A lot of people love the show. Some people hate the show. Audiences are crazy for the show. 2 critics hate the show. One of my dearest friends doesn’t care for it. Some people like me better and some people like my partner in the show better.
I was slightly down about it, but got over it after a day. I spoke to my teacher and he said critics hated his show and then he ended up winning the best play that year in a pretty big festival.
We as artists don’t do our art for the approval of others. We do it because we are sharing our experiences with the world. As a working actress sometimes it’s hard to keep that in prospective because acting is so subjective. However, as my teacher said, there needs to be something inside of us that is unshakeable, something that keeps us going despite the strong winds and storms that come at us.
I also have been listening to the Artist’s Way and the author talked about how she was so jealous of female playwrights and could easily judge another playwright very harshly. That is until she began writing her own stuff. Suddenly she felt a kinship of writers she hadn’t felt before.
The point is to keep going, to keep moving forward and continue the art. Art isn’t always pretty, it’s constantly improving and evolving.
And a quote about critics:
Theodore Roosevelt:
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
