Mom, I got news for you...

Editorial
My mom asked me not very long ago whether I had a “Plan B.” This was after I was awarded a Jerome Fellowship and a Helen Merrill Award, after three Guthrie commissions, and after several of my plays had various openings in various cities. I’m not quite sure what my mother’s idea of success is. I think it’s stability. Maybe health insurance. A house. Mostly I think it’s a conventional life, one where you know where your next paycheck is coming from and you know where you’ll live from one year to the next. Now I’m not a wacky playwright, living on absinthe and cobwebs in a garret. At the time, I was living in a spacious two bedroom apartment with my boyfriend, supplementing my writing income with a part-time job. I don’t have any illusions that I won’t ever work in an office again, and I sometimes consider taking a class in web design or one of those skills that artists learn because the work pays well and you can schedule your own hours. For some reason, my absinthe-drinking, cobweb-eating friends get angry at me for keeping part-time office jobs in the face of commissions and fellowships. But I do it so I can have that somewhat conventional life. I buy my own health insurance. I have a 401K that I contribute to (sometimes…). In a good year, when I have a fellowship or some steady form of playwriting income, I can bounce between different projects, working on a screenplay here, working on a play there, making calls for my theater company for a couple hours a day as the de-facto production/marketing manager. This past year and next, I’m keeping my head above water from money from writing projects. But 2010, who knows? When I was in my twenties, I saw a Hal Hartley movie about struggling artists, Theory of Achievement, that molded the way I think about these office jobs. One character, an unsuccessful realtor/wanna-be artist in Brooklyn, says to another, “I don’t confuse what I am with what I do for a living.” Financial stability isn’t how I define my success as a playwright.

How to define success

One thing that makes me feel like a success is writing something that makes me feel like I’m digging deep. There are only a few times when I’m making art. So much of the time, I feel like I’m splashing around in the kiddie pool. I slog through a lot of words and a lot of voices. I have many half-started plays on my computer and a lot of discarded pages between the first draft and the seventh. So when I have those moments when the words are flowing and they’re coming from God knows where, I learn to appreciate them. Another thing that makes me feel like a success is actually hearing and seeing my work. As much as I like writing, for me, I’m most fulfilled in the rehearsal room. Maybe it’s because my professional theatrical life started as in stage-management. In my old life, I spent seven years in rehearsal room, six days a week, twelve to fourteen hours a day. I was one of the few stage-managers who loved to work on new plays. Everyone else asked for the Shakespeare or the O’Neill with the famous TV actor. I worked on premieres by David Rabe, Paula Vogel, Paul Rudnick, Naomi Wallace – and I loved the drill. I loved the rewrite process. I loved that an actor had a real imprint on the character, playing it for the first time. I loved that the playwright, director, and actors acted as co-conspirators in a game where they made up the rules. I’ve found that any way to put myself in that position more, usually by producing my own work or even by enlisting friends to read my work in my living room, makes me feel closer to what it means to be a successful playwright. Unlike a novelist or a poet, playwrights need actors and the stage to complete the circuit. (This is why I think there’s been a surge of playwrights as producers in the face of theater cut-backs and the vicious cycle of “development.” It’s incredibly exhausting but also truly empowering.) When things get rough and I think of the comfy office job with dental benefits and vacation days, I then think of PowerPoint presentations, 40 hour weeks spent in cubicles, and spreadsheets. It doesn’t make me shudder. Again, I accept that I’ll veer back and forth between those office jobs and working as a playwright, probably for the rest of my life. It does however make me want to take a nap. And I think that’s part of why we work in the theater. Yes, it can be traumatic. No, it doesn’t pay. But at least it’s not boring. (Heroin addicts probably make the same justifications before they shoot up.) I accept that to be successful at my job, the job of being a playwright, I very easily may have to forgo what other people see as the definition of success, both my mom’s fantasy of stability and security but also my artist-friends even more unachievable fantasy of making a living only from writing. And I’m ok with that. So. Mom, I got news for you, there is no Plan B.
Headshot of Victoria Stewart
Victoria Stewart
Before becoming a playwright, Victoria Stewart was a professional stage-manager. Victoria is a member of the Workhaus Collective and is the recipient of the McKnight Advancement Grant for 2008-2009. Her play 800 Words: The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick plays at the Playwright Center May 28-June 7.