Answer:

Participant in the 2020 Directors Lab West Zoom chat

This is the most important question all theater people have to ask. And the more creatively you answer it early in your career the greater your potential as a theater artist will be. I would not recommend finding an answer to it alone. Finding the people who will help you start to answer it will tell you a lot about your already developing theater aesthetic. Pick people you love and admire to discuss this question with so you feel that you just can’t wait to talk to them. Feel if there is some excitement or if it stays on the level of “I need job.” Read Harold Clurman’s book about the Group Theater “The Fervent Years’ about how many ideas you can come up with nursing a S-cent cup of coffee to keep warm for a whole afternoon if-you think times today are rough. Don’t forget your future audiences – invite them too from time to time. They will not know how to create the work, or the form of the work, but their general level of enthusiasm will help you gauge what you are doing. And this doesn’t mean your roommates or the people you are dating. Add a second degree of separation – they’ve already heard this at home in the first circle, And where will this be? What community? Would a local political figure or a business owner like to hear what you’re thinking? You’ll need a board at some point! Take six months to talk and widen the circle. Everyone should bring a few new enthusiastic people in to join for an evening. If there is something to emerge, it will emerge. And if it looks exactly like something that already exists, it will be a harder struggle. You need to find your own thing – your new theater’s own thing.