No longer allowed: calling theater “the work”.
As in, “I know you’re having a rough day, but it’s time to leave the baggage at the rehearsal room door…let’s stay focused on the work, okay?”
It’s just pretentious. The only reason you do it is because you’re unsure that what you’re doing qualifies as work. Look, I know it sucks when other people don’t take you seriously. But that’s their problem, not yours. Stop overcompensating. No one else calls their work “the work”. It’s a feeble form of insecure navel-gazing, dressed up to look tough: “I really am working hard! See? It’s even called work!”
Plus, it’s generic and vague. If you can’t name what you’re doing more specifically than that, do you actually know what you’re doing?
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My issue with it has more to do with the idea of “the work” as a reverent phrase, as opposed to just “work”. Romanticizing your work is an indirect way of lionizing yourself.
Also true!
Huh. I guess the alternative would be calling it “the play,” and that just isn’t serious enough? Geez, people, a “play” is what it is.
Well, see, that doesn’t work. Consider the following additional example:
I seem to recall an old chestnut about how you could can tell the hard sciences from all the rest because real, genuine disciplines of science don’t have the word ‘science’ in their names. (ie Physics & Mathematics vs Social Sciences and Computer Science). Perhaps the same applies to things which are ‘the work’ (art, drama, stagework) as opposed to things which simply are work (washing windows, assembling minivans, et al).