Playwright Caridad Svich reflects on the economic reality of working in theatre.

Matthew Clinton Sekellick discusses moving beyond awareness with action, advocating for theatre artists and administrators to join forces with existing social justice movements.

Expat playwright Lydia Stryk considers living and working at a distance from the US.

In this installment of a new series leading up to the IETM Plenary Meeting in Bucharest, Theodor-Cristian Popescu writes about being an actor in Romania.

In this final installment, Ricky Young-Howze reflects on self-producing new work in a “theatre desert,” and acknowledges the importance of learning, wisdom, and respect.

In this installment, Ricky Young-Howze discusses the importance of having archival footage of new work, which serves as a historical document.

Rosalind Grush discusses why salaries for many arts administrators are lower than they should be, and offers some solutions.

In this installment, Ricky Young-Howze discusses his experience marketing his play Last Hope for Twenty Miles, and what he learned for future reference.

In this first installment, Ricky Young-Howze shares his experience of starting his own not-for-profit theatre company and offers advice.

Thom Dunn makes a case for union protection for the marketers and fundraisers and other theatre administrators who all play important roles, working long hours for little pay or glory.

Matthew Sekellick explores what New York’s proposed minimum wage increase would mean for theatre artists.

Are Equity tours of a higher quality than non-union productions? Very possibly. There’s a larger talent pool to work with and performers tend to be more experienced. That said, whether or not a tour is a union production has never been shown to have a demonstrable effect on ticket sales that I’ve been able to uncover.

Truthfully, as a Los Angeles-based theater artist working almost entirely under the 99-seat agreement, at a certain point I just gave up on earning my Equity card, and the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC) wasn’t popping up on my radar. While I may not currently carry a union card in my wallet, I do take great pride in how I am following in my grandfather’s footsteps. We both pursued our passion to craft and share stories, and simultaneously held careers working in the arts to pay the bills.

“Paying your dues”—it’s a pervasive refrain, and one that clearly lives deeply within us; it has gotten under our skin and through our veins. I can’t help but think that it’s a lie. The concept of “paying dues” implies a sort of social contract that’s simply no longer present, if it ever was.

Sometimes, the best way to study a theory or philosophy is to implement it and learn from the results. This twelve-part series is the year-long account of one young artist’s efforts to start a new theater company and put into action what he has learned and is learning from the HowlRound and #newplay community.

HowlRound is working with playwright residency sites around the country to track the impact of what it means to have a playwright on staff. At each of the fourteen theaters we have a Commons Producer—a theater practitioner from the local community working with the theater and the playwright to tell the story of each residency and make the learning from this experiment accessible as it's happening. Periodically we will post these residency updates on HowlRound in the hopes that it will be useful to field-wide learning on the question of what it means to employ playwrights inside of theaters.