Perfection vs Priorities

I'm in a play at the local community theater.

The Diary of Anne Frank. Beautiful story. Thought-provoking message. Period costumes. Tons of props. Specific religious observances. Dialogue, monologue, emotions, motivations, timing.

That's a lot of detail to get right.

But the timelines are tight. Three weeks of rehearsals, tech week, then opening night.

In that short time, we are not going to get everything perfect. It's a fact.

So what do we do?

We prioritize.

• Script calls for a wood-burning stove, but ours is gas? We can work around that.

• Emotional scenes not striking the right chord? We must spend time addressing that.

• Costumes not exactly to period? It's not ideal but we can work with it.

• Plot-critical costume pieces missing? That's a must-fix priority.

The truth is, the only way we could get this perfect is if we had an unlimited budget and unlimited time to prepare. There will always be something that could have been better.

And when time or budget are especially limited, we buckle down, make the hard choices, and ensure we don't sacrifice the critical elements — character, story, relationships, meaning — for nice-to-haves like 100% historically accurate individually tailored costumes.

Here's the thing:

Perfection is a chimera. Anything can always be made better.

When resources are limited — and they always are — it's worth taking time to set priorities, and to understand the costs and benefits of any effort at improvement.

All the best,
A.