Drama Drama

Beth is the director of a repertory theater and teaches at a school of drama. While Beth feels that collaborations in theater are most often wonderfully exciting and generative, she has experienced some that are chronically bad and some that have reached a critical point at which she has asked an actor to leave the play. She remembers casting an actress who turned out to be a non-functioning alcoholic, and she realized soon after rehearsals started that the actress had to be fired. However, she said that she felt “a terrible sense of responsibility to this woman,” and she wondered if she might be precipitating a crisis in the actress’s life by letting her go. Beth nonetheless maintains that there “was no question that this was the right course of action.”

Beth is the Director of a repertory theater and teaches at a school of drama. At the start of her career, Beth believed that theater could open people’s minds and hearts. Now, at forty-six, she takes a slightly different approach and believes that the function of theater is not to get people to do anything, but rather to stimulate change within oneself. She would like to inspire the work of actors, to help them trust and believe in their gifts, to push them to use their bodies and their imaginations. She hopes to help actors establish what she describes as an emotional relationship to their work. 

While Beth sees collaborations in the theater as wonderfully exciting and generative, she has experienced some that are chronically bad and some that have reached critical points at which she has asked actors to leave the plays. In all cases, problems were detected early, which diminished the traumatic effects of the departures. She tries never to turn her back on problems, in spite of how painful and frustrating they might become. Instead she tries to work through them and find solutions. 

Beth describes one issue that she felt she had to tackle head-on. She remembers casting an actress who turned out to have a serious substance-abuse problem. Soon after rehearsals began, Beth realized she had to fire her: 

“I had cast an actress in a play and it turned out that she was an alcoholic. Within a couple of days of rehearsal, it was clear that she was non-functional and that she had to be let go—had to be. It was the integrity of the company, the integrity of the project. Lots of good, hard working people were counting on me to make a hard decision, and I had to make the decision. Had I not made it, the artistic director would have made it for me. So there was no question about what I had to do … I had a … sense of responsibility to this woman—what crisis was I precipitating in her life by letting her go? What [might] my responsibility for that crisis … be?”

According to Beth, “There was no question that this was the right course of action.” Do you agree?