Generous people don’t always realize they’re being generous. Likewise, what might feel like small concessions to those people, can actually be life-changing, and in the case of the host families of Festival 56, key to the long-term success of a small theatre.

I’ve been an actor with Festival 56 for the past two summers, and it took less than a month into my first summer to realize something special was going on in Princeton. At first, that “something special” was mostly something I noticed in a business sense. The host family experience at Festival is a crucial part of allowing the theatre to invest so heavily in bringing immensely talented people to Princeton every summer for the sake of creating memorable and meaningful pieces of theatre. So many companies have vanished because they didn’t have the kind of community support that exists in Princeton, which makes that ‘something special’ far less about business and more about heart.

Like many actors, I’ve lived a somewhat nomadic lifestyle for the last three years. Theatre is rarely glamorous, and the truth is, it almost always requires you to have at least one “survival job” you can count on to pay the bills. This is all to say, I literally can’t fathom taking care of other people. Not that I don’t want to, I’m just years away from having the means to do it. So people who can take care of others and are willing to do it impress me.