The Rehearsal Room
The rehearsal room is a term that I use to refer to the space we hold as creators of theatre. Wherever it is that we prepare a performance for our audience is the rehearsal room. This room must be a safe space for everyone. Recently this has been forgotten in this movement/desire to “do better”. We’re so focused on doing better and regulating those who we perceive as unenlightened in the new protocols that we’ve made the rehearsal room a superfund site. And that will kill the theatre faster than any lack of budget or audience (or the five dollar Costco cookie).
I’ve noticed a general cultural shift to assuming the worst intentions of our colleagues. Everyone is now a stranger, an enemy… a sinner. I’ve seen veteran members of the community and even founding Artistic Directors “cancelled” for speaking in terms that last year would have never fluttered an eyelash. This mob-style rule is inherently dangerous to our field and must be guarded against at all costs. The rehearsal room is a place where our older members must be safe to bring and express their generational norms, unaware of the new ways of doing things.
Let me expand: We must allow all of ourselves to freely express our established world views, our judgments and our prejudices so that they can be aired, discussed, debated, relieved, re-educated, sometimes affirmed, mostly unwound... That’s right. All of us. We’re not monks. Monks aren’t monks, they’re just playing them on TV.
This is not an “all lives matter” statement. Understand that our movements for justice for all marginalized people are valid and we need our leaders to listen and make change. That’s not what I’m talking about here. We all have prejudices. All of us. We all harbor generalizations borne out of experience, and out of fear and fantasy. We all deserve to have those inconsistencies in our characters, and we have the right to work on them, or not to. In the rehearsal room, everyone is truly equal.
It must be safe for us to be fully ourselves in the rehearsal room. If a conversation needs to take place that will educate or shift members of our community who may be behind the culture curve, those who are facilitating the discussion must be patient and kind in the discourse. There’s a tendency for us to instantly want others to understand what we understand and be perfect now that we’ve told them. Maturity is the understanding that evolution is a slow process. It requires the processing of information over a period of time that leads to epiphones. It’s like building a theatre show. It’s thick and lurchy. That’s just the way it is.
Further, education is a two-way street. Some of our oldest community members are Baby Boomers. Some of them fought in, or fought to stop the Vietnam War. They helped to usher in the Civil Rights movement and have supported marginalized groups their entire lives. They have something to teach us as creators. They’ve participated in the most dynamic lifetime since the Great Depression, and they have something valuable to offer us. We should do a lot more listening and a lot less lecturing. The rehearsal room is the place where these conversations must be unavoidable. If an older or a less woke troupe member makes a faux pas, it must become an opportunity for dialogue, not a surprise public humiliation (as a colleague put it recently). This is absolutely critical. Approaching any actor/creator as a sinner smacks of Christian patriarchal dogma and it must be militantly guarded against in my view. Everyone has a right to be heard, and everyone has a right to feel safe. And everyone has the gawd-given right not to be a monk.
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