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AUDIENCE CONTEXT GUIDE

AVENUE

Avenue Q: An IntroductionWelcome, resident, to your new home on Avenue Q! Like our

orange, felty protagonist, you are bright-eyed, bushy tailed, and eager to enter the next phase of your life: the real world. As you

begin your downward spiral from excitement to disillusionment to unfathomable dispair, perhaps this little guide will help you see things a

bit more clearly. True, you don’t need too much context to understand the world o f Avenue Q—it sucks, in case you haven’t heard yet—but there’s a whole lot more to this little musical than meets the eye. As the interview with co-creators Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez reveals on pages 4 and 5, bringing this musical to life takes an incredible amount of juggling: there is the main theme of identity and self-discovery within a specific generation (see page 14 to learn about why this concept is so

relevant today), the parodic spin on Jim Henson’s vibrant world (you can read about the history of Sesame Street and The Muppets on page 6), and then the physicality of the story, turning a group of actors into master puppeteers over a few short weeks of rehearsals (which you can read about in an interview with the artistic team on page 10).

This context guide is here to pull you into the loud, silly, unapologetic world of Avenue Q, from the evolution of American puppetry through Olney Theatre Center’s 2014 production. For additional dramaturgical materials, including videos, cartoons, articles, and more, visit our blog at www.olneyavenueq.wordperss.com. If you want to interact even further, feel free to shoot us a message at education@olneytheatre.org with comments, questions, or ideas.

Table of ContentsAvenue Q: An Introduction

Background and History

Chatting with the Creators

Developing the Muppets

Evolution of Puppetry

Firsthand Accounts

Generation “Why Now”

2

3

4

6

8

10

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3

ackground and HistoryB Creators Jeff Marx and Robert

Lopez shared a quest—to create a

musical that spoke to people in their 20s and 30s—but it took a solid five years to bring Avenue Q from concept to performance. Both Marx and Lopez grew up surrounded by and passionate about music, comedy, performance, and the Muppets. Marx was even a former Sesame Street intern, although he was fired for pitching story ideas instead of making coffee runs.

The two met at a BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop in 1998. Lopez had just completed his BA in English at Yale and was seeking ways to integrate his passion for musical theater and comedy. Marx had just graduated law school; frustrated with his fledgling “real world” career, he joined the workshop in the hope of pursuing his earlier love for music and p o s s i b l y

snagging a few new clients. After discovering how well they collaborated, Jeff and Marx decided to fuel their post-collegiate frustrations into a story that would appeal to a younger audience. They toyed with various comedic techniques, decided on Jim Henson-inspired muppets as their hook, and finally wrote and produced a Shakespeare-inspired musical television pilot entitled Kermit, Prince of Denmark. Memorable titles from the show’s eight-song track include “There’s More Than One Pig in the Sea” and “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Doing the Mambo.” Their concept won the won the 2000 Kleban Award, a $150,000 endowment to encourage musical theater writers. The show’s lack of “kid appeal” led to its rejection by the Henson Company, but it put the lyricists in touch with Sesame Street puppeteer and designer Rick Lyon.

The team proceeded to write a TV pilot called Avenue Q, and they asked Lyon to design all the puppets in addition

to performing in the show. The pilot was noticed by the producers of RENT, who saw the potential

for a stage show. Lopez and Marx developed their unique

concept for the stage with book writer Jeff Whitty. Director Jason Moore was also onboard to help develop a more sustainable storyline.

Five years later, in March 2003, Avenue Q

opened Off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre,

where it was extended four times. It began Broadway

previews at the John Golden Theatre on July 11, 2003, with a

July 31, 2003 opening.

BROADWAY RUNS: 2,534 performances

TOURS: London, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, among others TONY AWARDS: Best Original Score,

Best Book, Best Musical FUN FACT: In the “school edition, Trekkie Monster’s “The Internet is For Porn” is replaced with “Social Life is

Online.”

The following interview with Marx

and Lopez was conducted by Aaron Dobbs

and Lily Oei in 2004:

In your wildest dreams, did you ever think that puppets swearing, having sex, and singing about schadenfreude would actually appear on Broadway, let alone win the big three Tonys?

All we knew was that we were kids writing a show about ourselves and how much it sucked to be us. Neither of us was making any money or really feeling like an adult yet. But we sort of had it good. Lots of our friends were worse off than us–at least we got to live in Manhat-tan and convince ourselves we were be-ing productive. Our friends were living in

squalor out in Brooklyn or Queens, com-muting, working all day long in entry-level jobs they hated, wondering how the hell they got there. So we decided to write a show about the situation.

How did you realize that you would work well as partners?

One of Bobby’s stage friends advised him to try collaborating with someone at least once so that he’d have the experi-ence. Bobby asked Jeff to write a song with him since he admired a funny “charm” song Jeff presented in class called “Peo-ple Suck.” Bobby also knew that Jeff liked his work since Jeff called him one day af-ter class to tell him how much he admired one of his own songs, one sung by the lion in Androcles and the Lion called “Pretty Much Everybody Pretty Much Tastes Like

Chicken.” So we started writing together a little and found that it was actual-ly more fun than writing alone—that when we put our two heads together to come up with ideas, and especially to edit them (we only keep things we both like, so the work ends up being the highest common denominator rather than the lowest), the result was stronger than what either of us produced alone.

What came first: the characters, the story, or the songs?

The idea for the show came first. We wanted to write a musical that would appeal to everyday peo-ple—people who don’t necessarily already like musicals—and so we were

hatting With the CreatorsC

Pictured: Jeff Marx (left) and Robert Lopez (right) with one of their Tony Awards.4

looking for a medium that would allow characters to sing but which wouldn’t be your typical Oklahoma! or Funny Girl type stage show. Our solution to overcome the modern bias against singing was to write a Muppet movie. We realized that for the most part, audiences have a tendency to say “oh please” when a character breaks into song nowadays, but we didn’t think that puppets faced that same hurdle. Where the Muppets are concerned, they must sing, otherwise they seem kind of flat. Singing is just part of their vocabu-lary. So we tried to find the most ludicrous plot we could find for it, and we settled on Hamlet. [The Henson Company] wasn’t interested, and that was that. But we learned something valuable from the experience: we learned not to write for other people’s characters because if they say no, all your hard work is down the drain. It made us say, “To hell with the Mup-pets. Let’s create our own family of charac-ters.”

What made you think Av-enue Q would work on stage?

We hadn’t ever thought of doing it on stage. But when we did this reading at the York, we were faced with a problem: What do we do with the puppeteers? How do we hide them? We decided the only prac-tical solution was to just let the performers stay in plain view and hold the puppets, and not make any effort to hide the fact that they were there. And you know what? Our performers were so great that when they started breathing life into the puppets and giving them expressions, movements, and voices, they convinced the audience that the puppets were real! We could see that the they were there holding the puppets, but even though the puppeteers were moving their lips, it looked like they

were mouthing along to what the puppets were saying. The performers were able to make it crystal clear that the puppets, not the puppeteers, were the characters and the ones to watch, and the audience went along with it.

How much of the story is autobi-ographical?

It’s all autobiographical. Or biographi-cal, anyway. It’s all based on us and our friends. It’s not as specific as “this char-acter is me and this character’s him,” but they’re all amalgamations of things and feelings we’ve been going through per-

sonally. Even the character of Gary Coleman has a journey in the

show that was personal to us. When we were all kids, our parents taught

us we were special, that we could do anything. Children’s television echoed that. And apparently we’re not the only ones who felt that

way. A lot of peo-ple tell us that they’re

Princeton or they’re Kate Monster.

Seriously, why puppets?

Puppets have a certain permission to sing that humans don’t necessari-ly have nowadays. Also, because the puppets were so cute and friendly, they had a wider latitude to go further than humans could go without being distaste-ful. Sometimes thoughts and words that would probably be offensive in a human’s mouth are more acceptable—and even funnier—coming out of a puppet. Also, a lot of the songs in Avenue Q are sort of mock-educational songs. Like the songs we remember from the children’s televi-sion programming we grew up with, they try to “teach” you something. But the very idea that these puppets are teaching us lessons about porn and racism are part of the song. 5

“Puppets are a bit of a Trojan Horse.

They’re our way in. Once you get the audience

hooked, you can tell them all kinds of truths and

they’ll go along with you.”—Robert Lopez

D Jim Henson

The award-winning director, writer, and puppeteer was drawn to the arts at a young age. His family encouraged his cre-ative passions, and well before his teen years, Jim Henson (1936-1990) was per-forming puppetry for audiences, includ-ing his fellow Cub Scouts. He also fell in love with television as an artistic medium, particularly TV puppeteer Burr Tillstrom’s work on the show Kukla, Fran and Ollie.

Henson had his first dalliance with tele-vised puppetry while still in high school when he began performing with his pup-pets on a local Washington, D.C. Satur-day morning program. By his freshman year at the University of Maryland, Hen-son had scored a bi-weekly bit on a lo-cal NBC affiliate, Sam and Friends. The program scored a local Emmy Award in 1958, the same year that Henson found-ed the Jim Henson Com-pany. The Mup-pets, including an early

version of Kermit the Frog, were born from Sam and Friends. The puppet char-acters’ popularity continued to grow, and they were soon making appearances in TV commercials. One of Henson’s puppet characters, Wheel Stealer, who snatched a family’s snacks on a food commercial and later chomped on an IBM computer in a TV ad, was an early incarnation of the beloved blue Cookie Monster. The first Muppet to gain national exposure, Rowlf the Dog, went from making appearances in Purina commercials to playing a side-kick on The Jimmy Dean Show in 1963. Rowlf was brought to life with the assis-tance of puppet builder Don Sahlin and puppeteer Frank Oz, the latter of whom would become one of Henson’s closest friends and collaborators. Members of Henson’s growing puppeteering team

also appeared on The Today Show and The Ed Sullivan Show.

Sesame Street

The biggest juggernaut in chil-dren’s-television history sprang forth from mundane origins. At a Manhattan dinner party in 1966, a Carnegie Foundation executive named Lloyd Mor-

rissett mentioned that his young daughter was so enthralled by

television that she would park herself in front of the family’s set to gaze at early-morning test patterns. That story prompt-ed public-television producer Joan Cooney to investigate how television could be used to package education as en-tertainment: “What if it went down more like ice cream than spinach?” They founded the Childrens Television Workshop, now called Sesame Workshop,

eveloping the Muppets

6

and their first creation—which taught kids everything from empathy to arithmetic under the tutelage of col-orful creatures like an 8-foot-tall ca-nary and a misanthropic garbage-can dweller—was greeted with acclaim by parents, teachers and even President Richard Nixon. Many of the Muppet characters were designed to repre-sent a specific stage or element of early childhood, allowing the show to address not only the learning objec-tives of various age groups, but also the concerns, fears, and interests of children of different age levels. More than 43,000 episodes since its debut, the program has featured more than 400 celebrity guests and won more than 100 Emmy awards.

The Muppet Show

Henson’s even bigger claim to TV fame had a slow start; he had a challenging time getting the show financed in the United States, but eventually found the support needed with London-based TV producer Lord Lew Grade. In 1975, at Grade’s ATV Studios, Henson and his crew creat-ed Miss Piggy, Fozzie, Animal, Gon-zo, Scooter, and the rest of The Mup-pet Show ensemble. The hit series, with Kermit as the host, premiered in 1976. Soon after, superstar guest hosts came aboard, including Liza Minnelli, Elton John, Vincent Price, and Steve Martin. Henson’s show reached a staggering 235 million viewers in more than 100 countries, and earned three Emmy Awards. But Henson didn’t limit his TV puppetry to his original Muppets. In the 1980s, he developed the TV series Fraggle Rock, The Jim Henson Hour, and Jim Henson’s The Storyteller. Other ma-jor motion pictures followed too, in-cluding 1982’s The Dark Crystal, a a groundbreaking mix of puppetry and animatronics, and 1986’s Labyrinth.

Sesame Street Scandals

1969: Early episodes of Sesame Street showed Cookie Monster smoking a pipe and an early green incarnation of Grover partaking in civil disobedience with hippies.1982: Following the death of actor Will Lee, who played Mr. Hooper, a special episode addressed the issue by having Big Bird’s friends outright explain death to him. The episode received criticism from some parents who believed chil-dren were too young to handle such information.1993: Sesame Street producers finally put rumors to rest, saying Bert and Ernie “do not portray a gay couple...Bert and Ernie are characters who help demonstrate to children that despite their differ-ences, they can be good friends.” 2005: After years of chanting “me want cookie,” Cookie Monster crooned that “A Cookie is a Some-time Food” to teach kids that cook-ies shouldn’t be eaten all the time. 2010: Producers announced that they would not air a music video duet of Elmo and Katy Perry. The music video, a parody of Perry’s hit “Hot ‘N Cold,” was released online, instantly sparking a controversy over the appropriateness of Per-ry’s cleavage-showing outfit. 2011: Sesame Street’s Youtube channel was hacked and replaced with porn; it was quickly fixed, but not before some of the page’s 148,000 subscribers viewed the offending material.

7

8

volution of Puppetry:20th Century — Present Day

ETony Sarg (1880-1942)

Attributed for the burst in puppet popularity during the 1920s and ’30s, Gua-tamalan-born Sarg exper-imented in animatronics, illustrations, marionettes, and balloons.

Bil Baird (1904-1987)Arguably the 20th centu-ry’s seminal puppeteer, Baird was a performer on Broadway, in film, and on television, a teacher (of Jim Henson, among many other artists), and author of the classic The Art of the Puppet.

“A puppet must always be more than his live counterpart–simpler, sadder, more wicked,

more supple. The puppet is an essence and an

emphasis.”

Edgar Bergen (1903-1978)

Bergen’s partnership with puppet Charlie McCarthy moved from vaudeville to radio with their 20-year program, The Edgar Ber-gen–Charlie McCarthy Show. The success of a ventriloquist act over the radio bewildered many critics, but listeners loved Charlie’s nonstop jokes and jabs at other puppet characters.

Sesame Street (1969—)

The Muppet Show (1976-1981)

9

volution of Puppetry:20th Century — Present Day

“The arts are political, whether they like it or not. If they stay in their own realm,

preoccupied with their proper problems, the arts

support the status quo, which in itself is highly political.”

—Peter Schumann

The Howdy Doody Show laid the groundwork for fu-ture children’s programming. Buffalo Bob Smith hosted the program along with his a freckle-faced marionette friend for a live audience of children.

First established by Peter Schumann as the New Dance Group, Bread & Puppet The-ater protests issues such as governmental bureaucracy and American involvement in the Vietnam War. Employing puppets and masks of vary-ing dimensions, the produc-tions emphasize mime and movement rather than nar-rative.

Howdy Doody (1946-1960)

Bread & Puppet Theater Company (1961—)

Theatre artist Julie Taymor’s early education in mythol-ogy, puppetry, and masks makes an appearance in many of her works. The most famous of her productions is The Lion King, a theatrical reimagining of Disney’s ani-mated film that integrates In-donesian-influenced puppets and artistry with the original story and songs.

The Lion King (1997)

Sesame Street (1969—)

The Muppet Show (1976-1981)

Avenue Q (2003)

Sesame StreetBobby Smith, Choreographer: I grew up with Sesame Street. My parents had divorced and Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers and later on the Electric Compa-ny used to pretty much keep me compa-ny. They were my babysitting machines. When I think back, “Did it do anything for me? Did it teach me my ABC’s? Did it teach me how to spell?”—I don’t re-member any of that. I just remenber be-ing so entertained by it, and I think it was because of the quirkiness of it. There’s something that Mr. Rogers did that wasn’t as much of an interest for me, not that I didn’t watch it. He was just a little sweet for my taste. It wasn’t as edgy. I guess I didn’t understand where it was—I was in Virginia, I was in the mountains, I didn’t understand this strange little city street they were talking about, kids playing in the fire hydrants and stuff.

Jason Loewith, Director: I remember watching it—it started the year after I was born—but I frankly don’t have a lot of memories about Sesame Street, except for Cookie Monster. I had a Cookie Mon-ster puppet.

It was part of the whole revolution in edu-cational television. When you were deal-ing with a new generation where there were so many parents and families that were working, the television really did become the babysitter a lot of times be-cause parents were so busy. And also, that revolution of the Children’s Television Workshop brought about kids shows be-ing about teaching lessons and merging

education and entertainment.

Bobby: As opposed to Captain Kangaroo or Romper Room.

Do you have any special connection with Sesame Street, Chris?

Chris Youstra, Music Director: Yeah, it’s funny, because my parents were al-ways very strict in terms of what we could watch, but Sesame Street was one of the shows we were allowed to see. I don’t think that I learned too much from it, be-cause I was above grade level, but what connected it for me was the creativity of it. I connected with Jim Henson and the work that he was doing, so when The Muppet Show came on, that really blew me away. It really was extraordinarilly creative, what they did with this universe they created. If you look at Jim Henson’s early puppets they were just circles and ovals and dif-ferent shapes, and they really went into a lot of detail later, they started giving each of the characters a personality and age.

Satire and ParodyChris: I honestly think this musical is an homage. It’s satirical, but it’s also an hom-age to the creativity they had in creating these characters. What I like is the char-acters are kind of close to who they are based off of. I mean people have been talking about Ernie and Bert being gay for what, 20 or 30 years?

Bobby: I think it’s also an homage to children’s programming, not just Sesa-me Street to a degree. I think yes, we are heavy on the Sesame Street aspect of it all, but I do think it pays an homage to the learning process. What would happen if we took adult situations and put it in this learning world?10

irsthand Accountswith Director Jason Loewith, Choreographer Bobby Smith, and Music Director Chris Youstra

F

11

Jason: So you look at Sesame Street, which was able to conquer issues of death and dying and race, 9/11, in a way that’s extremely simple for children. As adults, you suddenly realize the complexity of these things, so what’s charming about Avenue Q is how it simpifies, for example, racism: Everyone’s a little bit racist! Oh, fabulous, we’ve just solved it!

CollaboratingJason: You couldn’t have better collabo-rators. This is the third time I’ve worked with Chris, whom I adore, and the first time I’ve worked with Bobby. There’s a lot of mutual respect among this trio.

Bobby: It’s a learning process for me be-cause I’ve come in to help [Jason] and to choreograph this show, and he works very differently than I do. I respect his work, and so to watch him work and then add to it—he’s actually teaching me to be a little more loose with how I approach some-thing. He has us sketch it in, leave it to

marinate, then come back to it. The actual thing is, it’s working, which I didn’t believe the first three days was going to do. But it does marinate. It’s about trusting your performers and giving them adjustments.

Chris: Jason asks to hear my ideas, and I’ll say, “Hey, isn’t this funny?” And some-times he’ll tell me to go back to my seat, and sometimes he thinks it’s funny.

Jason: We are all three funnier together than we are apart. Certainly I am, although I can’t speak for you, though. I think our strengths complement each other. On Saturday, when Bobby wasn’t here be-cause he was doing two shows of Three-penny Opera at Signature Theatre, and we got to this song—this is a very song-heavy show with very little book—but we got this point in the song, and all I could say was, “Bobby will fix that! Bobby will know what to do!” I froze up, even though we aren’t doing complicated steps.

Continued on Page 12

11Pictured: Director Jason Loewith and Choreographer Bobby Smith 11

12

Movement Bobby: The movement is difficult in gen-eral—music and blocking and everything else.

Chris: Well, they have no feet.

Jason: It’s complicated because you’ve got already perform-ers who’ve got to worry about singing, danc-ing, and acting; they already have to split their focus in three different ways. Adding a completely for-eign element to that is just very time consuming. I feel like we’re just now getting into the stride of seeing it all come together in certain places, because it just takes a lot of time. Imagine trying to scratch your head and rub your belly and sing on a certain beat and dance at the same time.

Bobby: And move the puppet’s mouth.

Chris: It’s one of those things that we have to be super sensitive to and ask what the cast needs, because it’s physi-cally taxing.

Jason: In a usual rehearsal process, you work an hour and 20 minutes and take a ten minute break, but we can’t do that. We have to work the shorter 55 minutes and then a five minute break for everyone to stretch their hands.

Bobby: Because their hands are con-stantly in the air. Or on top of each other for the double handed puppets. It’s like

hugging somebody for 55 minutes.

Jason: Bobby and I have both done pro-ductions of The Long Christmas Ride Home by Paula Vogel, which uses bunr-aku puppets. You have to learn the basics of puppeteering, of breath, posture, and gesture. And I don’t know if an object ma-nipulator would agree with me, but I think

those techniques are the same for whatever object you’re talking about, whether I’m

trying to animate this bottle of ginger ale, or I’m trying to ani-

mate a giant pup-pet by Bread & Puppet Theater Company.

PuppetryChris: For me,

I didn’t think this show would be all

that different than usual; I’d be teach-ing the cast, putting an ethic of music in

i t . But what’s interesting is I’m having to pay more and more atten-

tion to watching the puppet mouths during the ensemble moments. The ensemble singing has to be relatively precise, but now it’s making sure that not only are they precise, but the puppets are, too.

Jason: Your imagination falls much more quickly and deeply and significantly into an object that is being manipulated with great artistry and skill sometimes than a person. A person has so many very spe-cific features and twists and tics, so that’s one of the reasons I just told Rachel [Kate Monster/Lucy the Slut], “don’t go so far with the nasal in your voice, because I’m starting to pay attention to you instead of the puppet.” But that’s the phenomenol-ogy of the puppet; that’s why a puppet is able to say things that a human can’t, do things a human can’t. And I’m not just talking about the satire, saying swear words, I don’t find that to be the magic of the puppet.

“Sometimes, your imagination falls much more

quickly and deeply and significantly into an object that is being manipulated with great artistry and skill

than a person.” —Jason Loewith

Continued from Page 11

It’s funny, on the first day of rehearsal, when everybody was moving with pup-pets, their first impulse was to do every-thing the same way they would as human beings—talk and move and do everything at once—and our brains are all trianed to follow a multiplicity of movements and small hand signals and eye movements and all of that stuff; we’ve been condi-tioned over years and years. But a puppet is an unfamiliar thing, and a puppet needs very few gestures to a communicate a tremendous amount of meaning. So the actors wanted to walk and talk with the puppets on that first day, but I told them, “No, just walk, and let’s watch you walk.” How interesting it is to watch a puppet, a piece of felt and plastic and cardboard and whatever else, become something that can actually walk.

Chris: What’s also interesting about the use of puppets in this musical is if you watch Sesame Street, the straight char-acters are the people. No one talks about

Gordon or Susan or any of those; it’s al-ways puppets, and the humans are al-ways the straight people. We’ve carried that over from Sesame Street, not only the parody of using songs to solve prob-lems and focusing on certain letters and ideas and commercials, but also using people as the straight characters, and the lessons more conveyed through the ani-mated characters.

The StoryJason: I think audiences need to know that it’s a really big hearted story about growing up when you’re in your 20’s and you’re not sure what the heck to do. The other stuff brialliantly packages that story to make you want to see it again.

Bobby: I think there’s truth that’s spoken in a way that’s contemporary, without any apologies. But there are moments in the show that are quite touching and lovely, and we can’t forget about that.

Pictured: Music Director Chris Youstra and Choreographer Bobby Smith. 13

In the following Harvard Business

Review article, Mille-nial Cal Newport offers a

response to the varied criticisms with which he and his peers have been

harangued:

Generation Y, of which I’m a member, is entering the job market in record num-bers, and according to many commenta-tors things are not going well.

The New York Post called us “The Worst Generation,” while USA Today noted that we are “pampered” and “high main-tenance.” Earlier this year, a New York Times op-ed called us “Generation Why Bother,” noting that we’re “perhaps…too happy at home checking Facebook,” when we could be out aggressively seek-ing new jobs and helping the economy recover. The fact that up to a third of 25 to 34-year-olds now live with their par-ents only supports these gripes. To many, the core problem of this generation is

clear: we’re entitled. I don’t deny these behaviors, but having recently finished researching and writing a book on career advice, I have a different explanation. The problem is not that we’re intrinsically self-ish or entitled. It’s that we’ve been misin-formed.

Generation Y was raised during the pe-riod when “follow your passion” became pervasive career advice. A chart gener-ated using Google’s N-Gram Viewer was made to show the occurrences of this phrase in printed English over time. The chart demonstrates that the phrase began its rise in the 1990s and skyrocketed in the 2000s: the period when Generation Y was in its formative schooling years.

Why is this a problem? This simple phrase, “follow your passion,” turns out to be surprisingly pernicious. It’s hard to argue, of course, against the general idea that you should aim for a fulfilling working life. But this phrase requires something more. The verb “follow” implies that you

eneration “Why Bother”G

Pictured: Illustra-tions depicting the expectations and reality of Millenial

life, from Why Gen-eration Y Yuppies

are Unhappy, published on wait-butwhy.com. The

article follows Lucy, a college graduate

raised to believe she was special

and destined for “a shiny unicorn on

top of the flowery lawn” (left)—until

the harsh reali-ties of life left her downtrodden and

disillusioned (right).14

start by identifying a passion and then match this preexisting calling to a job. Because the passion precedes the job, it stands to reason that you should love your work from the very first day.

It’s this final implication that causes dam-age. When I studied people who love what they do for a living, I found that in most cases their passion developed slowly, often over unexpected and complicated paths. It’s rare to find someone who loves their career before they’ve become very good at it—expertise generates different engaging traits, such as respect, impact, autonomy—and the process of becoming good can be frustrating and take years.

The early stages of a fantastic career might not feel fantastic at all, a reality that clashes with the fantasy world implied by the advice to “follow your passion”—an alternate universe where there’s a perfect job waiting for you, one you’ll love right away once you discover it. It shouldn’t be surprising that members of Generation Y demand a lot from their working life right away and are frequently disappointed about what they experience instead.

The good news is that this explanation

yields a clear solution: we need a more nuanced conversation surrounding the quest for a compelling career. We cur-rently lack, for example, a good phrase for describing those tough first years on a job where you grind away at building up skills while being shoveled less-than-inspiring entry-level work. This tough skill-build-ing phase can provide the foundation for a wonderful career, but in this common scenario the “follow your passion” dog-ma would tell you that this work is not im-mediately enjoyable and therefore is not your passion. We need a deeper way to discuss the value of this early period in a long working life.

We also lack a sophisticated way to dis-cuss the role of serendipity in building a passionate pursuit. Steve Jobs, for exam-ple, in his oft-cited Stanford Commence-ment address, told the crowd to not “set-tle” for anything less than work they loved. Jobs clearly loved building Apple, but as his biographers reveal, he stumbled into this career path at a time when he was more concerned with issues of philosophy and Eastern mysticism. This is a more complicated story than him simply follow-ing a clear preexisting passion, but it’s a story we need to tell more.”

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Still curious? Read, watch, and listen more at

www.olneyavenueq.wordpress.comThis context guide was created by Maegan Clearwood,

Dramaturgy Apprentice, and edited by Jason King Jones, Associate Artistic Director and Director of Education, 2014.