There is a woman who has spent eighteen years making sure you never notice her.
That is not a criticism. It is the job.
Teri Pruitt works in the wings on Broadway, most of those years on Wicked, and her whole craft is to make enormous effort disappear so that someone else can shine. When she does it perfectly, you see nothing at all.
I have spent much of my working life doing the reverse. Twenty years in management consultancy, where the effort was the product, and being seen to work hard was a good part of what you were paid for. I am a recovering management consultant, and I still catch myself at it.
So I came to this conversation wondering what a career of deliberate invisibility does to a person’s sense of their own worth.
It made her lighter.
Take what you’re doing seriously, but don’t take yourself seriously.
She said it when I asked what she notices in companies that they cannot see about themselves. Her answer was rigidity. Teams gripping the system, the process, the way we have always done it, and calling that commitment.
Hold on tightly, she says, and there is no room left for anything to grow. Hold the goal seriously. Hold the work seriously. Hold everything else, yourself included, lightly.
Coming from someone who spends her evenings repairing disasters in real time, in front of a thousand people, with no second take, that is not a soft idea. It is the discipline that lets a show survive contact with a real night.
We talk about how you keep a global production identical in Tokyo and New York, tonight and a decade ago, while it stays alive and never quite the same twice.
Her answer is unglamorous and true: the work nobody sees. Rehearsal, practice, repetition until it becomes muscle memory and everyone around you knows exactly where the show is headed.
We talk about teams, and she gives me the best line I have heard this year about the person who always picks up the slack.
There is a saying backstage: once a courtesy, twice a cue. Cover a gap once, and you have helped. Cover it every time, and it quietly becomes your job, with no thanks attached.
There are also two stories I will not spoil here. One involves a telephone ringing in ancient Rome. The other involves a goat tail, a block-long sprint across a Broadway stage, and an improvised torch. Both are funnier than they sound, and both turn out to be about care.
Near the end, she stops explaining her work and starts loving it out loud.
I love that we are a story-making species... I am part of a lineage that’s being sent into space to meet whoever is out there. We’re sending music. We’re sending art.
You can hear it in her voice. Thirty years in the wings, placed inside something that runs the whole length of being human.
Teri’s advice to anyone starting out was to find your core and make it your North Star, because when you lead from that, the work feels right even when the outcome isn’t, and when you don’t, even a perfect outcome feels wrong.
It left me with a question, and I will hand it to you. Where are you gripping hardest at the moment? And what would it actually cost you to hold that thing a little more lightly?
About Teri Pruitt
Teri Pruitt is a Broadway wardrobe professional with more than thirty years in live theatre, including roughly eighteen years on Wicked. She is the founder of Open the Aperture, which brings theatrical solutions to business problems, taking companies backstage to learn how live performance handles pressure, teamwork and repair.
If this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who is working through the challenges of encouraging their team to work together better.
I love it! 🤩! Thanks for being you, Teri 🤩😉🙏