LA Stage Blog - Beta

So I’m listening to Day to Day on NPR the other day, and there’s an interview with a Wall Street investor who also happens to be a shrink. Madeleine Brand is asking him about the psychology of the market, why it continues to go down even after this $700 billion bailout. And he says, essentially, that the uncertainty is unbearable for investors. He says that people feel the pain of loss twice as strongly as they enjoy the high of gains. And I’m thinking, these WIMPS! These people, who are somehow making money off of my mortgage because it’s been bundled into some kind of security (no, I can’t explain that) suddenly don’t want to play the game anymore, because it’s too scary.

I think, as artists, we could give these people some lessons, because we play the numbers game in a bearish market for a good part of our lives. Do we feel pain? Yes. Do we feel fear? Of course. We knew that going in. Most of us have had at least one experience we can cite that consists of sitting in a group of aspiring theatre artists, and having a teacher say to us: “Look around. In 10 years only 1% percent of you will still be working. Those are the odds.” And we all looked around, and each one of us thought, “Yeah, and that’ll be me. I’ll be the one.” And about 1% of us were right. And the other 99%… well 31% are now teachers, 17% are real estate agents, 10% are therapists…you get the point. (Percentages not specifically based on any hard data.) And the 10%(?) of us that stuck with it, our certainty in the face of uncertainty stood fast, even as the years ticked by and that person who sat two rows back rose to stardom, while we spent our time wondering just how much longer we could reasonably wear that pair of jeans from 1998. Being an artist is a huge gamble. Either you content yourself with living without, or you put all your money on the brass ring.

But here’s the catch. The people who become artists are the most emotional, sensitive, empathic people of anyone. We absorb the world around us and spin it back out as a reflection. It’s not something learned or faked. You’re either a natural sponge or your not. And if you are, it’s hard to ignore it. So if I take these two things - fear and pain - that seem to be the only things that can bully these Wall Street investors, and I look at how often in my daily life as an artist I have felt them in proportion to the payoff of landing a job or getting a good review, I can’t help wondering if I would have been better off playing the market.

In general, the average day in the life of an artist probably contains at least one of the following: fear that you are not as talented as you think you are; internal comparisons to people who have lots of money and/or a beautifully toned body; fear that someone else somewhere is writing a script about the exact same subject you are, and it’s better; self-loathing based on the way you hype your career rather than have a genuine conversation at a party/dinner/chance meeting; internal comparisons to your friends who are living off trust funds or working with inner city disabled children or going to graduate school - I could go on.

It doesn’t just take thick skin to be an artist. It also takes paper thin skin. The thin skin allows us to experience the world without a filter - so that we can actually make the art - and the thick skin allows us to face a world that revolves on the axis of “no”.

And these people, these people playing with our money, these people who have just created the fissure by which we may all define our lives from this point forward, these people whose greed has overwhelmed any sense of ethics, these people are afraid of fear and pain.

What I want to say to them is: walk a mile.

And of course, the acute irony of all this is that these are the people who - when they have the funds - buy the tickets and give the donations that make our doing theatre possible. And we are the people who remind them that there’s more to life than money. Not only is there art for art’s sake, but there’s also art for the sake of looking into the much darker corners of our world and finding the comedy or tragedy of humanity, which is much, much bigger than anyone’s checking account. (Except maybe Warren Buffett’s.) We are, for better or worse, inextricably linked.

So now it’s up to us as artists to remind everyone to get out of their fetal positions. If we sensitive creatures can get up every day and face the brutally ridiculous world that we’ve chosen, so can these men and women in their pin-striped armor. It’s up to us to remind them that we know how they feel.

And we do.