Accountability Case Study: Live Theater

Accountability: anything or anyone that helps us gain mental leverage to achieve the results we desire.

— The Accountability Stop

In 2023, I put on my own one-hour show, Shy, the musical at the IndyFringe theater festival. Creating the show was a real-world case study of personal accountability and how different techniques worked. I needed a lot of mental leverage to complete the project.

I’ve wanted to write a musical for most of my life. Like many of us, my desire for self expression was my big “why.” But having that “why” wasn’t enough to actually do it. My goal needed accountability, and I needed to generate it out of thin air.

Brainstorming

I started with my accountability group at the time. On a day we set aside for working on anything we want and checking in every few hours, I decided to brainstorm multiple concepts for a show. But I put a severe limit on it. I asked myself what the smallest musical I could write would be. What could I do with just two people and a piano? I would play the piano, so I would only need two more people. 

I landed on a concept that piqued my interest: Two people see each other every day at a bus stop. They never speak to each other, but imagine what the other person might be like. Naming the show Shy, the musical, was probably the easiest part of creating the show.

Incremental Progress

To write a musical, I needed continuous accountability. My next stop was my accountability buddy. I made it my priority to write songs for two years. I was doing other projects at the same time, so Shy started as a back-burner project that I worked on between others. Most success coaches would say we need to focus entirely on our goal and get rid of other distractions if we’re going to succeed. That would have been nice, but it wasn’t realistic for me. Most of the work happened in short sprints of scheduled time, when I could ignore everything else going on in life and focus on songwriting.

I can say unequivocally that I would not have finished writing a musical were it not for my accountability buddy. Many times I felt that what I wrote was no good, too cliché, or too bizarre to be likable. But I had promised my buddy that I would write a musical, so I kept at it. These were the dog days, slogging through songs and sometimes making very little progress toward the goal. Little by little, lines became songs; songs became scenes; and scenes became a show.

I was far enough along by late 2022 that I decided to sign up for the 2023 IndyFringe festival. It included payment of earnest money to be part of the festival. This was a threshold to cross regarding accountability. Was I willing to commit money to doing this thing and put it onstage? I decided yes.

Hurry Up and Wait

“Shy” was waitlisted for the festival initially. It was likely I would not get in. So I decided I should give myself a separate deadline to at least finish the show for myself. I scheduled a “sing-through” with friends. I had to complete all the songs for that to happen. It worked out well. I had a couple of months to polish up everything. My friends and I got together and had a really good time.

The sing-through was a particularly good idea, because in April I found out I had a slot for the festival in August. Accountability kicked into overdrive.

• I had a deadline to put a show on stage.
• I had put down money.
• I had to tell everyone I knew in order to have attendees for the show.
• The festival schedule was published online for anyone to see. Plus I started posting on Facebook about it.

Added Pressure

I’m an organizer as well as a (self-described) creative, luckily. I could anticipate the main steps to put on a musical, but still some curveballs came my way.

• I had to find actors to do the show. (I had two in mind. One was available, the other was not.) I had to hold auditions for the second role.
• I thought the stage would be a very small and shallow. It turned out to be a very large stage with the audience on three sides. Suddenly, I had to come up with much more stage movement and even choreography. (I am not a choreographer!)
• Since the actors would have so much movement, microphones became necessary. 
• When I was putting together music accompaniment that I would play, I found I would make my life much easier if I added bass and drums.

All of this added more accountability—for a “better” show to put in front of the audience that would show up on opening night.

Lost My Why

Oddly missing from the mental leverage list was “why.” “Why” was completely lost in the chaos of putting the show together. My accountability was on steroids and drove me from morning to night. (Especially the accountability I needed to keep showing up at my day job.) I told friends I was living in a low level of panic through the entire summer putting it all together. I could have quit. I would have been out some money. But I would have disappointed a lot of people whom I had directly and indirectly enrolled in the process.

Happy Ending

I did not quit. I was accountable for what I promised publicly. Shy, for a first-time entry in a small Fringe Festival, was a success. We were the tenth most-attended out of 70 shows. I talked to many people after each show who said they enjoyed it.

I had a “why” at the beginning – to write and perform my own musical. The goal remained a pipe dream for the better part of my life. Attaching that dream to several significant accountability techniques at once turned it into a reality.

I can wholeheartedly endorse participation in a fringe theater festival to create your own show. My guess is only a small number of readers actually have that particular goal. 

What’s Your Account?

How might you put your goal or project on accountability steroids? Can you attach your goal to something outside of yourself that will drive you forward? Could you sign up for a community event? Can you find an event that puts your name on a list as a participant or contributor?

Have you had a similar experience with loads of accountability that made you finish something? What was that like?