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Welcome to TFP, the Theatrefolk podcast. I am Lindsay Price, resident playwright for
Theatrefolk. Hello, I hope you're well. Thanks for listening.
This week on the podcast, you are in for a little humiliation-rejection combo. But first,
let's do THEATREFOLK NEWS. Have you found our blog? We didn't really lose our blog but
you need to find our blog. The blog is updated every day, ten months a year. Every day in
ten months a year, there is something new for you to read, to listen to, to click, to
look at, covering the gambit, acting posts, resource posts, writing posts, writing exercises.
Recently we've been talking about, of course, the latest TFT podcast with 10 questions answered
by moi and Craig's view from his acting gig in Neil Simon's Last of the Red Hot Lovers,
The Playbill Vault, and a fascinating website and a Writing Exercise called who's your protagonist.
Check out our blog. Please!
And of course, please always remember and don't ever forget the places in which you
can find this podcast. We post new episodes every Wednesday at theatrefolk.com on our
blog and our Facebook page and Twitter and you can subscribe to TFP on iTunes. Search
for us on the word Theatrefolk.
Episode Seven: Humiliation and Rejection
Now, there is a fun couple of guys, humiliation and rejection. And am I going to learn how
to say humiliation correctly? It always said sounding words to me, humiliation, humiliation,
humiliation. Those guys are, they are the life of the party. Who's that weeping in the
corner? Who's that ripping up their work page by page? Who is eating an entire bag of Doritos
with an Oreo chaser? Oh them, that's just Humiliation and Rejection. Swell guys. And
yet, for those of us in the creative fields, they are a pretty common duo. They are a common
experience. They are things that happen to all of us especially rejection. Depending
on where you are in the business of show, it is possible that you are getting rejected
multiple times in a day. How are we dealing with this? Sometimes it is a silent rejection.
The jobs you never hear about, the jobs that just fade away. Sometimes you get a form letter.
Sometimes you get really personal hate mail, more on that and little bit.
The problem is that we can't... not have a career without it. We must live with and accept
rejection. If you're going to make a living, if you want a creative career, there is no
such thing as sitting in the corner alone with your craft. You can do that. You can
make it a hobby and you can make it something that is purely for your own personal enjoyment.
It's just me and my craft in the corner hanging out, watching movies that is doable but it's
not a career and it's not a job. And if you're going to take you and your craft and go out
to the world, you are going to get your face slapped over and over again. It is going to
happen. And there are lot of different reasons why an actor, a writer or a dancer gets rejected
instead of hired for a project. And sometimes the rejection is it's nothing that you can
do right? There are more actors than jobs. There are more plays than slots in a theatre
seasons. What do you do? It can be overwhelming, the amount of rejection that can happens to
a creative artist. And it really bites to say this, but you have to get used to it.
You have to get used to rejection and again, sometimes you just can't just prevent it.
What if you're too tall or too short? What if there's more chemistry between actor A
and actress B than you and actress B? What if your play has too many characters for a
theatre's budget or they did a play just like this last year? Or, and this is the big one,
what if the person reading your play just doesn't like it? It didn't float their boat.
If you're acting, what if the director just didn't get a good feeling from you? You know,
you did your best; you put your best work out there. And it just didn't happen.
This is something that we get a lot of... When writers and scripts, when writers? And
then scripts independently when writers and their scripts, can you imagine I have a script
that cuts knocking coming up, knocking on the door. Hello I would like to be published
by Theatrefolk. Or what is that? Potting you bare? You open the front door and there's
like a just bear on your friend, a friend stooped "Please look after this bear. Please
look after the script, find a home for this script". When writers send scripts in Theatrefolk,
of course, there is a lot of rejection. Theatre is subjective. There's no one way to experience
it. It's impossible for someone's work to be all things to all people. In so one of
my jobs for Theatrefolk is to read the script submissions that come in and I spend a lot
of time sending out rejection letters. Sometimes it's an easy task because the play is just;
it's outside of our guidelines. It's that rejection that you cannot prevent because
the play that you have sent has a majority of adult characters. That's not for us. But
the play that you have sent, right now we're not looking at musicals and you're looking
for a home for your musical. There is nothing you can do. It's completely not within the
guidelines of what were looking for. Sometimes, rejection is hard because there's promise
in the play and it's a fine line between rejection and encouragement. Sometimes rejection is
hard because there's no promise in the play. But yet, it's still my job to respond. And
my thesis in submission response is to try, try, to find something positive and to be
specific about why we're rejecting the play. It's not my job as an employee of Theatrefolk;
it is not my job as a human being to knock a play or a playwright. It's not my job to
take somebody down a peg.
And so, that brings us back to Humiliation. Oh, doesn't it always come back to humiliation?
And when you combine it with rejection, that one two punch. There is a special place in
hell for that combo. I'm not going to hire you and you suck. I'm not going to program
your play and you're a horrible writer. I'm going to trip you and I'm going to kick you
when you're down. I don't understand why people feel it necessary to humiliate and reject.
I find it unnecessarily mean. You're already saying no and unless you're going to be constructive,
which is different. What purpose do you serve by being mean? As you might be able to tell?
I have certainly had my share of punches of that one two combo. There's a really, really
recent one that I cannot share because of the people involved but I will say that it
ended up being the second time, only the second time that a rejection has made me cry in public.
Thankfully, it was a dark theatre! The first time, it didn't have to do with writing per
say but I pretty much cried through my University graduation ceremony because I had, of my own
doing failed out of my honors degree in University and was getting a general. Totally my fault,
I hated sitting there, and I just felt I had humiliation on one shoulder, rejection on
the other shoulder, me balling in the middle and basically and I vowed as I was sitting
there that I would never feel that way again. Oh if I only knew that I would go into the
arts and there were dozens of people waiting to trip me and kick me down the stairs.
Okay! Here's a recent one. I had a teacher tell me that my work was good enough for student
directors but not good enough for him. To my face! That one I was like, you're just
sitting there and someone's telling you this and you're like "What? Why are you telling
me this to me?" I've also had the silent rejection, which I actually feel is more humiliating
than the vocal ones, when you send a script to somebody and they never respond. And obviously
they don't like it, right? There's no reason not to respond. If I've sent you something
and asked you to respond and you don't respond? They can't find the words to tell me how much
they don't like it and it just disappears into the ether. I have to say though as a
little tip, not hearing doesn't make it better, it doesn't not make it go away. Not hearing
means that, I think that it's the worst. I'm the worst. My whole existence on the planet
is the worst.
I've had a number of horrible experiences from artistic directors who felt it was their
job to reject me and kick me down the stairs as much as humanly possible. The first one
told me that he was in no way interested in anything I had to say and that I should never
send him another play again. And that was literally what was on the letter that he sent
me, never sent him anything again. And I have to say that when he died a couple of few years
later, I wasn't all that sorry. I'm very ashamed to admit that I'm not sorry. I wasn't sorry
and then another AD told me that a certain play of mine could in no way be fixed through
the development process offered by his company. He ripped me twice, but I can't. I've been
trying to remember because I've long since... burned these letters. I cannot remember what
he said about the first play but after I got that second later, I really had to wonder
like had I laughed at his hairline or had I like bullied his children? I could not figure
out the deal. I got a contest response once that was a piece of paper and it was a number
system for each element of a play like characters, story and 1 to 5, 5 being fabulous and 1 being
horribly disgusting. And on my sheet, all of the 1s were circled and at the bottom of
the sheet, there was the question there what did you like about this play? And someone
had scrawled I do not like this play. Like why would you send that to me? Again it was
a contest, obviously I didn't win. Maybe there was a reason whoever was doing it did not
like my play. What purpose does this help? It doesn't help because he didn't give me
any constructive criticism and I've got lots of constructive criticism. I know, criticism,
I don't mind. Being kick down some stairs is not helpful. On and on it goes. I know
had a reviewer write that a student written play on the same bill as mine was by far much
better than what I had written and there's a lot. Why I'm telling you this is that this
combo, this humiliation-rejection combo, it's one of the two things. As an artist, break
it down or make you stronger and unfortunately, some folks in the arts interpret strong as
hard, that they have to build a wall between them and their work and the world. And if
they need to retreat into a shout, I kind of hate that. I hate that for some, those
are the only choices. Turn in to a puddle of goo and be destroyed or become hard and
I don't think that helps the creative process to build a wall between you and the world.
The world is what inspires, the world is what gives us sparks and inputs to find work and
create work and develop ideas. If you wall yourself up from the world, where does your
work come from? It seems to fly in the face of what we're trying to do in the creative
process.
Thankfully, overtime, I have found another response. And I'm still pretty capable of
the goo reaction. I have to tell you those two, the one where crying in the dark theater
and I'm sorry, it's not an exaggeration. I was crying in the dark theatre, it's such
a cliché, you know tears streaming down your face in the theatre, the place that's supposed
to love you and nurture you as a writer and it's rejecting me and I feel humiliated and
a teacher telling me to my face that my word is not good enough. Both of those happened
in this past year and both of them really turned my insights out. But for the most part,
when I get rejections and particularly if it's mean, what I come around to is, well,
it's your loss. It's their loss. I know what I write and how I write it and I'm really
happy with my process and my product and because of that, I think when I responding to playwrights,
my main objective and I tried, is not to make them feel the way that others have made me
feel. And I'm not saying I succeed all the time and I'm not saying it's meant with a
great response all the time but I try. And I just that it's to make somebody, to humiliate
and reject someone at the same time, I think is unnecessary. And my greatest accomplishment
always is when a playwright writes me back and thanks me for their rejection letter.
Thank you for rejecting me. I had this wonderful woman a couple of years ago who took my rejection
letter and put it on her wall and that was her inspiration to keep going forward and
ugh, that made my day. It made me feel that I was doing it right and not hiding in a shell
and not retreating from the world.
So the QUESTION OF THE DAY is what is your worst rejection story? And how did you deal
with it? How did you, when that slap of the face came, what did you do?
And that's where we're going to end. That's it that's all, take care my friends, take
care.