The Art of Depending on One Another
Community theater, shared purpose, and the practice of interdependence.
Modern life is remarkably effective at organizing us into groups.
From an early age, much of our lives unfolds within communities shaped by some shared characteristic. We attend schools with children who often come from neighborhoods like our own. We pursue careers alongside people with similar training. We join clubs built around shared interests and spend time with others in similar stages of life.
Some of this is simply human nature. We gravitate toward people who make us feel understood. Shared experiences create familiarity. Common interests help friendships take root. Belonging isn’t something to outgrow; it’s one of our most fundamental human needs.
Other patterns have less to do with personal choice. In America, race and class continue to shape where many of us live, where we go to school, and whose lives become woven into our everyday experience. Long before we choose many of our communities, we inherit them.
Taken together, these histories, institutions, and choices shape who becomes part of our daily lives. Most of us spend far more time among people whose lives overlap with our own than people whose experiences differ from them.
There are, of course, places that operate by another set of assumptions.
Community theater is one of them.
Photo: Rehearsal For Life’s theater production at Bellforge Arts Center. Summer 2025.
Spend a few weeks around a community theater production and it quickly becomes clear that many of the people participating have little else in common on paper. They may be decades apart in age. Some have spent a lifetime on stage, while others are walking into their very first rehearsal. Outside the theater, many of their paths might never have crossed.
Inside a production, however, those distinctions begin to take on a different significance. A retired electrician becomes essential to opening night alongside a middle school student making their stage debut. A recent art school graduate spends evenings sewing her younger sister’s costume at the kitchen table. A parent volunteers for the late-night carpool during tech week to make sure everyone gets home safely. Someone stays after rehearsal to finish painting scenery. Someone else solves a problem backstage moments before the curtain rises.
None of these roles are interchangeable. Each depends on the others.
"At certain moments this fragmented world comes together and for a certain
time it can rediscover the marvel of organic life. The marvel of being one."
- Peter Brook
It’s striking how often research into human connection arrives at the same conditions that naturally exist inside a rehearsal room. Sociologist Robert Putnam describes the importance of bridging social capital—relationships that connect people whose lives might otherwise never intersect. Psychologist Gordon Allport similarly argued that meaningful relationships develop when people work toward shared goals while depending on one another as equals.
A rehearsal room does exactly that. It asks people with different histories, abilities, ages, and perspectives to build something together that none of them could create alone.
Photo: Rehearsal For Life’s Freelance Players (Bellforge Troupe) following their performance of ‘A Place Between Them’ at Bellforge Arts Center. Summer 2025.
A theater production depends on many forms of knowledge becoming equally valuable. Creativity exists alongside craftsmanship. Technical expertise supports storytelling. The audience may never see the person who repaired a costume, rebuilt part of the set, or quietly solved a crisis moments before a scene began. Yet the performance would be diminished without every one of those contributions.
Watching enough productions, you begin to notice that the rehearsal process asks a different question than much of modern life does.
Much of modern life encourages us to distinguish ourselves. Schools recognize individual achievement. College applications ask students to describe their accomplishments. Social media rewards visibility, inviting us to present the most polished version of ourselves. Independence, expertise, and personal ambition all have real value.
A rehearsal room asks something different.
What can only happen because you’re here?
It shifts the measure of a person’s value away from visibility and toward contribution.
"I feel the theatre is the most unique one of all [the arts] for collaboration. I feel very fortunate to be in a field where I really do get to have long conversations with the visual artists, the actors, the musicians. It's all art forms rolled into one."
- Susan Stroman
The goal isn’t for everyone to become the same. Productions depend on people becoming deeply skilled in different things—and then trusting one another enough to rely on those differences. In that way, community theater offers something increasingly uncommon: a place where people of different ages, backgrounds, experiences, and abilities build something that belongs to all of them. Confidence grows not only from what we’re able to accomplish ourselves, but from discovering that our strengths become useful to other people.
Adults need that reminder every bit as much as young people do. The desire to know that our presence matters—that someone depends on us in ways both large and small—doesn’t disappear as we grow older. If anything, it becomes easier to forget amid a culture that often celebrates self-sufficiency above interdependence.
Community theater offers another vision. It reminds us that strength isn’t measured only by what we can carry alone, but also by what we’re willing to build together.
Photo: Hand-drawn sketch of ‘A Place Between Them.’ — A 2025 original musical by Rehearsal For Life’s Freelance Players.
This week, Rehearsal For Life presents: The Gardener’s Daughter, an original musical by the Freelance Players (Rehearsal For Life’s youth theater arts program for ages 8-16).
Like every production, what audiences will see on stage is only part of the story. Behind every performance is a community of young artists, writers, directors, families, and mentors creating something none of them could make alone.
This is one of the many reasons we believe theater matters. It gives people repeated opportunities to discover that they are needed.