A Little Respite, A Little Rest

Hey all. It’s your friendly neighborhood playwright/blogger here. You might have noticed a slight lull in reviewing. It’s not that I haven’t seen shows – I saw Hamlet at Park Square at the beginning of October, The Privateer at Park Square a couple of weeks ago, and In the Next Room at the Rarig Center just this weekend. I, however, have not reviewed them. It’s not that I don’t want to review them. But the problem is with my brain and the things it’s struggling through right now.

I have anxiety. And not like Zooey Deschanel-New Girl -“I’m socially awkward” anxiety. I mean the actual mental condition of generalize anxiety disorder. It’s been a greater struggle as I’ve become an adult and left the structure that school and having set classes offered and, as the years have gone on, it’s become a larger influence on my life. I only acknowledged that I had anxiety in 2015 and, since then, I’ve been working to learn to better handle it and reduce the things that provoke and trigger it. The 2016 election has been a definite trigger, so the last year has been a little rough. But it’s also been one of the best years of my life and I’ve grown in a lot of ways.

Right now, I’m relearning how to live with my anxiety. I started taking Zoloft just over a month ago and cut out a lot of things in my life that were causing me additional stress. One of those things was the number of shows I see. I decided to cut back in order to have more free time to focus on grad school and relax. However, after cutting back shows I found that I still didn’t have the desire to review. I wanted to see theater, but reviewing had begun to feel like a job – no, a relentless task, something that I was continually being asked to do and continued to accept because, more and more, I feel that the theater community is becoming reliant on bloggers to make up for the inadequate press we have in town. As much as like voicing my views on theater, I also don’t want to create the expectation that I will see all the shows and write all the reviews and always share my socio-political perspective. I like doing that, but right now I am tired and I need to take a break. I need to remember what it’s like to see a show without having to worry about getting home to my computer to write down my thoughts. I want to remember what it’s like to watch shows as an audience member, as an artist, not a reviewer. In the long run, I think it’ll make me a better artist and critic.

I’m hoping to get back into reviewing, I think, but right now I really need to make time for myself. The world is full of stresses and triggers, as it always has been, but my engagement with them has changed. I’ll continue to see shows, hopefully a couple a month, and I plan on writing here, more about playwriting and other thoughts I have on theater. In the meantime, I’m working on a series of posts about anxiety and theater for Minnesota Playlist, so keep your eyes out for that (I’ll also share them here once their published).

Thanks all and see you around town.