Emma Gregory

Opportunity will never be dropped at your feet, your livelihood is not guaranteed, and a production never comes to fruition. Unless you work at them. My father, from the moment I was born, promised me one thing about the world I was coming into: you can succeed in anything if you work hard enough for it. This idea has been my north star, guiding me as I move into my career, and in everything that I do. This includes my work as a stage manager. 

A project that fulfils me most deeply is one that doesn't come to fruition easily. A very condensed timeline, an incredibly restrictive budget, a small-but-mighty team, a grandiose final vision, or even all of the above, what attracts me to a theatrical project is how much I will stretch my skillset and knowledge to achieve the final product. Theatre is also a fundamentally collaborative art form. I am never happier than when something goes wrong, and the full team meets to problem solve together. The combination of the years of experience, knowledge, and skills of a group of artists coming together to tackle an unprecedented issue is a magical, intangible force that can only be experienced through the art of theatre. 

This comes to play in my tastes as an artist as well. As both a stage manager and actor, I strive to uplift and create works that examine and interrogate the human condition. Deeply psychological questions can sometimes only be explored through a shared experience, and that is what acting satisfies in me. As a stage manager, I facilitate stories, but as an actor, I get the privilege to embody them, and both functions are essential to theatrical production in wildly different ways. No matter what I work on, whether it be dance, musical theatre, or acting in a straight play, my goal is to pursue artistry that offers a greater understanding into the deep, messy parts of the human experience. 

Theatre is hard. Life is hard. I choose to tackle them head first, working endlessly to pursue the lofty goal of being an artist who explores the complexity of the human condition for the rest of her life. Never do I want to work toward something that comes easily. In everything I do, I will be satisfied at the end of the project knowing that it wasn't easy and it wasn't perfect, but I poured everything I had, and it blossomed into something that I didn't know it could be. That is what art means to me, and it's what I strive for all art that I participate in to become.