BWW Blog: Finding Your Niche

Hello, Broadway World, and welcome to my first blog! My name is Sarah, and I am very excited to begin sharing my thoughts with you. Theatre has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember -- one of my earliest memories is sitting in the lobby of a local dinner theatre during the intermission of Wizard of Oz, watching them roll into place a giant mechanical structure for the actor playing the Wizard to stand in. I didn't know it then, but by high school, I realized that no matter how my future turned out, theatre had to be a part of it.

Of course, now, as a junior at Albright College, that's a nice thought, but not exactly a productive one. How will theatre remain a part of my life? What exactly do I plan on doing? I don't mean that in a cynical "you can't make a living in theatre" kind of way -- I mean "what area of theatre do I intend to pursue?"

The nice thing about my college's theatre department is you don't have to know, at least not at first. A lot of colleges have different concentrations of theatre -- acting, tech, stage management. There's nothing wrong with that; it works great for a lot of people. But it wouldn't have worked for me.

When I started college, I had only ever tried acting, but, as a mediocre-at-best actor, I knew that that wasn't where my future was, and I wanted to try as much as I could to find where it actually was -- to find my niche, if you will. And I have tried a lot. I have tried assistant directing, stage management, lightboard operation. I have helped make props and move sets. In my classes, I have learned how to design and how to be a dramaturg. I have even been a critic. If something in the theatre needs doing, I have probably done it at least once.

I don't want to preach the benefits of a liberal arts education (or a liberal theatre arts education, as it were). If you've been on any sort of college search recently, you've heard it all already; you don't need to hear it again from me. What I do want to do, though, is emphasize how helpful and freeing it was for me personally to not have to feel like I should already know what I liked best, where I wanted to go. I was able to experiment with all sorts of roles so that I could know that my favorite is dramaturgy. Even better, I was able to gain the skills to do pretty much anything, at least a little bit, and, in life in general, but especially in a business like the theatre, more skills is always better.

My theatre major probably wouldn't work for everyone. If you already know you want to be a lighting designer, it might be a little bit frustrating having to take classes in every other area of theatre and only getting to take maybe a couple of design classes, just like it would have been stressful for me to pick an area to concentrate on before, to be quite honest, a couple of months ago. Every artist has different needs, but as senior year looms closer and closer and the idea of life after college becomes less abstract, I am very grateful that I was in a place that allowed me to tend to my needs in a way that I did not even know I needed.

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