Experiencing the box

Wow. Time flies when you're trying to finish a master's degree. And of course now that I'm in the final crunch of it, I turn back to here for more writing. I really need to keep writing here. Honestly, I turned away from this blog for a while in the hopes that I really didn't need to continue it. But the fact is that there is just *too much* to unpack when it comes to trying to be a woman of any shape navigating this world.

So tonight, I'll talk about "the box". In theatre, "the box" is a term to describe the basic "type" you are when being cast in a show. Some common types are things such as "ingenue", "romantic lead", "character", etc.

Basically, the type that I fall into is "character". Now honestly, I find character parts to be pretty interesting and fun to play. You usually get the good jokes and tend to have a character with more dimensions. But the idea that what emotions, events, and people I am able to portray on stage is determined mainly by how I look and not by my skill, quite frankly, pisses me off.

What really bothers me is that in most of these plays (and honestly, I'm not vouching for quality, but quantity here), the "romantic lead" has the main requirement of being thin and pretty. This is the character that falls in love, gets the girl or the guy, and is usually the person whom the entire plot of the play revolves around. "Characters" play the goofy side-kicks, or the villainous foils to these romantic leads.

Now I'm a firm believer that much of the learning to live our lives we do is through reading, hearing, and seeing stories about other people trying to live their lives. So what am I learning from these stories? What have I learned from these stories? I've learned that if you're pretty, you'll fall in love and get the guy. If you're not pretty, your personality will win you friends, but not lovers.

This year, we had a showcase performance for agents and industry professionals. The idea is that you get your two minutes on stage, and these professionals decide if they want to work with you in those two minutes. This means that you have to choose your box well and fit into it perfectly, because they're not really looking at you...they're looking at your category. So when it came time for me to choose what to sing, the choice I made had very little to do with my singing ability at all. In fact, the directors were encouraging me to not let my voice be the center of that, because it's a very difficult voice to box in and can fit in multiple categories quite comfortably.

But my body type is pretty clear and can only really fit into one category. So what do you think was the deciding factor in what I would be performing in this showcase? It made me feel pretty worthless and made me wonder why I do this at all.

I really thought that I had grown beyond a lot of that during this year. I really thought that I could set those stereotypes aside and not hold them as value placers on me. But now that I'm dealing with the world of casting, I'm finding that not only are these all getting thrown back into my face, but now I have to decide if I'm going to be actively perpetuating these stereotypes by trying to get work in the land of stereotypes (theatre, that is).

So now I've got some decisions to make about how I'm going to be working in this field where how you look is probably the most important factor. I'm also going to have to acknowledge that I've taken too much of that box on board. Thinking that I'm not going to be the girl who gets the guy because of how I look...thinking that my place in the world is at the side of other people who are way more pretty and way more amazing.

It honestly isn't fair to anyone, no matter how they look, to think like that.


(if I get comments, I promise I'll write often)