Sean Daniels

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Theater director Sean Daniels has outstanding credits to his name. He co-founded the company Dad’s Garage, which is now a cornerstone of Atlanta’s theatrical scene, and then went on to lead Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Massachusetts. He also spent four years as associate artistic director at Actors Theatre of Louisville where he oversaw the sadly now-defunct Humana Festival of New American Plays and directed many of its world premieres.

The credit that brings him the greatest pride, however, is just a tad more recent: person in long-term recovery. For almost two decades as he charted his remarkable artistic path, he was also increasingly hobbled by his addiction to alcohol, and as is so common for people with substance-abuse disorders, it took him several tries before he was finally able to manage his disease. Sean detailed his painful, absurd, and often surprisingly hilarious journey to sobriety in his play “The White Chip,” which enjoyed a successful Off-Broadway run in 2019.

Now, over a decade into his sobriety, he has added a new credit to his resume: advocate. After a widely lauded stint as artistic director of Arizona Theatre Company, Sean recently became the associate director of Florida Studio Theatre. At FST not only will he head the theater’s new-play-development program, but he will also work as the inaugural director of his brainchild, The Recovery Project. The Recovery Project is an initiative working to heal the stigma of addiction and recovery through the development of new plays, theatre-education programs and outreach.

In this interview, Sean explains why those working in the performing arts are especially vulnerable to substance-abuse disorders and details how he hopes his advocacy will establish new support systems to catch struggling artists long before they fall as far as he once did.

Choose a question below to begin exploring the interview:

• Looking back at the darkest times in your addiction journey, what do you think your colleagues and boss could have done differently to help you?
• You had to reintroduce yourself to your creative self once you were sober. What were the challenges and the discoveries?
• How did you decide to create The Recovery Project? What was the spark of inspiration? And how did you find your partner in Florida Studio Theatre?
• How do you think The Recovery Project is going to affect the nation or your community in a way that existing arts have not addressed the crisis?
• What do you think artists who struggle with addiction require that perhaps professionals in non-creative fields might not need? Is there a way to approach creative people with addictions differently?
• If you had enormous resources and influence, what could be a fix that would address some of what you just spoke about?
• What does it feel like now to be so out of the closet, to have your name attached to The Recovery Project?
• What creative projects of yours are you really looking forward to?

Pier Carlo Talenti: Looking back at the darkest times in your addiction journey, given what you know now, what do you think your colleagues and boss could have done differently to help you?

Sean: One of the reasons I wanted to start The Recovery Project, and I think one of the reasons why Florida Studio Theatre was interested in doing it, is that every organization has had people who struggle. Ten percent of the population is in active addiction at any given moment, so the chances of them working in your local arts organization, I feel, are pretty significant [he laughs]. And what happens there, and I think elsewhere, is that honestly nobody knows what to do. Nobody is trained in this. Nobody has mental-health first-aid training in terms of how to operate. 

We all understand sexual harassment. We’re trained in it. I’ve never started a job without having some type of video about sexual-harassment training. Recently I was a guest director at Cincinnati Playhouse, and they made me do a short video on active-shooter training, what to do if someone were to enter the building while firing, but nowhere has ever done anything on mental health in terms of how do you deal with it? How do you start the conversations? Should you identify it? What does HR allow you to do if somebody feels like they’re a little out of it? 

I think at the time I was angry, but what I’ve realized now is that they just didn’t know, and I didn’t know how to ask for help. The stigma of addiction is so strong in our country that even people in recovery sometimes think, “Just come on, just please don’t show up drunk to this meeting. This is important,” as opposed to being like, “Please don’t show up with cancer to this meeting. This is important.” We would never do it to other diseases. I think the thing that I want to do is figure out how do we train our institutions to be as aware and sensitive to all the information.

Because addiction is like any disease: early detection, conversation, dealing with it at an earlier point are crucial. You’d rather have stage 1 than stage 4 cancer. Same thing with addiction if you can catch it early and talk about it. But I think it’s so ingrained in all of us that you’re not fun if you’re not using or drinking that nobody wants to talk about it. 

I remember after I got sober, so many people were like, “Oh my god, I’m so glad you’re sober. I’ve been sober for seven years.” And part of me just wanted to be like, “Where the F were you?” I really felt like I was the only person in the American theater.

Pier Carlo: So people were in the closet about their sobriety?

Sean: Oh yeah, everybody. It’s a controversial idea in the Alcoholics Anonymous world that they say that anonymity is the spiritual foundation of the program. I think that exists because for a long time you wouldn’t go get help if you thought you were going to be outed by going to a meeting. And that may be still true today in a lot of fields. 

Theater claims to be the most empathetic, liberal group of people on the planet, and we all know that is not true, so it may still even impact your ability to get jobs in our field. So I think I understand why anonymity has been so built into it, because otherwise you wouldn’t show up. You wouldn’t go to a church basement somewhere you never knew if you thought you were going to get called out. But I think what happens because of that is nobody knows who else has been there.

And when you start to look at the numbers of addiction in our country … in the United States, someone dies from substance-use disorder every three minutes. It is huge. More people died in 2020 from overdoses than died of AIDS at the height of the AIDS crisis. It is tremendous in terms of the toll it’s taking, and yet we’re all very quiet about it because the shame that comes along with it is on everyone’s part. 

I think I didn’t know how to ask for help, and they had no idea how to offer it. What I see now is that it was not a failing on anybody’s part back then; nobody in our field has any idea how they should do it. 

The thing that I’ve also realized in researching it is that there are systems in place to help people who are struggling in almost every other major field. Lawyers have one; doctors have one; airline pilots have one; nurses have one; any field where it feels like it is necessary to get help and to do it in a very private way that doesn’t ruin your life. Lawyers have this great line that you call, and you can say, “I’m struggling,” or you can say, “I was in court with someone that was struggling,” and this line will put you in touch with someone who will come talk to you to help you figure out what next steps are. 

We don’t have anything like that in the arts. In fact, in the arts we have, “Maybe you should keep working because you’ll lose your health insurance if you don’t get six more weeks in the next 10 weeks.” We’re almost at the other end of it. I think that part of my frustration at the beginning has really fueled me figuring out what is it in our field needs to change to make it easier for people when they’re struggling.

Pier Carlo: Well, we’re definitely going to talk about that sort of systemic reinvention and The Recovery Project, but right now I want to focus on you and your relationship to your own creativity. In the popular imagination — and I know you’ve talked about this — there’s the romantic notion of the creative alcoholic. Also, since alcohol is a disinhibitor, it can maybe open, I think, different paths to creativity that perhaps a sober person might not have. 

So I’m curious about how you had to reintroduce yourself to your creative self once you were sober. What were the challenges and the discoveries?

Sean: It’s such a great question because I feel like for so many people in the arts, there’s this myth that’s built in that somehow it costs you something to be an artist, that there’s a toll that is taken and that’s just your deal with the devil to be able to do what it is that you do. It’s late nights, and it’s big personalities and tempers. We all have this kind of self-destructive narrative built into it. 

I don’t know the numbers, but the vast majority of Nobel Prize winners in literature are alcoholics. And of course, we’re just like, “Oh my god, if only I could be Ernest Hemingway or any of these people,” these people that put a shotgun in their mouth and blew their head off.

Pier Carlo: Yes, it doesn’t end well.

Sean: That’s right, which I think is the story for so many of us, that yes, it disinhibits you, and yes, you’re more charming. Oh my god, I remember this TCG conference where I purchased all this booze and I opened an open bar in my talkback session because I just thought they were dry. And the next day it was packed. And I got a directing gig out of it. The problem is that so much of that is true or is so baked into our field as creatives. 

For me, I really thought, “Oh my god, I’m not going to be anything if I have to get sober. I’m going to be boring. People aren’t going to want to hang out with me.” I had a person I was dating who I said that to, and they were like, “Oh my god, do you have any idea how boring you are now? You just sit every day at the bar from 5 to 9. You think it’s going to get more boring than this?” It was really having to figure out how to be an artist without that. 

Then the tough truth of it is once you’re on the other side, once you’ve had a couple years, you look back and you actually see how it got in the way of your art. I would always say, “Well, it’s not taking a toll on my work.” Then once I was sober a couple of years, I’d look back, and I was like, “Of course it was.” The energy that it takes, the rigor that it takes, the focus, to be in the rehearsal room and to be in touch with everybody and to be making the choices that are needed and late nights of rewrites, so much of that was really put aside. I think the work was good for a while, and then it started to get in the way. Now I realize that I couldn’t do the work that I do and I couldn’t navigate the personalities and the shows that I do and the amount of work that is taken if I was drinking.

Pier Carlo: How did you decide to create The Recovery Project? What was the spark of inspiration? And how did you find your partner in Florida Studio Theatre?

Sean: I had lunch with Richard Hopkins, who’s the artistic director here at Florida Studio Theatre. We were talking for a while, and finally he was like, “What is it you just want to do? If you could do anything, what would you do? Stop complaining. Just tell me, what is the end?” And I said, “If I could do any two things, I would rebuild the Humana Festival somewhere else, and I would figure out how to stop artists from overdosing. If I could do any two things, I would do that.” Then he called a couple weeks later and said, “OK, let’s do it,” and I was like, “Oh my god!” 

Pier Carlo: Wait, was he saying yes to both?

Sean: He was saying yes to both. He was saying, “Let’s do it then.” When someone calls you on your claimed goal in life, then I think you have to take them up on it. 

During the pandemic, when like everybody I was thinking about what is it I would do if our field doesn’t return, I started to think about how to do things in the recovery world and should I be putting more time into that. I had a great friend who said, “You don’t leave a field after 30 years to do something else. You’ve got to figure out what the intersection is of those two things.” So I began to put together, “OK, how do arts and recovery come together?” 

Then this was the spark of it all: There was this great study that was done about how do national narratives change? How do we actually think differently over time? They studied gay marriage. And they studied how Barack Obama, when he ran for president, was against gay marriage and now 15, 20 years later, you can’t imagine a Democrat running for city council and saying the things that he said. So how do actually we change those things? 

The answer was the arts. The answer was what you see on TV, in the movies, in the plays, in the books you read and the songs you listen to. That influences vastly how we think about things. Ellen comes out, and everybody thinks her career is over, and now it’s luckily boring to have a lesbian talk-show host in the afternoon. “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” is fetishized, and now it’s not even a thing anymore. You watch how the arts really change how it is. 

I began to think, “Well, if we have the power to do that.” We spend so much time talking about, “If one person in the audience can be changed by this piece of art,” what if we looked at the thing that was killing the vast majority? The No. 1 preventable death that happens in our country is addiction and substance-use disorder. Maybe we could use the arts to change that very narrative.

We spend so much time talking about, “If one person in the audience can be changed by this piece of art,” what if we looked at the thing that was killing the vast majority? The No. 1 preventable death that happens in our country is addiction and substance-use disorder. Maybe we could use the arts to change that very narrative.

Sean Daniels

Pier Carlo: How do you think The Recovery Project is going to affect the nation or your community in a way that existing arts have not addressed the crisis?

Sean: A couple things. One, we want to support artists who are in recovery, whether talking about recovery or not talking about it, in the same way that we finally came around in our field, hopefully, to the idea of supporting artists of color when they’re not talking about their trauma, supporting them regardless all the time. I want to figure out how do we get more shows out there, plays, movies, books that talk about the thousands of different ways that recovery can happen and all the real success stories. 

If you’ve watched TV, all you know is that you go to a very sad church basement where people will hold coffee and everyone will say their name back to you. It’s so far from the truth. First of all, those meetings are hilarious. There are people telling horror stories, and the room cackles. For a field that loves dark humor, you would fall in love with all of these characters that if you put them in a movie, people would say, “That’s too much.”  So how do we just change? How do we get the stigma out there? How do we talk about the numbers in terms of what it is? 

Then I think also as the arts, we have to start putting together some training. I really want to launch what’s called a warmline, which is similar to what other fields have. If you’re struggling, there’s a phone number you can call, and they’ll put you in touch with somebody who’s in recovery to talk to you.  

Pier Carlo: Do the unions have that? Does Actors Equity have anything like that?

Sean: They don’t. I met with Actors’ Equity, and they’re game to help because it is about safety for the actors. There are different services out there, of course, but I just think there’s no one place. 

Our field is so specific in terms of what its needs are and where it is. I try to explain to other people in the recovery field, “You’re an artist, which means that if you’re successful but not on Broadway, you’re probably not in the town that you live in, so you don’t have your doctors, your friends, your dentists. You’re in artist housing, and you’re struggling, and you don’t know what to do. You can’t go away for a month in the middle of a show! The contract is 11 weeks. The contract is eight weeks.” We’re really set up to just encourage you to suck it up and get through it and try to fix it when you get home. 

We’ve been talking about launching a warmline. What’s a simple place that you could call and receive the services that they could provide you? We’ve been partnering with other organizations to figure out what if you don’t have insurance? How do you call and get the help? Everything from just talking to you on the phone to being able to get you to science-based recovery or an AA meeting or to get you into outpatient or to get you into inpatient. You should have all those options, the same way you would any other disease. Addiction, especially alcoholism, was declared a disease in the late '50s, yet we don’t treat it at all. 

Listen, I always like to say we’re so great about peanuts. We’ve really figured out how to ask everybody if they have a peanut allergy, how to make sure that peanuts aren’t around allergic people. You fill out a form when you check in artist housing asking if you have a peanut allergy. And you should do all that because it can really be serious if you’re not. But nothing exists in terms of this issue that affects 40 million Americans a year. It’s just not treated in the same way, so I want to be a part of changing that. 

I think part of it is just the stigma. Part of it is deep down inside, people don’t know what to do. We really think that it’s a moral failing if somebody is abusing anything, and we judge them for it, and we’re just frustrated with them, and we’re angry with them. We would never do that with any other disease, but that stigma is ingrained. And it’s ingrained in the person that’s suffering also. They try to hide it; they don’t want to talk about it only till it gets to rock bottom. Like we said earlier with any disease, if you wait till stage 4 to treat it, chances are less, as opposed to talking about it earlier. 

Pier Carlo: What do you think artists who struggle with addiction require that perhaps professionals in non-creative fields might not need? Is there a way to approach creative people with addictions differently? 

Sean: We do know that artists suffer from depression at higher levels than the average person. Often what attracts you to the field is that you get to be part of the circus and you finally fit in and the level of misfits. That can play a big role in what attracts people to it. But the artform does require, especially for performers, a tremendous amount. It’s the same thing that gets rock-and-rollers. You got to give it your all at 11 o’clock on a Wednesday night.

Pier Carlo: And as you said, you’re often on the road, away from your family and community.

Sean: That’s right. You’re in a weird place, in artist housing. And you’re doing eight shows a week where you got to go out and sing, and you’re tired, and your voice is hurt, and you’re on vocal rest. It’s really primed for asking you to just get through it. We also know as a field that the show must go on. There are more people than there are opportunities, and so there’s always a sense of “Don’t screw this up; keep it going. You may not work again.” All this is built into figuring out for people, “Great, what do I have to do to get through the next section?” 

And then the worst of it is, especially when it comes to actors, if you don’t keep working, you lose your insurance, so who would ever take time off to go to rehab? If you want to have a baby, you got to figure out exactly how to work up until the last possible second and somehow have some work ready to go five or six months later. It’s near impossible for any actor to stay in it unless they’re consistently working. 

I think the field is really built to punish you if you want to take time off, if you want to take some mental-health time off. If you just say like, “I’m really struggling; I’m going to take six months off,” you have to have insurance through a partner or somewhere else. You have to be independently wealthy. So much is built into the way that we operate that lets addiction thrive, that really sets it up as a great place to come in. 

Just even think about this: If you’re at an organization and you’re struggling, first of all, they could fire you and get somebody right away, and you know that. And the other thing is even if you get through it, you’re gone in seven weeks, eight weeks, and then they don’t see you again. You are tossed aside, and then maybe they just don’t bring you back. 

If we’re going to talk a game that we care about artists and we’re there for artists, then I think you have to say, “Great, they’re dying. What do we do next? How do we figure out what are the steps that we should be taking?”

Pier Carlo: If you had enormous resources and influence, short of converting this country to single-payer insurance across the board, what could be a fix that would address some of what you just spoke about?

Sean: I think first of all we have to have training in every arts organization about what it means to care for people with substance-use disorder and teaches how to have conversations about it. How do you have a workplace that is friendly to those conversations? I think that involves unions and collective-bargaining groups to figure out how you protect people. How is it OK to be able to ask for help? If you had cancer, you wouldn’t think twice about going to your boss and saying, “I have cancer,” even though, in a similar way, everybody’s going to have to figure out how to redistribute some of the work going forward because you’re not going to be able to do what it is. But you know it’s a life-and-death situation, so, “I hope my job is helpful, but even if you’re not, I got to take care of me.”

Nobody feels the same way when they’re struggling with addiction, so I think we also have to have a place in which the stigma has been broken down enough that you can ask for help, that you can figure out what it is, whether you can call this warmline, you can talk to somebody else who’s been through it. You can understand that there are a vast majority of sober artists.

The music industry has done such a better job than the performing-arts industry about highlighting performers that are in recovery, taking care of each other. They have organizations that can get you the help that they need. I think we have to do the same thing for the performing arts. If you raise your hand and ask for help, which is the bravest thing, we need to be able to have the resources to be able to say, “We have a place that takes your insurance. They’re going to be able to take you in. Here are the things that are a part of our field.”

Everybody wants some type of peer-to-peer relationship with the people that are helping them. I was in rehab trying to explain theater to every third person. They were sex workers and lawyers, so it was sort of in the performing arts, but not exactly. What if you were able to talk to other artists to figure out how do you do it? And then how do you come back? How do we have to program to get people there? What are the resources that they need? How do we not take artists who are 60 days sober and throw them into four donor cocktail parties when they’re out of town? What are the setups that we have? Like the conversation about peanuts, how do we really take care of them and make sure that their personal trauma is dealt with in a way that helps them to get back on their feet? 

Then long-term maintenance is a huge part of it. What are the things that you are doing? What are your checkups? Who are the people that are checking in on you? Who are the people that are with you to make sure that things are growing? How do you have a mentor? How do you have somebody who’s been there before and got their feet back underneath them that you can text? Right now, it’s all put together sort of, “I hope you Google the right rehab center, and I hope you text the right person that can maybe connect you.” There is no network of anything for you to fall into. I think that larger system has to be in place. 

Pier Carlo: What does it feel like now to be so out of the closet, to have your name attached to The Recovery Project?

Sean: Oh my god, the other day somebody said to me, “Well, you’re the leader in our field in dealing with this.” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” I used to take naps on the 10-minute breaks because I would go in the bathroom, because in the bathroom people look for feet and they leave. I would take a six-minute nap, and then I would wake up, and I would drink before going back to rehearsal. So the idea that I would be the leader in our field — I don’t even know if that’s true — it just felt like a full 180° moment of, “Oh my god, I’m on the other end of it.” 

I’ll say that the thing that also has spurred this is that we did “The White Chip” Off-Broadway in 2019, and I probably get contacted, I’d say, on average by about a person a week since then, so about three and a half years of somebody saying, “I have a brother, uncle, aunt who’s in the performing arts. I’m struggling. I heard about your play.” Which is amazing, right? Because we all know plays, especially Off-Broadway plays, it’s not a movie, it’s not a TV show. It wasn’t seen by millions of people. If it went great, it was seen by thousands in a one-month period. It shows the need is so great.

“American Theater” did this article about The Recovery Project, and its author, Alexis Hauk, said she was floored because they published the article and what happens to me happened to her. Within minutes of the article going out, someone reached out to her and said, “I need help. I have somebody that I’m working with. What do I do?” People are so desperate for help that they don’t know, and suddenly they hear something, they see something. 

I think it shows you how little information is out there that there’s a play that played Off-Broadway or an article on the online version of “American Theater” and people are within minutes writing in to say, “Oh my god, I read this. Please help me in this very specific situation.” I think that just shows they have nowhere else to go. They don’t know where to go. They feel so alone. We’re in this field that’s all about the other and empathy, and there’s a vast majority of people who are just struggling day to day because they feel like they’re alone and nobody else is there for them.

Pier Carlo: Finally, what creative projects of yours are you really looking forward to?

Sean: “The White Chip” is coming back to New York. The lovely and talented Annaleigh Ashford is producing a reading of it in hopes that it attracts more producers to be able to put together another run Off-Broadway. This is the story of so many shows. It had this great run in New York, and it was about to come back in the summer of 2020. And that did not happen. 

It’s also supposed to tour Scotland next year. This is crazy, but in Scotland, the government pays for theater that it feels like should be out in touring! I don’t understand it. Those words don’t make sense to me, but I’ve been told several times that that is actually the case!