Dear MAGA: “Theatre Kid” is Not an Insult

by Chris Peterson

Somewhere along the way, “theatre kid” apparently became a political insult.

I’ll admit, I missed the memo.

A recent New York Times piece looked at how the term has increasingly shown up in right-wing political commentary, usually as a way to describe someone as overly emotional, performative, soft or desperate for attention.

Which is funny, because anyone who has actually spent time around theatre kids knows that description leaves out quite a bit.

You certainly don’t have to like theatre people. We can be loud. We can be dramatic. We occasionally break into songs nobody else asked to hear. There are plenty of stereotypes about theatre kids that we have earned.

But weak?

That one has always seemed strange to me.

Think about what a kid doing theatre actually signs up for. After-school rehearsals. Weekend calls. Tech week. Memorizing lines, music, choreography and blocking while also trying to finish homework, work a job or just survive being a teenager.

Then there’s the part where you voluntarily stand in front of people and get critiqued.

Your director tells you the scene isn’t working. Your choreographer corrects you. Your music director tells you that note isn’t there yet. Sometimes you completely screw something up in front of the entire cast.

And then you come back tomorrow and try it again.

That’s a pretty good lesson in handling criticism and embarrassment at an age when most of us desperately want to avoid both.

Theatre also teaches you very quickly that you cannot do everything yourself.

The lead might get the applause, but the show doesn’t happen without the stage manager calling cues, the crew moving scenery, someone handling costumes, somebody mixing sound and plenty of other people doing jobs the audience may never notice.

You learn that sometimes your job is to lead and sometimes your job is to listen. Sometimes you get the big moment. Sometimes your contribution is making sure somebody else gets theirs.

Neither is empathy a bad skill to carry into adulthood.

Actors spend an enormous amount of time trying to understand people who aren’t themselves. You’re constantly asking why a character behaves a certain way, what they want, what they’re afraid of and what makes their choices reasonable from their point of view.

That doesn’t magically make every theatre kid a wonderful human being. I’ve met enough actors to know better than that.

But learning to look at another person and wonder why they see the world differently from you is a useful habit, especially right now.

And then there’s the idea that theatre kids are somehow too sensitive for the real world.

Try auditioning.

Go into a room, perform something you’ve spent hours preparing, get rejected and then do the exact same thing again a few days later.

Theatre people get told no constantly. They lose roles. They get bad reviews. They forget lines. They bomb jokes. They watch somebody else get the part and then spend the next two months helping that person put on the show.

You learn fairly quickly that disappointment isn’t the end of the world.

Former theatre kids are also everywhere.

They’re teachers, lawyers, doctors, salespeople, executives and politicians. And many of the things they learned doing theatre are exactly the things companies spend a fortune trying to teach employees later: public speaking, collaboration, communication, accepting feedback and reading a room.

There’s also an uglier part of the insult that shouldn’t be ignored.

Calling somebody a “theatre kid” often seems designed to suggest that caring too much is embarrassing. That enthusiasm is embarrassing. That expressing emotion or being openly passionate about something makes you weak.

I’ve never understood why detachment became something we’re supposed to admire.

Give me the kid who cares too much.

Give me the teenager who spends six weeks building a set nobody outside their town will ever see. Give me the student who practices the same eight bars fifty times because they want opening night to sound right. Give me the stage manager who somehow keeps forty teenagers moving in the same direction.

Are they occasionally annoying?

Absolutely.

I was one of them. I’m sure I was exhausting.

But I also know how much of who I became came from those rehearsal rooms.

You learn to speak in front of people. You learn to take criticism. You learn that preparation matters. You learn that other people are depending on you. You learn that being nervous isn’t an excuse for not doing the thing.

Most importantly, you learn how to fail without disappearing.

So if “theatre kid” is going to be the latest political insult, theatre people shouldn’t spend much time being offended by it.

There are worse things to be accused of than caring too much, working hard, telling stories and being willing to stand in front of a room full of strangers and risk making a fool of yourself.

Call me a theatre kid. I’ve been called worse.