We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Isaac Byrne. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Isaac below.

Isaac, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

I’ve spent most of my career as a theatre director of new plays and a teacher. It’s been wonderful and incredibly rewarding. Helping artists grow, or helping a playwright get their perspective and artistic goals across to an audience in meaningful ways has been an amazing artistic life.

But in two weeks, I will be doing something entirely new, terrifying, and exhilarating: directing a film.

After 20+ years of working solely in theatre, I’m learning all new terms, necessities, and skills. I started writing plays in 2019, and the level of vulnerability that comes with being a writer was a shock to the system. The intensity of other people speaking your words and revealing how your heart and mind experiences the world—cannot be overstated. It’s a wild, painful, and joyous ride.

An actor in one of my short plays, OPHIOLOGY, fell in love with the script. She asked if we could do it as a short film. I laughed and said “Sure. If you raise $30K, we can do it.” Much to my surprise (and somewhat consternation) she went out and did just that.

Now I’m learning about refining shot lists, location scouting, permits, and how to see the story through a single frame instead on a stage. To learn how to direct in a new format at 46 is both invigorating and nerve wracking.

The fact that so many people have come together to tell this story is truly humbling and overwhelming. On the surface it’s a Tarantino style story about a heist gone wrong, psychological and physical manipulations, and one person left to make an unthinkable decision. But underneath the surface are so many threads from my own life: the death of my mother, the real life story of a murdered friend, the difficulties of loving neurodivergent partners, and the terror of how we make decisions in crisis without really knowing the truth.

Also there’s rattlesnakes. Which scare the bejeezus out of me.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I started acting professional at 13. I didn’t come from a family that leaned into the arts. I was the odd duck working on oil rigs to pay for ballet camps at 18. I moved to NYC in 2003 and started a theatre company and became a director. My company, Theatre 4the People, works to support and develop artists, both emerging and established, while producing new plays economically accessible to everyone.

I’ve been awarded the New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Direction twice and productions I’ve have directed have been nominated for a Drama Desk Award, an Off Broadway Alliance award, and 29 NYIT awards. NYC directing credits: Other Mozart, In Vestments, To Nineveh, Tar Baby, Rusalka, and AMP. I’ve taught acting and directing at University of the Arts, AZAA, and I’m the founder and co-artistic director of Theatre 4the People.

In other words, I help make new plays happen, and I help actors become better, more powerful artists.

You can find out more about my work at www.isaacbyrne.com or www.theatre4thepeople.org

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

There are two lessons I had to unlearn as an artist.

First, people kept telling me that I needed to make art that was easier and cheaper to produce. I didn’t believe them for a long time, and then I did. The period where I tried to make more marketable “sellable” art—was the worst period of my artistic career. I hated what I did, and I hated the process of doing it.

Art has to have blood in it. I mean yours. I’m not talking about “suffering” for your art. I can’t stand that idea and I don’t believe artists should ever be unhealthy in their process. I don’t have time for that kind of masochism or toxicity. What I mean is, it has to have part of something truly human and personal in it: Your life, your feelings, your secret joys, your painful truths, and your own weird vulnerable experience of the universe inside it. Anything else just ends up being cheap, cold, and dead.

The second lesson I had to unlearn, is asking for help. I mean money. Art does not fit into capitalism. It is an expensive, poetic, process oriented venture. It can make money. Restrictions from money and resources can lead to innovation and ingenuity. But you have to reframe asking for money from a scarcity “begging” mindset to sharing an opportunity with people to create something meaningful that makes life more worthwhile.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

Education and institutional support. If you educate people at a young age about art—about how it intersects with science, math, psychology, and history—then people will feel more connected to it.

Art needs support from the government—at the local, state, and federal level. The barriers to that need to be lowered. It can’t all be competition. We can’t just live in a world where “America’s Got Talent” is the only platform. Artists need space to experiment, mess up, and grow. They need money to live on. They need to not get sucked into hustle culture and end up working 4 jobs to survive while they try and learn and grow as artists.

For theatre, we should have fully funded theaters in every city. People who go to the theatre have been shown statistically to be much happier and feel more connected in their lives to their community. Theater is the place where people go to find connection, learn, argue, and connect.

It can’t just be for the rich elites—everyone deserves to get to be a part of the magical experience of telling stories together. It’s unquestionably the oldest and most human of art forms.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Www.isaacbyrne.com
• Instagram: @theatre4thepeople