How To Succeed in Theatre: By Really Trying

On March 5th of last year I mailed out a mountain of resumes.  I sent out 30 envelopes on that day (and another 25 e-mailed or mailed resumes over the course of the year).  13 of those initial companies  sent e-mails saying they would keep my resume on file or expressing interest in having me work with them.  Of those 13 I was able to arrange meetings with four different companies.

And yesterday, almost exactly a year later I started my first Equity apprenticeship credit as an ASM for Pi Theatre – a job that was birthed out of that batch of resume mail outs.

Since March 5th of last year, I met with Emma, the general manager of Pi Theatre twice, volunteered for Pi three times, & exchanged over two dozen e-mails talking about options and often simply following up on a previous conversation.  I did my best to make my interest known without being pushy.  And this time it paid off.

Some people assume that it should be easy.  Give one good audition. Meet the

Image by Flickr user Campru

right person at a party. Mail your resume on just the right day.  And sometimes that is enough.  But for every time that a job magically falls into someone’s lap, there are hundreds of times that a job was landed by auditioning multiple times, dozens of e-mail conversations, & simply never giving up.

And now it’s March again. So out comes my not-so-trusty laptop, the stack of headshots, photocopies of reference letters & the process starts again.  But this year my goal will be to mail out to 50 companies, get responses from 25-30 of those, and land 2 jobs over the next year.  But only if I keep really trying.