If You Want to Learn How to Lead, Run a Theater Company

Virgin CEO Richard Branson once said if you want to be a millionaire, be a billionaire and then buy an airline. Something about this line always strikes me as true about starting a theater company as well. If you want to learn how to lead, run a theater company. Not because it is healthy. Not because it is gentle. But because it is real.

A friend, who saw me be wrecked every time I produced a show, once called it a planned airplane crash. You know the date. You sell tickets to it. You promote it months in advance. And then, on opening night, you strap yourself into a machine you built while it was already falling out of the sky and you hope it holds together long enough for everyone to land alive.

Arrival is the Only Metric

The curtain goes up no matter what.

That single fact separates theater from most other leadership laboratories. There is no extension, no quiet pivot, no graceful delay. You cannot say, “We’re not quite ready” to a waiting audience. Readiness is not the metric. Arrival is.

You begin marketing a thing that does not yet exist. You promise an experience before you know exactly what it will be. People give you their time, their money, their trust, based on your word. That alone teaches a lesson most leadership programs never touch: credibility is forward-facing. You earn it by delivering later.

The Process of Breaking

Inside the process, everything conspires to break you. Money is scarce. Time is worse. Artists are brilliant and fragile and stubborn and exhausted. Volunteers burn out. Tech fails. Someone gets sick. Someone quits. Something essential arrives late or not at all. Every production contains at least three moments where a reasonable person would stop.

You do not stop.

Sometimes the catastrophe is unbearable. Someone’s brother dies in the middle of the run. Not abstract grief. A phone call. A body. A family shattered. And the actor continues. He comes to rehearsal. He shows up to tech. He steps onstage. Not because he is unfeeling, but because the work is holding him too. Because meaning does not pause for grief. Because the container you built is suddenly carrying something far heavier than art.

As a leader, you do not romanticize that. You do not exploit it. You hold space, adjust where you can, and keep the structure intact so the people inside it don’t fall through the floor. That is an ethical burden most leadership books never acknowledge.

The "Cosmic" Logistics

Other disasters are smaller, and just as cosmic.

Tech night. Everything is going wrong. Cues misfire. Tempers flare. Tomorrow is opening night. And then your car gets towed. Your car, with your things in it. With props in it. Irreplaceable, time-sensitive objects now sitting behind a locked gate while the clock keeps ticking.

So you leave the theater. You retrieve the car. You pay the fee. You get the props. You bring them back. You keep going. And the next night, the house opens and the audience never knows any of it happened.

This is what “the show must go on” actually means. Not denial. Not cruelty. Continuity.

The Distributed Ethic

And here is the part outsiders often miss: this rule is not yours alone. It is shared.

Every professional or semi-professional theater person knows it. Actors. Stage managers. Designers. Crew. Front of house. There is a single cardinal law that outranks temperament, preference, and personal comfort: the show must go on. You don’t have to explain it. You don’t negotiate it. It is assumed. It is trained. It is practiced.

That shared understanding changes behavior. People prepare differently when they know the container will not pause for them. They build redundancy into themselves. They show up sick, grieving, exhausted. Not because they are exploited, but because they understand they are part of a temporal promise.

Alignment Over Money: Even though I paid everybody, it was pennies on the dollar considering the amount of time they were committing to every production. It wasn't the money that was motivating them; it was being part of something that mattered.

Alignment was critical—keeping everyone on the same page because we were doing something meaningful. From costume designers to new playwrights, every artist had their own ego, ambition, and vision. Yet the work demanded alignment without the carrot of money. You had to engage, inspire, and create shared purpose. This was another key crucible for leadership: learning how to align artists around meaning, rather than financial incentive.

Rehearsed Responsibility

When someone inside that system does not know the rule, everything breaks instantly. You learn this the hard way. You hire someone out of desperation who is not a theater person. They do not carry the rule in their bones. They do not understand that not showing up is not an inconvenience—it is an existential threat to the entire structure.

So they disappear. And suddenly you are running the lights yourself, because someone has to, and you are the one who understands that failure is not an option.

Theater people are not morally superior. They are culturally trained. They have rehearsed responsibility. They have practiced reliability under pressure. They know that if they drop the ball, the entire system visibly suffers, immediately, in public. That is what makes “the show must go on” powerful. It is not a slogan. It is a distributed ethic.

The Leadership Forge

Running a theater company forces you to make decisions with partial information. It forces you to choose a direction knowing it may be wrong, because not choosing is worse.

• It teaches you how to hold fear without exporting it. * It teaches you that morale is not cheerleading, it is clarity. People can survive bad news. They cannot survive ambiguity.
• It teaches you to respect logistics as a moral act. When people give you their nights and weekends, you owe them competence.

It also teaches responsibility without spotlight. If you succeed, the applause goes to the actors. If you fail, the failure is yours. Leadership disappears by design.

The Reality for Women

For women in particular, running a theater company is a clarifying education. You are punished for authority and blamed for outcomes you did not control. You carry emotional labor alongside operational responsibility. You absorb damage so others can perform. It is not gentle. It is not fair.

And still, something in it can feel right.

Creating stories about women, by women, for women carries its own fuel. You watch narratives enter the world that would not exist if you had chosen comfort instead. You feel the deep, clean satisfaction of achievement. Not praise. Completion.

The Ultimate Reward

The ultimate reward is the audience. Their laughter in the right places. Their tears in the right places.

I remember a play I wrote and produced about marriage. In a talkback, a woman shared that she had lost her husband within the year. She described her conflicting feelings about love and loss, and how watching the play gave her comfort—a sense that she wasn’t alone. That moment, their emotional engagement, the validation it provided, is the deepest reward.

Achievement changes people. Not because it makes them arrogant, but because it teaches them what effort can do. External incentives get you in the door. Internal reward keeps you there.

Ready Enough

Theater does not make you happy. It does not make life easier. It often wrecks you. It makes you capable.

If you can run a theater company, you can lead anywhere. You have already learned how to ship under pressure, how to carry risk, how to tell the truth when it costs you, how to step in when someone disappears, how to make the lights come up anyway.

The curtain rises. The audience is seated. The moment arrives whether you are ready or not.

You learn to be ready enough.

That is leadership. Not as identity. As practice.

Coda: The Why

At the end of the day, I didn't endure the towed cars, the tech failures, and the sleepless nights because I loved the "business" of theater. I did it because there were stories about women that simply weren't being told.

If I didn't hold the container together, those voices stayed silent.

That was the fuel. Every time a woman sat in the audience and saw a piece of her own complicated, messy, beautiful reality reflected on stage, the "planned airplane crash" was worth it. We weren't just producing plays; we were reclaiming space. We were making sure that narratives by women, for women, and about women had a place to land.

That’s why you do it. Not for the applause, but for the moment the lights come up and the world looks a little bit more like us.