Stories of Leadership in the Outer Solar System: A Values-Driven Approach to Alistair McDowell’s X

Faced with being stranded on Pluto, the characters in Alistair McDowell’s X struggle to decide who has the authority to make decisions and even whose story is the “real” truth. During their existential emergency, they wait, fight, and lose themselves altogether as their realities fracture and unfold. As the Production Stage Manager of X, I considered each collaborator's diverse stories and stakes. This external tension fueled an inner one, ultimately challenging me the most. X forced me to confront the incongruity between my avoidant, people-pleasing tendencies and my responsibilities as a Production Stage Manager. Leading this production required a dance with power, challenging old stories about my role as a stage manager and writing new ones about the value I add to a process with my knowledge and experience. My initial approach began with a checklist of values. Before the tension points surfaced in this process, I shared my values of respect, pride, trustworthiness, excellence, flexibility, and fun with the company as part of our first rehearsal. Naïvely, I planned to return to this list as a definitive guide for any problems I might encounter. However, this strategy was complicated by complex interpersonal challenges that would activate my self-sabotaging habits of avoidance, passivity, and ruminating. When we shifted to the performance phase, a tension point arose that tested how I saw myself and my role on the production. Our director became very involved in troubleshooting technical problems encountered during performances, which set off my self-defeating default behaviors. I initially worried that I had done an inadequate job of maintaining the production, leading to a disruption in trust. After a fair bit of hand-wringing, I gathered the courage to confront my discomfort and discuss my concerns with the director. She validated my feelings and agreed that I had the competence to maintain the show now that it had opened. Through this conversation, I applied m