An Open Letter to Both Sides

Dear New York theater friends who think this L.A. 99-seat thing sounds like B.S. and a clear-cut case of exploitation that Equity has every good reason to shut down: I might not go so far as to say "if YOU lived in L.A. you'd work under the plan and/or understand why it's not all bad," but suffice it to say that the folks I got to know there over 15-plus years, whose work helped shape my taste and whose community I felt a part of, are all opposed to Equity's proposed changes (I can think of maybe two exceptions). Without relitigating the substance of the argument, I'll just say: I'm the same person I was then, and those menschy L.A. theater folks I know and respect are my colleagues and friends as much as you are. It's not hard, in other words, to imagine you in their position (and vice versa). They're neither a bunch of celebrities doing this as a hobby nor a bunch of quasi-amateurs; with the usual allowance for percentages of jerks and mediocrities (some of whom have had the largest presence in these debates, I'll concede), they're first-class theater artists and part of the national theater scene.

Which leads me to...Dear LA theater friends: You are part of the national theater scene. Those of us who are following the debate in L.A. aren't just rubbernecking at a good brawl; some of us actually care about what that scene and its business model might mean for the rest of the country. If you insist on calling yourself volunteers, and that you're doing it solely for the art and not the money, but then you also want to build and stand by legitimate nonprofit institutions that run seasons, sell tickets, take donations, even pay a fair number of folks to keep them going and raise money to keep them going, then you have understand how this looks to a national theater (and nonprofit arts) field that typically feels as underfunded and undervalued as you do but still has found ways (with exceptions) to pay artists and/or prioritize artist compensation. The argument over artist compensation vs. other financial priorities fieldwide is far from settled, but it seems clear to me that the right side of the argument is that artists deserve to be paid, and it's entirely fair to hold nonprofit institutions to account on this score.

The other side of that argument, of course, isn't necessarily that artists don't deserve to be paid--it's that they deserve a chance to seek other rewards from practicing their art apart than strictly monetary ones, and no one, least of their union, should prevent them from doing so. I hear that argument loud and clear, but I don't buy its logical conclusion--that monetary and other rewards are mutually exclusive.

I may speak only for myself here, but while I don't want to see L.A.'s great small theaters wither and choke under a punitive, restrictive new regime, I would love to see the business/producing acumen of L.A. theaters rise to the level of the great work I've seen on its stages. I can vouch personally that L.A. has great theater to offer, but it's the work on the stage that L.A. theater folks should be proud of, not the non-remunerative business model they work under. I think there's a place for non-paying laboratory theater, up to a certain budget level (hello, NY Showcase code), but it's a model I hope smart people are seriously looking for ways to grow out of rather than perpetuate.

Sweating Equity

The last thing I wrote about the controversy over L.A.’s Equity 99-Seat Plan, for American Theatre magazine, was more personal than the typical news report; I felt I couldn’t help but inject my own experience into a debate I’ve watched for most of my professional life. But now, after several more Facebook back-and-forths, private chats, and a thoughtful podcast with my friend Isaac Butler (which, based on the retweets and shares it’s gotten, is being perceived as more pro-Equity’s position than not), I feel the need to get even more personal about the possible end of the plan as we’ve known it--as essentially a way for union actors to lend their talent for peanuts to small theater productions in L.A.

In the podcast, Isaac spoke sympathetically about how painful it must be for Equity actors who’ve built decades of work, and forged much of their artistic identities, via this largely non-remunerative-workaround scene to have their own union now come along and say, “Oh, that work you’ve been doing all these years? Sorry--not real work, illegitimate amateur vanity bullshit, shouldn’t have happened, won’t happen again.” If I'm honest, though I myself only ever appeared in three 99-seat productions in my two decades in L.A. (as a musician and/or music director), I can't help taking this diss personally, as well. I have a lot more skin in the game than may seem clear at first glance (even to me).

Yes, I’ve written about how formative the small theaters of L.A. were to my theatergoing taste and sensibility, but I don’t think I’ve put it strongly enough. Los Angeles theater basically created me as an arts/theater journalist, and the vast majority of that theater was produced under the 99-seat plan. And so much of the best of it would either not have happened at all or would have looked a lot, lot different minus the union actors allowed to work in it by the 99-seat plan. In my AT piece I compared the feeling of watching Equity actors and small theaters ready to split over this issue to a divorce, but it’s starting to feel like something closer to deep-seated existential dread--like, did I dream all that great theater? Was it all a mistake? Was I the unwitting stooge of a theatrical sweatshop regime I should have fought to end? Has my professional theatergoing life been based on a fraud?

To give you some idea what I’m talking about: I saw my first Beckett in small L.A. theater (and my second). My first Pinter (and second). Most of Sondheim. Chuck Mee. Caryl Churchill, Sheila Callaghan, Maria Irene Fornes. Dael Orlandersmith, Erik Ehn, Thornton Wilder, Michael John LaChiusa, David Edgar, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Chekhov. Miller, Balzac, Coward, Schiller, Pirandello, Ionesco. Mary Zimmerman. G.B. Shaw, Strindberg. OyamO. Paula Vogel. Mike Leigh. Athol Fugard, who did the world premiere of Exits and Entrances at the Fountain. Lorca. Charles Ludlam. Conor McPherson. A bunch of Shakespeare, Brecht, some of the Greeks. Freaking City of Angels and Candide! Cabaret. And Shopping and Fucking and Orson’s Shadow. I could go on...

I wasn’t checking the asterisks in the program, but trust me--the best of these productions weren’t acted by non-union kids straight out of school; just making a list off the top of my head of actors you may have heard of who worked in 99-seat theater in my time, some of them before they made their name in film and TV, others after, I came up with Alfred Molina, Ian McShane, Anna Gunn, Philip Baker Hall, Orson Bean, Phil LaMarr, Jack Black, David Dukes, Robert Foxworth, Harry Groener, Zachary Quinto, Jessica Hecht, Brian Cox, Nick Offerman, Patricia Heaton, John C. Reilly, Holly Hunter, Greg Itzin, Gregory Jbara, Megan Mullally, Byron Jennings, Carol Kane, Richard Kind, Amy Landecker, Sharon Lawrence, Tim Robbins, Kyra Sedgwick, Jeffrey Tambor. Justin Tanner’s extraordinary repertory of kitchen-sink comedies, which remains among the high points of my theatergoing lifetime, could conceivably have happened in a non-Equity context, but they probably wouldn’t have been able to cast Mark Ruffalo, Laurie Metcalf, French Stewart or Pamela Segall.

These and countless other great, great actors, union and non-, essentially gave their work away for a pittance, and I count myself among the prime beneficiaries. What I gained was a theater education, without which I wouldn’t know what I'm talking about, or care enough to. In a sense, I owe them my career.

So what’s eating at me now is: How do I best pay that gift back? By throwing my support behind those who want that scene to continue, more or less unchanged? Or by saying to the artists who’ve made L.A.’s small theater scene one of most vibrant in the world, and certainly in my experience: Thank you, but you shouldn’t have changed my life for so little money? And all who come after you shouldn't have the chance to do the same under the same or similar terms?

"The terms" are, of course, the rub; they're the axis on which the whole debate turns. And it’s not as if this is the first time I’ve noted the dysfunction and bad incentives built into this shadow economy. Back Stage West was an actor’s trade, after all, so we didn’t just review theater and give it awards; we also regularly looked under the hood of how it was getting made. I had many conversations over the years with Michael Van Duzer, Equity's patient, tireless 99-seat liaison, who had the thankless job of policing a non-contract that his union only grudgingly recognized. (A lot more about the history here and here; Van Duzer was reportedly fired last year as part of Equity's new push to crack down on the plan.)

And I remember standing on the construction site of Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena with the architect, John Sergio Fisher, and thinking: They’re spending $5 million to build a beautiful new performing arts center with a 99-seat theater in it, and they can’t find more money for actors? (I wondered as much in print at the time.) That theater, of course, has grown into a new-play incubator of national significance, and its largish budget (north of $1 million) may make it better positioned than many in L.A. to weather Equity’s proposed changes, but it’s hard for me to see how it would have risen to that position as quickly without the 99-seat plan.

I can reconcile myself intellectually to the union argument, to the laws of supply and demand, the marketplace, etc. It’s true that L.A.’s small theaters haven’t done a great job of developing a market for their work, and that has a lot to do with the self-defeating incentive structure of the 99-seat plan; you don’t need to create much of an audience to keep scraping by, nor do you need to shore up enough to build serious infrastructure; it's much to easy to just pour the money back into another show (which, to address a recent objection by Isaac, is where those seemingly midsized theaters with six-digit-and-more incomes are spending most of that money; you can argue that it’s a bug, not a feature, that the plan incentivizes the creation of so much work without paying actors wages, but those doing the creating--many of them actors themselves--see it differently.)

Bottom line, if you’re doing art for art’s sake, by definition you are outside the market, so it’s almost inevitable that your encounters with market forces--in this case, union workers, but in a larger sense any kind of real-world economic pressure--will create headaches somewhere down the line, particularly if you start doing that art-for-its-own-sake so regularly that you begin to quasi-institutionalize it, form boards, gather donations--professionalize it, pay-wise, in every department but the actors' compensation. (A professionalization that, by the way, has well-served L.A.'s theater patrons, who can mostly expect pleasant, air-conditioned theaters with decent seats and amenities--niceties that may not be as highly prioritized under Equity's proposal to allow "self-produced" non-contract projects as long as they aren't professionalized in any other way.)

So it's become hard for me to listen to folks who pretend that there's no conflict at all between having a union card and working for free in that union's jurisdiction, some of whom even go so far as to posit that artists shouldn't expect to be paid anyway if it's art, and certainly not in the theater, where there's "no money." There self-evidently is money there, just not enough to sustain all the artists who want to work in it. And the huge, pent-up desire of actors to do more fulfilling stage work than is on offer--a desire that still burns in them after they've gotten their union card, often even moreso--is what led to the 99-seat plan in the first place, and to the great, apparently fleeting 30-year interregnum of theater for which I was lucky enough to have a front-row seat (or good seats, at least).

That desire to get onstage will be much, much harder to slake in L.A. if Equity's proposals go through; maybe the new restrictions, though they will feel punitive to many, will be good for some union actors; maybe a few more will be able to sustain themselves doing exclusively or mostly theater work in L.A. It won't be good, though, for folks like me, or for the younger versions of myself who are coming up in the theater journalism racket, and will have to satisfy their curiosity about theater by reading scripts and reviews of far-off productions of the above playwrights.

This post is really more a eulogy than an argument; I concede much of the union's logic on principle, even if I find their tactics misguided and hamhanded. I just feel the need to express that I still feel like hell about this potential impending loss; it’s literally keeping me up at night. And if I, who built a career mostly at secondhand to L.A.’s vibrant small-theater scene and now live and work in New York City, am feeling this torn up about the possibility of the coming changes, what must it be like to be a theater artist faced with this unappetizing Hobson’s choice?