Rehearsing Trust

How to create when the gatekeepers — real and imagined — stand in the way

Photo by Elen Yatsenko, Unsplash

Some days it feels like the only thing keeping me from creating something, anything, is the depression. Blame the depression. Depression is the gatekeeper.

I say “The Depression” like the title of an era. I say “My Anxiety” because the anxiety feels like it belongs to me or I belong to it. The depression is some other entity that comes to stay in the cheap motel of my rib cage or sometimes in the gaudy suite of my stomach. I’ve studied enough mindfulness to know I should just be aware of it, do not fight it, invite it to tea and let it dissipate. I’ve also studied enough tantra to know that there is wisdom and even pleasure available in all states of aliveness.

And yet.

Depression is inaction. Depression is willful inaction, inaction because nothing feels good to do. Creating from this place is nearly impossible. And yet.

I am writing this in bed, eating a tub of cookie dough for breakfast. That was the bargain I struck with the depression. I will give you comfort and sugar. Let me just open a blank document and see what comes out. Please.

I am supposed to be writing a new draft of a play for which I am under commission. I got an extension because I deleted the entire thing a few days ago when I realized it was actually not good. Now I am trying to write it again, better. It is a play about anger and rage. What happens when a group of 40-something women who were in a high school punk band reunite and realize none of them are punk anymore, nor do they have any mechanism for expressing their anger.

Depression doesn’t really like anger. Because anger is doing, and depression wants stagnation.

The depression is fucking delighted that I got a big rejection yesterday. I made it to the finals of a big screenplay accelerator program. I thought I had a good chance, and if I had been selected as a fellow, I would have gotten to pitch this screenplay to a whole bunch of producers and production companies. I was not selected.

The depression says, see, why bother trying? You’re just not good enough.

The anxiety says, quick, do something else, prove you are.

A friend of mine from graduate school has a play on Broadway right now. The depression says just give up.

Y’all, sometimes I want to. In my mid 20s, I stopped acting because I was so tired of other people telling me I was or wasn’t good enough to do the thing I most loved. Every opportunity to be on stage required an audition in which a gatekeeper would make that decision for me. I just didn’t have it in me to be constantly showing up somewhere asking “Do you like me enough?”

In 2007, I started writing a play for myself to perform so I didn’t have to play that game anymore. I could be my own gatekeeper.

Turns out, the joke was on me because this was much harder than just showing up to audition. I had to learn how to write a good play and then raise money to produce it, then stand on stage speaking my own words and then read reviews of the work, some of which were glowing, and a few which were not. There was no one else to hide behind or blame. But also the success of the production was that much sweeter knowing that I believed in myself and did the hard thing. And I got to play a dream role– a heartbroken country singer– without auditioning.

Baby Joanna doing the hard thing, 2008, Seattle.

When I decided to go to grad school for playwriting in 2013, I was ready to make a bigger commitment to myself as a writer. I had written a handful of one-acts since the premiere of my one-woman show, 100 Heartbreaks. I had also turned that one-woman show into a small-cast musical and performed it at Bumbershoot, which was both affirmation of the merit of the piece and also truly demoralizing. Performing at a large arts festival means acting and singing while audience members walk out of the show willy-nilly, deciding that getting a hot dog or catching a band was more interesting than staying to see you.

It made me terribly anxious and insecure. It also gave me a sort of perverse drive to write something so good no one would want to walk out.

In my very first grad school writing seminar with professor Steven Dietz, he told us, “Imagine the theater has no seats and the audience is walking by your play. What makes them stop? What makes them stay?”

I wrote many things in my three years at UT-Austin. It was like the cork in the bottle had fallen out, and I suddenly had permission to spill the strangest collection of stories onto the ground around me. Writing an artist statement, the first time I tried, felt almost impossible because my plays were so different from one another. A country musical rom com. A political drama about Iran. An immersive food/sex experience. A play for babies about a magical cave??

There was something about UT’s grad program that welcomed maximalism and eschewed competition. We were far from the rat race of New York. In Texas, we were just making shit for the hell of it. What do you make when you’re not thinking about whether or not people will like it? That’s the true question. When you have a scholarship paying you just to write, you write whatever you want, because the gatekeeping is over and now you’re free to experiment.

What a fucking gift. I know not many artists get that gift. I feel incredibly grateful because I needed that permission so badly. Now I try to give that permission to others not in a grad program by helping turn on creative flow. Trying to help others turn off the part of the brain that says, “Not good enough, not needed, not wanted,” and just write from the place that is a channel to the muse.

But part of that mission to help is admitting that it doesn’t always work for me. That being an artist of any kind is an ongoing struggle with yourself and also with the gatekeepers, no matter how much you try to ignore them all.

I’ve reached a point where producing my own work is just not a good use of my time. But then I’m back to the gatekeepers. Yes, it’s different than standing up for an audition, but it’s still a process of submitting oneself/work and saying, “Do you like me enough, believe in me enough to put money behind it?”

Finding success in theater as a playwright is a strange and mysterious process. Acting is fairly straightforward: you audition again and again and again, the end. Writing a play, for one, can take years. Maybe even decades. At least in my experience, writing a good script for the theater is like slowly excavating the ruins of a building. After years, you’re like, “Oh THAT’S what it is.” Writing a screenplay I found to be much more straightforward– you have an outline, you plug along following some prescribed story moments, and then you’re done.

Once you have a draft of a play that seems to sort of make sense to you and also some other people (because theater, you know, is a live art form and requires other people), then you go about trying to convince a theater to produce it. But this is no small feat because the American theater system is largely fucked. Meaning, theaters have very little money, relying largely on donations from an aging population of patrons, many of whom would rather see plays that have stood the test of time and are recognizable. So, most theaters large enough to have money to pay artists, have very few opportunities to showcase new plays. So, you have all of these writers churning out new scripts, backlogged at the gate keepers.

Since getting a full production is so difficult, there are a number of prestigious development festivals across the country whose aim is to help writers make their plays better and also get those plays in front of the gatekeepers to experience live instead of just reading off the page.

As a playwright, your best chance at exposure is applying to these development opportunities while also trying to create relationships with the decision makers at theaters. I spent the latter half of grad school all the way into 2020 grinding the submission pipeline.

A recent reading of my play, The Orange Garden (about pre-Revolutionary Iran). I began writing this play in 2015. Since then, it has had at least six staged readings and two university “workshop” productions, and still no “real” production. I’m proud of this play and love it like a child and also have to just trust that its life is somewhat out of my hands. I just say this in case you also have loved projects that you feel will never come to fruition. (Pictured: Jacob Surovsky, Jacqueline Castañeda, Poonam Basu, Nick Marini, Shireen Heidari, Amir Kamali).

When Covid hit, theater as a business stopped heart-attack dead. In that pause, I started to consider the word submission. How submissive I felt, constantly submitting myself: please validate me!

I know, that’s just how things work. Someone has to be the arbitrator or else how would we get curated experiences of art? But I just couldn’t do it anymore, again. I didn’t want to try to convince anyone. I didn’t even know if I wanted to write, at least not for the stage.

At this point, I was a playwright on the side of my full-time job as the Senior Story Creative Director at Meow Wolf. In the final days of original Meow Wolf CEO Vince Kadlubek’s first C-Suite role at the company (before he was ousted in favor of Disney execs), he asked me to write the entire future of the company’s story universe. In lockdown in my Santa Fe condo, I wrote a 160-page novella, which was so rewarding, I had momentary absolute creative fulfillment. My full-time job could also be my creative outlet, I realized with the delight of someone who has reached that one peak moment of bliss at the top of the fulcrum before everything would crash down again.

What happened at Meow Wolf over the next three years that I stayed at the company is for another article, but I did get a taste of equilibrium that so many of us working artists dream of. It often feels impossible to make money from our art without losing the creative spirit of our initial idea, or without losing our own creative spirit from having to submit and submit and submit.

Since leaving Meow Wolf in 2023, I have been trying to find my way as an independent artist again. It’s disorienting to find myself with time in which I can fill it with whatever creative project I want with no money coming in from the creative projects I am initiating.

The depression lurks on the sidelines waiting for the inevitable question: why bother? Who cares? Or the more definitive, self-pitying assertion: the world does not need my creative work.

Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe the screenplay accelerator rejection is a way of the world saying it does not need a country music rom com right now. (By the way, I turned that original country musical into a screenplay a few years ago, making 100 Heartbreaks my longest running creative obsession. And yet I can’t seem to shake it).

Oh good, says the depression. Quit. Finally, we can relax, stop trying so hard. We can close our eyes and deep - rest.

Because to be an artist is to be forever striving. Forever showing up to say, “No, I do matter.” And there is a toll. An energetic and psychic one.

But then when I picture giving up – never writing, imagining, dreaming into existence worlds and stories and characters — well, I can’t. That’s the thing. I can imagine pretty much anything else except a world in which I do not open the channel to create. Being an artist is not like the depression, which comes to visit but does not have a permanent address. The creativity is my creativity. It’s part of me.

Sometimes when I do not have the energy to write anything, yet still feel the undercurrent that needs to create, I write a small poem that begins, “A prayer for…” I started the practice nearly four years ago, and I still hold onto it like a raft. I have endless Notes documents full of prayers just for me. I will write one now, though, for us.

A prayer for
Making love when we want to shut our eyes.
I had a lover once who did not like to
Be inside me if he could not
See me.
I hated the way he tapped me on the nose,
Like, wake up.
He was not for me
But he was correct:
I was sleeping inside myself,
Waiting for a time
When my heart would not be afraid
Of the making.
The active verb,
In dance.
And to be witnessed
In it
(as now, fuck)
Too crushing
Without
The rehearsal of trust.