“Amateur work is fun but the price for it is just simply tremendous. In the end you get ‘Thank you’ and that’s all. You give three performances which everybody promptly forgets and somebody has a breakdown—that somebody being the enthusiast” (F. Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter, trying to persuade her away from amateur theatre, as reported by Scott Eyman in Hank & Jim).
I recognize the sentiment, and it’s part of why I don’t do shows too often: Mounting them is a lot of work to be doing it for free!