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Struggling to Meet People? Community Theatre is Your Answer!
Hannah Crawford, OnStage Blog Columnist
The older that we get, the more we realize it’s not as easy to make friends as it was when we were kids in school. We get busy with our lives: career, families, bills, responsibilities, and just being plain old tired.
Meeting like-minded people becomes tougher than it was when we were kids, thrown into those social situations.
I can almost guarantee that if you’re over the age of 30, you’ve probably thought something along the lines of “making friends as an adult is just weird.” See, when we were kids, we were making friends naturally through school, sports, activities, and college.
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Now, as adults with careers and busy schedules, making new friends feels…well, awkward.
And I’d say that the majority of that has to do with the fact that we aren’t surrounded by like-minded people. Sure, you get along with the 50-year-old Nancy from your job, but you probably don’t have much in common outside of work. Or you could believe you don’t make friends with co-workers because you like to keep your life separate.
So, if you’re working all the time, where do you meet people? I recently saw on a local Facebook page someone post a picture of themselves saying they were looking for friends. I honestly stopped and stared at the post for a hot minute. I felt awkward for this person posting it.
Most of the time, I think that as we get older, we struggle with making friends because we don’t want it to feel forced. Have you ever been to a networking event where you had to go up to someone you didn’t know and strike up a conversation cold turkey?
And that’s exactly what we don’t want to do with our friendships.
Well, you’re in luck because theatre is different. You’re not walking into a networking event and trying to force a conversation. You’re busy building a set together, working backstage with one another, eating pizza after the show, grabbing drinks after a long rehearsal, and spending hours together with like-minded people.
When you’re doing that, friendships will just happen naturally.
Theatre is uniquely positioned to build some of the best kinds of relationships.
Because when you’re working in theatre, you see people at their best and their worst. You celebrate opening night together, you survive a stressful tech week, you watch your fellow artist hit that high note, you help fill in when a crew member has a family emergency, and so many more moments like these.
That’s called real life. And when you see people in real moments, you get to know them better and form actual bonds.
Over the years, I’ve met some amazing people I am so proud to call my friends, with whom I’ve worked in theatre. People with unique backgrounds, different careers, and different ages, and we were all brought together for the love of the stage.
Yeah, sure, theatre gives us the chance to perform and create something beautiful.
But I think one of the best things theatre does is help us find our people.
