What It Takes

I was planning on writing a post, later perhaps expanded into an article, called What it Takes about making a living in the theatre. Playgoer's recent posts on TV effectively subsidizing theatre by hiring playwrights has brought this issue to the fore. (You can read his latest on the subject here). Playgoer's writing on this is really really great. And someone should expand it to talking about actors, and how television both subsidizes and coopts the theatre industry because, let's face it, NY Theatre would be completely different if there weren't three different Law & Orders taping here and employing actors constantly.

But seeing as I don't really have it in me to write that one right now (but really, someone should... even if it is just in the comments here... it's worth looking at)... I want to write a little bit about What It Takes from the directors point of view.

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I have a friend, let's call him B. B and I recently got coffee to catch up with one another, and I asked him how he was doing. He mentioned that for the first time in his life, he made a living this year solely from directing plays. B. is in his early thirties, a graduate of a prestigious grad school and well connected. It has taken almost ten years since graduating from graduate school to reach this point, and there is no guarantee that he won't be exactly back where he was next year. Even so, B. is lucky. It takes a lot of people a lot longer than that to reach the point he has, if they reach it at all.

B. made his living largely in the regional market. He lives in New York City. What this means is that he has spent quite a bit (if not most) of the last year not living at his home.

I have another friend who we'll call C. C is a graduate of the most prestigious directing school in the United States, and is (shall we say) to the manner born. C immediately began making a living directing plays. He quoted me his salary at one point a little over a year ago-- $5,000 a show.

That means in order to make a basic living, he has to direct roughly seven shows a year. Freelancer taxes being what they are, he should probably direct eight. Including previews, C probably spends on average six weeks rehearsing a play (some more, some less). That means that he spends about forty eight of the fifty two weeks out of the year rehearsing shows. That leaves four weeks for, amongst other things, preproduction work on those eight shows.

All of this in order to make $35,000-$40,000 a year. Pre-tax. And he is an extremely lucky, very well-connected, very successful director.

Directors have to make a living according to a different set of rules than writers. They can't have multiple productions of the same play at the same time. They (in general) do not easily cross over to film and television until they've reached a point of success in theater where that become icing on the cake (think Sam Mendes).

NYC Directors are also faced with a dilemma common to those in the performing arts. Making money frequently means leaving your life for at least a month at a time.

So we end up in day jobs, which makes leaving our lives even harder.

So how do we do it?

Well, I can answer how I do it. Through a mixture of paid theater jobs, temping and inheritance.

Right now I am directing a show and temping. On a day when I have both (like tomorrow), my day will begin at 7:30AM, when I'll wake up, go through my daily rituals, and head off to Conde Nast. Thankfully, this job is mindless, which means that my brain can be thinking about the show. Luckily, I have a good enough memory that by the time lunch rolls around, I'll be able to jot down what i've been thinking for rehearsal tomorrow night.

Of course, then I'm faced with a dilemma. Doing so means taking more time for lunch. I'm paid by the quarter hour. So it means that I lose $7-10 in order to do so. But no matter, this is important.

Thoughts jotted, rehearsal prepped for (very quickly) I will go back to mindless work for the next few hours until 5PM rolls around (thankfully, this is a 9-5, not a 10-6). Then I'll go downtown, get some dinner and think more about where the play is going and what we need to do in rehearsal over the next couple of days. Then it's time for cup of coffee #3 to get me ready for rehearsal (#1 is just after I arrive at work, #2 is just after lunch).

Then I get three hours to rehearse. 7-10PM. Equity showcase rules say that you can't rehearse a play for more than four weeks. I give two days off a week because everyone has day jobs and overloading and exhausting people isn't good. So that's (in general) 4 days at three hours a day plus one day at 4-5 hour a day on the weekend afternoon, for a total of somewhere around 70 hours of rehearsal. If we need it, I'll add extra time, but still, it never gets over 100. Not counting extra time for tech, a larger scale Off-Bway show would rehearse roughly 30 hours a week (6 days * 5 hours a day) for four weeks, or 120 hours. Just so you know.

George and my post-rehearsal meeting tends to happen right after that on the subway ride home. It didn't last night because we went late and I was in a hurry to get back.

Why was I in such a hurry to get back? Because on top of all of this is what most people delicately refer to as a "personal life".... my time with Anne, and my pets, and my house.

I'm not saying any of the above to whine. This is just what it is. This is What It Takes for work to get done in this city. It's exhausting, but it is also thrilling.

I just think it's helpful for people to know the concrete realities that go into creating a work of art.

Comments

[MattJ]

Great post Isaac. Great great post.

I guess the other important thing we take out of this post is that there is no real track either. Not everyone is doing what you are doing. But this is the way you are trying to make it work, balancing realities with passions. Of course these are all things I'm trying to figure out for myself right now as well.

There are people doing it while working full time jobs, people with other very flexible part time jobs, others that work in theatre administration during the day, etc. A good spin-off questions is: Where DOES theatre grad school fit into a life in the theatre??

[philucifer]

Yup, that's pretty much my week exactly, when I'm in a show. It's amazing that when I'm acting instead of directing, it sometimes feels like a vacation (since I don't have to find time to meet with designers, etc.) Although, as a producer with Nosedive, that's quite often still the case. Add in trying to find the time to design the sound, and it's like scheduled boot camp several times a year.

Tangentially, and to give just a brief bit of perspective: my mom was working for Dreamworks at the time that Sam Mendes was filming "American Beauty". I knew who he was, because of his work at the Donmar Warehouse, etc. so she'd keep me updated on how it was going. Apparently there were frequent screaming matches between he and the producers -- at least one in particular -- that quite often included the phrase, "He's just a theatre director! He has no fucking clue about how movies are made!!"

So how did he get the film finished? By avoiding all phone calls from this particular producer while on set after the first week or so of production.

I remember watching the Oscars to see if he'd wind up including the producer's name in his thank you speech (he did.)

So even at that level, it was only enough to get him through the door. If the film hadn't won the awards it did, I doubt he would have ever had the chance to make another.

[Malachy Walsh]

Indeed, a great post.

And, though I'm a writer, within it (and Playgoers article) are some of the reasons I've recently moved west. (There are other, more personal reasons.) It's partly to point of my blog.

Another avenue writers have also gone down (myself for instance) to make $$ is advertising. (Anonymous on Playgoer would really be sickened by such a thing, I'm sure.)

As David Gluck, the former managing director of the Magic once said to me, "I'm told the most creative writers in America are working in that industry."

Don't know if that's quite true, but it's been a steady gig for many smart writers and employs thousands (maybe 10s of thousands) of actors every year.

Finally, to grad question, I did grad school late in life and have a big debt from it. I don't regret this. It gave me the opportunity to explore ways of writing that I never would have otherwise - and my writing changed for the better.

The debt has its own problems, but that, I might add, is not different from the pressure most feel from any kind of degree these days. I've used it as fodder for my art in any case, so who knows, I might even be able to pay for the debt by commenting on the debt - it that makes any sense.

[Tom Loughlin]

"What it Takes," I think, really depends a lot on what you want. And I think very few people, if they ask the question "what do I want," answer it honestly. Whenever I read about such issues as "what it takes" or the LA Times piece Garret has brought to the forefront, it seems to me that the 800-lb gorilla in the room is the question of recognition and fame. I would venture to say that many people of course want to make good art, but what goes unsaid is that they also want to have that art recognized by the outside world, either in money or awards - preferably both. They sort of go hand-in-hand anyway.

There is, in my opinion, only one reason why people insist on going to NYC to try to "make it" when there are so many other possibilities in this country, and that's for the recognition. It's so much cheaper and so much easier to produce plays in so many other cities than New York, but seldom is this possibility seriously considered. Heck, in Buffalo we have a theatre which has, for over twenty years now, done almost nothing else but produce new plays. But can you convince playwrights to come and live and work in Buffalo? Probably not, as I am quite sure the image of a vacuous, empty city is the first thing that pops into mind. There are spaces aplenty, rent is cheap, day jobs can be had, there is acting talent; but there is no lure of fame. Just the work. Makes me wonder sometimes if people really, actually do want to simply get their work produced, or produced in a particular place, and that's what they want to "make work." Is it for the glory, or is it for the work? -poorplayer