“We all have holes in our education.”

In other words, we are all human so be kind when someone displays some ignorance

Photo by Evgeniy Sholokh on Unsplash

I learned a valuable lesson years ago when I was a script reader. It came when I was in a meeting with the Theatre director (and later TV director) Bob Berlinger when we both worked at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre.

At the time, Bob was all of 25 years old, a recent graduate of Dartmouth College and UC San Diego, and head of the Old Globe’s Play Discovery Program. He was in charge of finding and evaluating new works and he recruited a young team of a half-dozen “theatre people” to be play readers.

As a group, we met weekly in the theatre company’s boardroom to talk about the new scripts we were assigned to read and evaluate. We would read aloud from our script reports and Bob would decide what the next step would be for the new play. Of course, most of the new works were rejected despite the best efforts of the hopeful, fledgling playwrights. (I was one so I could relate.)

One afternoon in a meeting, Bob interrupted a script reader (not me!) who was giving an evaluation of a play and said it had a “bathos” quality to it. Bob interrupted and said, “I think you mean ‘pathos.’”