor and #MeToo helped cure my ‘work in progress’ theater phobia
By Mary McNamara
15 August 2019
Some people get anxious when they fly, I get tense when I go to a play. Particularly if the space is small and intimate and there is no intermission.
I fret about tech disasters and dropped lines, bad casting and flawed sets as if I were the playwright’s mother or some make-or-break investor. Mostly, I worry that it will be terrible and that I will be trapped. Theater is an active, communal experience; what if I, as an audience member, can’t hold up my end because despite what the reviewers said, I just really hate this play? It’s not like I can hit the remote or get up and leave. I can’t even slump in my seat and commune in horrified hilarity with my friends. The people who are making it are right there.
And that’s for a play that’s finished. Watch a work in progress? Honey, there’s not enough Xanax in the world.
Then my older daughter became a summer intern at the 22nd Ojai Playwrights Conference’s New Works Festival and so I went to the final production. By the time it ended, with a denunciation of John Proctor, a celebration of Lorde and 200 people on their feet cheering, crying and dancing their way onto the stage, my theater anxiety had vanished; I was cured.
Read the full article in The Los Angeles Times.
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