<p>WE are subsidizing the theater." Those words, addressed to an audience in a Lincoln Center auditorium last weekend, weren't spoken by a corporate suit bragging about slapping the company name on the fire escape at one of the city's often needy nonprofit theaters.</p>
<p>They were spoken by the actor Tim Blake Nelson to a group of 100 or so of his fellow performers at the National Congress of Actors and Acting Teachers. What did he mean? Essentially, that actors help keep the theater in business by supplementing their meager stage paychecks with other, more remunerative kinds of work - "Law & Order" guest spots, voice-overs, commercials, even that old standby, waiting tables.</p>
<p>That's not really news to anyone paying attention, just common knowledge rephrased in an unusually discomfiting way. And unlike corporations and civilians, the actor doesn't get a tax break for the charitable contribution he makes to the nation's cultural life by working for a pittance. Applause aside, he doesn't get much in the way of thanks, either. No drinking fountain named after spear carrier No. 2 in that Off Off Broadway production of "Coriolanus," temping by day to give himself the chance to practice his craft and pay off debts from acting school.</p>
<p>(Several anecdotes worth clicking over to read)</p>
<p>It kind of makes me feel a bit weepy. I’ve confessed before that I know nothing about being on stage nor about acting of any kind personally. But I was for 3 years on the board of a very lovely theatre company in our city that was at the time dedicated to bringing the forgotten musical to stage in concert. I learned a lot from that experience including… holy crap is this really what these amazing people (actors, musicians, stage hands etc.) get paid… or not paid if we can find a way around equity status such that their time can be considered a donation because, we can’t afford to pay them and they so want to be in our show anyway?</p>
<p>Sigh. We would have paid them handsomely if we could have. As it was, every performance was either a money loser or a barely breaking even and the gap was covered by dedicated board members or sponsors but also by the willingness of the artists to work for poverty level wages. I honestly don’t know what the answer is but to this day, amazing performers do whatever they can to be in these productions. What they did for love I guess.</p>
<p>Someone we know was working as supporting lead in a semi-professional theatre. They were paid in a tiny stipend of $350 for all work, which included rehearsals as well as shows. This amount basically covered gas to get to the 3 months of rehearsals and shows.</p>
<p>The artistic director said that was all the theatre could afford. Ok, that is true of many struggling theatres. But this particular theatre was different. It was packed with patrons, over 1000/performance, at $25-$50/ticket. There were 23 performances. Where did all the money go? The owner was a friend of the producer, the board was composed of friends of the owner, and the theatre was run in a very closed non transparent fashion. </p>
<p>The kicker was when they found out the orchestra was paid $100/night/player. (That’s $2300/orchestra player for the run, and they rehearsed two nights compared to 3 months.) When confronted by an upset actor, the artistic director said, “Well, how else could we get professional orchestra players?” Um…</p>
<p>There are many amazing theatres, many. But there are some theatres and venues that simply take advantage of actors. There’s a glut of actors who will work for nothing or very little out of love of the craft and desperation for work. We talk about this in another thread, but this is how equity was born. </p>
<p>I would have no problem with basically unsubsidized forced charity work that Tim Blake Nelson refers to if everyone were in it together. And in many theatres, they are. Please don’t get me wrong. I personally know of several absolutely amazing theatres in which the owners/operators are basically as poor as the actors and everyone works together for the love of the craft. But in other theatres, the actors are expected to donate their highly skilled services - treated basically as disposable props - while the owners, producers etc., make out like bandits. </p>
<p>More:<br>
"Andrew Weems gave an explicit example, recalling that some two decades back he’d been in a production of “Troilus and Cressida” in Washington for which the actor playing Thersites had received about $600 a week. Recently Mr. Weems found himself playing the same role, Off Broadway, in a production directed by the esteemed Sir Peter Hall. Mr. Weems was earning significantly less. Another voice chimed in to denounce the disturbing tendency of regional theater management to mimic the latest trends in the corporate world: While the artistic directors’ salaries have steadily grown, payments to actors have not kept pace.</p>
<p>But will the hearts of future generations of actors prove as intractable? In truth, the answer is probably yes, such is the lure of the profession, which was referred to as a calling and a faith by more than one participant. (Every third actor seemed to have flirted with joining the priesthood.) And the frustrations discussed weren’t necessarily new; embarking on a career in acting has always been a risky enterprise.</p>
<p>But the testimony from the conference suggests that it may well be getting riskier by the minute. And that may be another dispiriting sign of a general shift in values in American culture, where the prerogatives of mega-corporations, their chieftains and their stock prices hold sway, and the increasingly pension-less workers are left to fend for themselves.</p>
<p>Big movie and television stars are the mega-corporations of the acting profession, and they seem to be acquiring an increasing measure of the industry’s rewards, leaving less for the vast numbers of fameless actors. As the status of the star has continued to crest, with celebrity-obsessed television shows and magazines proliferating like bacteria over the past quarter-century, the unfortunate byproduct may be a declining respect for actors who don’t happen to be household names. If performers’ attractiveness and fame are what studios and even theaters want to buy and market, talent and experience naturally become commodities with lesser or no value.</p>
<p>That’s a potentially calamitous situation. To gauge its impact on our culture, imagine a world in which there were no more actors, just stars. We’d have the cast of “Friends” performing Eugene O’Neill, and Paris Hilton as Hedda Gabler.</p>
<p>O.K., so I may be guilty of a little fear-mongering there. Things will probably never get that bad. But chances are we’ll all continue taking journeyman actors and their gifts for granted, and they’ll continue to scramble and scrape for opportunities to be taken for granted." (Isherwood NYT)</p>
<p>Not sure how we are to take this discussion. Theater actors are underpaid, noted. They have to do it for love, yup. Is there an action plan to change this? In our mid-sized market even the most successful actors can not make it without teaching or otherwise subsidizing their income. My D accepts this as the hard reality. It will be the same for 95% of theater actors. Sad yes, but new information, no.</p>
<p>What my colleagues who attended this event and are quoted in the article are making note of (and what Isherwood was publicizing in 2006) is the fact that all actors’ payments are, in fact, going down as the cost of living increases. (There’s another section in the piece in which Isherwood explains that the same downward trend is also notable within TV and film.) By contrast, Artistic Directors’ salaries have grown over the same period. Producers are not making less. Managing Directors are not making less. Ticket prices are certainly not going down. That reality sets in sharp relief the relative value actors are assigned. The industry is dependent on “journeyman actors…scrambling and scraping for opportunities to be taken for granted.” Though the information is not new, the forecast is not improving and these hard truths bear repeating for young hopefuls. </p>
<p>@vocal1046 If you were aware of all of this 20/30 years ago when you started out (assuming you didn’t know) would this have discouraged you, made you change your paths? </p>
<p>I don’t see it as new information either. How often does the Equity minimum go up? What has been the usual increase? The reality is that most productions are not going to make a huge amount of money, regardless of where they are. Just take a look at how long it takes even a Broadway show to recoup. Regional theatres and smaller theatre companies are just not going to be moneymakers for the most part.</p>
<p>I also don’t think it serves any purpose to denigrate sponsors and donors who are largely responsible for keeping many of these theatres alive so that our kids can actually perform in shows. Most producers who are listed are not making a dime from shows they are investing in. </p>
<p>I think we all agree that this message is not new to most people within this group.</p>
<p>@alwaysamom - I don’t see Isherwood or any of my respected colleagues denigrating sponsors and donors. The point of the article is that a job that paid $600 a week in DC in the 80’s was paying “significantly less” in a very high-status Off Bway production 20 years later. In that same period of time, the administrators and others involved in the DC and NYC theaters saw their salaries go up. The question isn’t whether the theater is making money but how the money that it does make gets distributed among the various workers. There’s no suggestion anywhere here that “most productions are going to make a huge amount of money”. The matter that folks are discussing is that however little income theater generates, that gain is increasingly redistributed at the top of the food chain and, in fact, the amounts doled out to the artists have shrunk over time. AEA negotiates something like 35 different regional and national contracts, each on its own schedule and each with its own rates. </p>
<p>@MTMajorCook - That’s a great question. The thing is that what Weems, O’Hare, et al are taking about here is a shift that has occurred since they began working, which was about the same time I did. (Ms Weist has a somewhat longer timeline to analyze.) When each of us made the choice to enter this profession in the 80s, matters were somewhat different. </p>
<p>I really don’t think there’s sufficient predictability in this career to generalize from one actor’s experience to another’s but I will share a smidge. I entered the profession 18 months out of college over the strenuous objections of my family members. I had the great advantage of growing up with nothing (emoticon) and benefited from a full ride through my ivy league college that left me debt-free and overconfident. So, when I moved forward with the plan that I’d articulated since third grade, that is, to work in the theater, you can imagine the dismay of those who feared that I’d be unable to support myself. But I expected little and so the thought that I would get little wasn’t particularly daunting. Nonetheless, the fact that I was obviously going to fail and waste my education was articulated to me with some vehemence and great frequency over that 18 month period. Had I been able to foresee my 1040’s for the next 30 years, I would have been comforted to know that I’d be fine without the Master’s and PhD degrees my siblings were earning. But I couldn’t see those numbers; I believed I’d be OK, at least partially, because I was accustomed to doing without.</p>
<p>The larger question is whether I would have made a different choice in the early 80’s if I’d known that things would go downhill in terms of equitable distribution of profits leading up and into 2014. That’s probably too many hypotheticals for me to honestly address, but I’ll go out on a limb and say no, not really. I was 20-something - unstoppable in a foolish, romantic way. Thing is, my good fortune kept me on the right side of the checkbook and the growing income disparity has not had as much impact on me as some of my friends. A kid entering the profession today is entering a very different marketplace. He is starting from a point when artists’ slice of the pie has shrunk to a sliver. Perhaps this means that his expectations will start out low and diminishing earnings will not surprise him. But if he has been raised to believe he should be fairly compensated for his labor, there may be trouble in Tahiti.</p>
<p>Not sure I answered your question @MTMajorCook but that’s my best stab. </p>
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<p>Vocal, this is the comment to which I took exception. That particular ‘corporate suit’ may, in fact, be the one who has influenced the decision of his company to donate those funds.</p>
<p>I’m a little confused about the anecdote about Troilus and Cressida. That off-Broadway production was in the spring of 2001.</p>
<p>Right. Andy’s saying that his salary in the 2001 production was lower than that of the actor who played the same role in a regional theater production in the early 80’s. The anecdote is used to illustrate that a mid-career actor is paid less now to do the same job. It is not just that actors are underpaid in the theater. The article is noting that the performers’ salaries have trended downward during the same period that others (notably administrators) saw their own income rise. That’s all.</p>
<p>A couple quick thoughts.</p>
<p>
In addition to increasingly-underpaid actors subsidizing Theatre, many parents of young (and even some much older older) actors in the US are often also subsidizing Theatre. Not only are we paying for most of the training, which in many countries (eg the UK) is heavily subsidized for talented actors, but many parents continue to offer financial support post-college. I get that the Arts need support, but now it is largely assumed that the Artists’ families will be the Benefactors. Where are the Medici’s of today (hint: not at my address)?</p>
<p>While we all like to think you can’t outsource live theatre, I absolutely understand why people more often pay $14 for a movie which will be of predictable quality than plunking down $65 to see a regional tour that might be mediocre. I think more live theatres will be wise to follow the National Theatre’s lead and make recorded performances more widely available, while sharing the ensuing profits equitably with performers. Among other considerations, it’s environmentally unsustainable for those of us on the left coast to jump on a plane every time a show opens in NYC or Chicago.</p>
<p>… also, I’d love to read the article. Am I missing finding the link?</p>
<p>If you just Google the title and New York Times, you will find it </p>