How Theater Became America

This article about (potentially excessive) executive pay at top NYC theaters reminds me of something... what is it?  Oh, that's right, the blog posts that appeared all over the place roughly six or nine months ago about this issue!  I think it was Ken Davenport that tipped the theatrosphere off to the existence of Charity Navigator (which the article uses for all of its information) and then Garrett and I did a couple of posts about executive compensation at large theaters. 

 (Full disclosure... looking through my archives... at least I think I did, I know I talked about it with many of my peers and wrote a couple of posts about it, I might've been too chickenshit to actually hit "save" on them because we are talking about some heavy hitters in NYC theater here, but either way at least Ken and Garrett deserve credit).

Anyway... This is not to belabor the point, but I'd just offer that this story was talked about in the theatrosphere months ago, and it would be nice for at least Ken and Garrett to get a little credit for being ahead of the curve.

I think personally that this is a complicated issue. It's complicated even more by the fact that we don't know more salary info about these theaters.  It's important to find out if Todd Haimes' rising tide is lifting others' boats.  Will starting salaries at Roundabout increase? (i doubt it, but maybe they are who knows?) will they start paying their writers, directors, actors or designers more?  Will they start paying their interns decent wages?

I understand Andre Bishop's point that most well compensated artistic directors started on the bottom and worked their way up, taking a lot of shitty gratis or low paying jobs.  It's important to have good salaries to keep talent in the business.  It's important to have a brass ring to chase to incentivise staying in theater. I'm not naive, we have a talent retention problem on both an artistic and a managerial level, and the income and lifestyle that can be expected is part of that.

At the same time, you'd expect-- or at least I'd expect-- people who have come up through the hardscrabble ranks to have a certain desire to make it a bit easier for people just starting out, or to incentivize people entering the business in the first place.  Otherwise, essentially the point is "look, I put up with a lot of exploitation to get where I am, and now I deserve the fruits of that even if t means I participate in the exploitation of the next generation of labor".

I have a friend who works for a theater. This story is going to sound familiar because it's ubiquitous.  He had to fight for a standard of living wage increase last year because the theater has run deficits for years.  Okay, understandable, we have hard times, you care about your company, you make sacrifices. But... and I'm sure you've already guessed what the kicker is here... they're building a multimillion dollar new space.  Even though they're arguing they can't afford to pay their staff a decent wage.  And it's not like they're saying "hey, included in this capital campaign is a wage increase for you guys, so just hold on, its coming".  They're saying "we can't give you this because times are tight".

Now, this friend doesn't come from money, and he doesn't have a spouse with a good job to support him.  Wouldn't you understand if that friend said "fuck this, I'm going to do theater as a hobby that i love and just go fucking make money somewhere?"  And if he did, we'd lose a very talented person who works long hours for shit pay because he loves being in a literary department and helping writers.

This is yet another way that theater has become america. We expect those at the bottom to take huge sacrifices and remain in it for "the love of what you do" or because "it's a good cause" while people at the top make significantly more money. And in theater, that significantly more still pales in comparison to what they'd make managing companies of the same size outside of the art form. 

Comments

[malachy walsh]

Another way all this reflects "America" is how building a bigger stage/theatre dovetails with American notions of bigger being better and that growth can/should only be expressed through literal growth.

As has been pointed out by many over the last year, this has worked its way into the everyday thinking of many theatre leaders. Example: I took some classes with Ben Cameron when he was heading up TCG some years ago. We were discussing theatres and the issue of growth when someone wondered aloud if a new theatre was really a necessary expense. They rambled on and asked if that "growth" money should be put into other things: Like more productions, work with larger casts or smarter investments in audience development.

Cameron looked blankly at the questioner and then politely re-asserted the POV that healthy theatres built bigger theatres.