A Roadmap Toward Economic Justice for Theatre Folk
29 June 2017
Matthew Clinton Sekellick discusses moving beyond awareness with action, advocating for theatre artists and administrators to join forces with existing social justice movements.
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.
Chicago-based costume designer, textile designer, and wardrobe stylist Elsa Hiltner considers the division of labor and allocation of technical support within theatrical design.
In this installment, Ricky Young-Howze discusses his experience marketing his play Last Hope for Twenty Miles, and what he learned for future reference.
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.
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.
But this particular day I was walking uphill in ninety-five degrees heat wearing hosiery, a corset, a silk slip, a long sleeved collared shirt, a wool skirt and a wool coat. Oh, and a pretty doofy hat. "Boardwalk Empire" followed the unfortunate schedule of filming its winter scenes in summer and summer scenes in winter. At some point I muttered to myself, "I hate this."
foolsFURY is a theater ensemble from San Francisco that sees advantages in working with playwrights and devisors, and seizes opportunities to become a touring company. As they come up on their fifteenth year, artistic director Ben Yalom sheds some light on their transitions, and lets me in on how they are working toward what is next artistically and financially.
In the last couple of seasons I’ve become aware of a ticket scheme already practiced by some of our larger regional theaters, and currently under consideration at some where my plays are produced. And this practice goes by a very catchy and newfangled name. It’s being called “dynamic pricing.” But it’s not a new practice. It’s actually quite old, and has a more familiar name. It’s called "scalping".
I grew up entranced by Jim Henson’s Muppets. Performing with wry but gentle humor, they pulled back the curtain to snicker at backstage life and deftly expressed all the joy, camaraderie, and frustration of working as an ensemble. Though televised, it embraced the dynamic liveness integral to puppetry, variety, and vaudeville as art forms. So now, looking back at the films as a young arts manager, I’m shocked to realize that Kermit the Frog—whom I love very, very much—is a pretty bad producer.
Alvina Krause, one of twentieth century’s most famous teachers of acting, believed, “if you can act Chekhov, you can act anything!” In the summer of 1976 she was 83 years old, long retired, yet still taking private students in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. Little did she know that seven students from Northwestern University in Chicago would come to study “acting Chekhov” with her, and end up settling into the town for a much longer stay as the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble (BTE).
How do you work as a group? How do you work without a script? How do you ask someone to fund a group without a script? And how are you still together—financially, artistically? The non-traditional model of creation is frequently mysterious if only because it is hard to understand without doing.
A. Nora Long examines our culture's fascination with the starving artist, scrambling to make ends meet... and calls for a movement to dismantle our thoughts about how we make a life in the theater.
Paul Meshejian challenges the idea that compensation in theater is something to be taken for granted. Instead, shouldn't we expect to not make much for our art?
