Audrey A McGee

There’s honestly not much to say here… I’ve been spending a lot of time working on next week’s post and have avoided this one until the last minute. So, bear with me on a little ramble.

I’ve mentioned this before, but when I was interning, I heard the phrase, “You never stop working at Taproot.” It seemed true. The past two interns before me, Chloe and Becky, kept showing up at Taproot to do acting or other gigs. Many people, including my mentor Sonja, had started at Taproot as interns. And people kept showing up in different capacities, like members of the facilities team were also in shows and on the touring Road Company (RoCo).

Taproot is really good about employing people that they like. If you’re an intern looking for extra hours, you can join the box office or the facilities team, or you can go on book during tech rehearsals and take line notes. There’s a million ways to contribute to the theatre, and being aware of that, Taproot loves being able to keep gig work internal — honoring the people that want to work with them by giving them as much work as they’d like.

I bet other companies are like that, too. There’s always something to be done, and always something to learn and grow from as a result of it. If you want to work more, ask someone.

This carries on past internships. Once you make a good and lasting impression, people will want to keep you around.

I was sought out by Taproot to join RoCo as an understudy the year after my internship. It was such a cool opportunity! It let me see a completely different side of the company and explore an entirely new skillset.

Honestly, since I don’t have much else in this post, let me quickly detour and say that tour acting is kind of wild. These are the skills one learns:

• Seamless, non-verbal communication with your teammates. You go through the same routine of set-up and tear-down at every single school, often multiple times a day. Eventually, you just know what needs to be done, and you’re aware of when your crew needs help.
• Bringing a bright smile to children at 8am even when you should be asleep.
• Memorization of everyone else’s lines, acting, and blocking. This was literally my job as an understudy, but even the core actors often had to step in for each other. At one point, I had 10 roles that could be called upon at any time.
• Endurance. I had a four-show day at one point.
• A hyper-awareness of your own body and a heightened sense of taking care of it. I made sure to drink a lot of water.
• A huge toolbelt of classroom management skills and developmental tools. Mnemonic devices, quiet coyotes, age-appropriate discussion questions.

It was an awesome experience. Definitely a lot of stress, but I wouldn’t have traded it for anything.

Now that I’m working full-time at a different theatre company, it’s harder for me to get back to Taproot. Not by any means impossible or improbable — heck, Dandylyon just rented sets and props from Taproot for two of our spring shows.

It was actually in one of these rentals, while I was picking them up from my friend Jaiden, that he said, “You know, I keep telling Michelle [Taproot’s Production Manager] that we should bring you back for shows, and Michelle just looks at me and says, ‘Audrey is too busy.’”

I can’t express how warm that made me feel. After my internship is done, after RoCo is done, they still want me back.

Yes, alas, I am too busy to go back to Taproot right now. But knowing that they want me back means that door will probably be open in some capacity, whenever I’m open for it.

Be a good intern and a good person, and opportunities will continue; people want you back, so you’ll be back.