How Not to Be a Theater Dad (Lessons I Learned the Hard Way)
The talk I gave at Pittsburgh Unifieds last year was called “How to Not Be a Theater Dad.” I want to be upfront about something: I was not consistently good at this. By my own honest accounting, I behaved like a reasonable dad for at best 50% of my daughter’s auditions. The other half? I don’t know if I was following my own advice. The fact that I’m now giving a talk on the subject is either ironic or useful, depending on how you look at it - I’m hoping it’s useful, because I learned most of this the hard way and would rather you didn’t have to.
Let me start with the story that stuck with me most, because it’s a good illustration of what’s actually at stake here.
My daughter and I were at lunch during Unifieds. There were two faculty members and what I think was a MFA or senior BFA from a program at a table right next to us. They likely knew we were there for the auditions, but they didn’t seem to care. They were talking openly about the kids they’d seen, about things they’d heard, and then - this is the part that’s hard to forget - they started talking about a dad. A dad who had been emailing them constantly. Every time his daughter posted a new video, every time she put something up on social media, he was forwarding it along, because they were from her dream school and he wanted to make sure they saw it. They talked about how it reflected on the audition. And then they talked about the audition itself, which unfortunately had not gone well for her.
I’d love to tell you which school it was, but of course I won’t. The point is that this dad thought he was helping. And what he was actually doing was making things worse, in a way he would never know about and she would never find out.
Coaches tell their students all the time “be very careful about what you say in public, since you never know who might be listening.”. This clearly applies to faculty!
The most common version of this mistake is subtler than mass-emailing faculty. It’s the question you ask the moment they come out of the audition room.
How’d it go? What did they say? Did they seem to like you?
I was definitely guilty of this. You’ve been sitting in a hotel lobby for two hours. You’re invested. You want to know. It feels completely natural to ask. But what you’re actually doing is taking someone who just spent every ounce of emotional and artistic energy they had in that room, and immediately asking them to perform again - this time for you. All you’re doing is adding to the pressure.
My daughter finally told me to stop asking, somewhere in the middle of Chicago Unifieds. I started waiting for her to bring it up on her own instead, and she always did, and those conversations were better. I wish I’d figured that out earlier in the season rather than later, but I didn’t, and I’m passing it along now.
A few other things I had to actively work against:
Don’t obsess over the prescreens. Once they’re submitted, they’re submitted. Watching them another fifty times looking for things she could have done better isn’t useful, and if she catches you doing it, it’s actively harmful. Trust the work that went into making them. One other bit of advice that my daughter has learned as a freshman is that it’s generally not worth recording pre-screens over and over again, looking for that perfect take. Of course, if something went off the rails in a recording and you can easily fix it - do that. But all those tiny little details and differences between takes that your child may notice won’t really matter in terms of getting in.
Don’t make it your identity. This one is harder than it sounds, because you’re going to spend an enormous amount of concentrated time with your kid during this year - traveling together, sitting in lobbies together, going through highs and lows together - and it’s great in a lot of ways. But at some point the season ends, they go to college, and if your entire sense of purpose has been wrapped up in this process, that transition is going to be rough. Your kid is auditioning. You are not. Whether they get into a program or not is not a reflection on them, and it’s certainly not a reflection on you.
Lower your expectations for control. You’re going to spend months helping with every aspect of this process: building the list, tracking the deadlines, booking the travel, handling the logistics. It can start to feel like you’re running a campaign, and campaigns have outcomes you’re trying to influence. But you are not the one driving this bus. The artistic decisions are theirs. The relationship with the stage is theirs. Your job is to make sure the infrastructure holds so they can focus on what actually matters in those rooms.
Stay humble about your kid’s chances. Everyone in this process is talented. Every kid at a Unifieds event is talented - that’s why they’re there. Overconfidence about who deserves to get in leads to exactly the kind of behavior that ends up discussed at lunch tables. The bar is genuinely high, and the process is genuinely random at the margins, and modeling graciousness for your kid - being happy for the kids around them who get good news, not bitter about the ones who don’t - matters more than most parents realize.
There’s a version of all of this that I’d summarize as: remember whose dream this is. You are there to support it, not to own it. The moment you start treating your kid’s MT ambitions as your project to manage, your mission to accomplish, or your identity to protect, you’ve crossed a line that’s hard to walk back from.
Theater kids, from what I’ve seen, are remarkably good at cheering for each other. They celebrate each other’s acceptances, they encourage each other through rejections, they seem to genuinely want everyone around them to succeed. As parents, we could learn something from that. Our job is to raise a good human who’s happy when other people do well - and if we do that job right, the rest tends to take care of itself.