"The Reformation" – Article 3: "Shutting the Door On a Hard-Knock Life"

by Jesse Green 

[Jesse Green’s third essay of the “Reformation” series was published in the print edition of New York Times on 7 August 2022 in the “Arts & Leisure” section.  It was updated on 24 August 2022, including a correction to an earlier version of this article concerning the name of the organization Intimacy Directors & Coordinators.

[I’ve posted an introduction to “The Reformation” by Callie Holtermann on 20 September and Articles 1 and 2 of the series on 23 and 26 September.  I invite ROTters to read the three foregoing articles and to return to the blog for the final installment.]

The requirements of the theater, and the constant physical and emotional risks facing performers, have many demanding their basic needs as humans.

Getting to play Cinderella in a Broadway revival of “Into the Woods” sounds like a young musical theater performer’s dream, until you break your neck doing the pratfalls built into the role.

That’s what Laura Benanti says happened to her in 2002. “I was a 22-year-old girl who didn’t know how to say ‘this doesn’t feel safe to me,’” she wrote on her Instagram page nearly two decades later, after suffering “intense pain every single day for seven years,” two surgeries and much heartbreak.

[Into the Woods played at the Broadhurst Theatre 30 April-29 December 2002.  Benanti left the show in November.]

At the time, people bad-mouthed her for missing performances.

Disastrous tumbles and physical danger are so much a part of theater history that they’ve become treasured backstage lore instead of causes for concern. I am ashamed to admit to laughing when I read about the dancer who fell into the “Anyone Can Whistle” orchestra pit in 1964, landing on a saxophone player, who promptly died. In 1991 we all gossiped merrily when the tempestuous Nicol Williamson ignored his fight choreography in “I Hate Hamlet” and struck his co-star Evan Handler with a sword. (Handler quit; Williamson got applause.) For much of the early 2010s, the mayhem of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” was an endless source of schadenfreude.

[Anyone Can Whistle ran at the Majestic Theatre from 4-11 April 1964; the accident occurred during the Philadelphia try-outs at the Forrest Theatre, 2-21 March 1964. I Hate Hamlet ran 8 April-22 June 1991 at the Walter Kerr Theatre; the incident reported occurred on 2 May 1991.

[Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark officially played at the Foxwoods (now the Lyric) Theatre, 14 June 2011-4 January 2014, but producer Michael Cohl had repeatedly delayed the opening night. I posted “Reviewing the Situation: Spider-Man & the Press” on Rick On Theater on 20 March 2011, on the dispute between the press and the producers of the musical over the long preview run.]

But concussions, broken ribs, a fractured skull, a crushed leg and an amputated foot — those are just the “Spider-Man” injuries — aren’t actually funny. And they are only the most visible part of the story of harm endured by theater workers onstage and off. In return for the privilege of scraping by in a field they love, they are commonly expected to endanger themselves physically and emotionally.

They dance till they drop. They work punishing hours. They strip themselves, often literally, and enact trauma over and over. If they are parents and nevertheless insist on sleeping more than five hours a night, they may see their children — as Amber Gray, a star in the original cast of “Hadestown,” told me — barely more than 50 minutes a day.

[Hadestown, still running on Broadway, premièred Off-Broadway at the New York Theatre Workshop in the East Village, where Gray was part of the cast, and opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre on 17 April 2019; Gray was with the show until 19 February 2022.

[I have a post on ROT that reports on parenting in the theater: “Life upon the Wicked Stage – With a Family,” 21 December 2017.]

The pandemic put a temporary end to all that, reuniting families and helping injuries heal. The pause also gave theater workers, perhaps for the first time ever, plenty of time to consider the lives their profession requires them to lead. It’s no surprise that, as theaters reopened, calls for change therefore emerged with greater urgency. This summer I’ve been grappling with those demands, and in earlier parts of this series I’ve looked at ridding the art form of the “great man” inheritance that built cruelty into its DNA and the movement for fair pay.

But getting back to business has also reminded show people of the specific weirdness of their work. In sync with the resurgence of labor activism nationwide, actors, dancers, stage managers, technicians and others have been questioning the nuts and bolts of their contracts — both the documents that detail their jobs and the wider assumptions about what they owe an audience. Can the theater, they ask, find a way to uphold them more holistically as humans, even as they continue to gut themselves every night?

Some people will not even agree that it should. The idea that theater is a calling, not a job, and that the two categories are mutually exclusive, is so ingrained in the industry’s ethos — not to mention its business model — that demands for shorter working days, more understudies, intimacy coordinators, mental health stipends, child care reimbursements and other accommodations are often met with doubt or derision. Caring for actors, some say, is coddling. Suffering is a badge of honor, and the theater is properly a purple-heart club.

That indoctrination goes deep. Stanislavski saw his students as votaries in an ascetic cult. The men who created the dominant forms of American theater assembled their power by extorting it from others. Musicals have often romanticized the idea that a good artist is a starving one. And Broadway dancers, many trained in a system even more repressive than the theater’s, have traditionally been expected to perform like robots, retire early and shut up in between.

Perhaps the most pervasive and pernicious maxim is the one that says the show must go on — no matter what. Work rules that would seem ludicrous in any other business are, in the theater, built into the contracts. Performers represented by Actors’ Equity Association, the national labor union for [theater] actors and stage managers, are typically engaged for eight-show weeks, but productions can increase that number under certain circumstances. During holiday seasons, many offer 10-show schedules, and nonunion gigs can exceed even that.

Another rule, governing the number of hours a company can work during technical rehearsals, is so reviled it has been the subject of a 2015 backstage comedy. In Anne Washburn’s “10 out of 12” — named for the clause in Equity contracts that permits 12-hour days if there are two hours off — the under-slept and daylight-deprived company of an absurd plantation melodrama undergoes a kind of mass psychosis while the tech teams adjust lights and scenery.

[10 Out of 12 ran Off-Broadway at SoHo Repertory Theater in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood, 10 June-18 July 2015.]

It’s not fiction. Kate Shindle, the president of Equity, has lived it herself. As a working actor she spent part of 2018 at a regional theater having “an awesome creative experience,” she told me in an email. (She declined to name the theater.) “But the schedule was no joke. On the longest days, I left my apartment at 9 a.m. and didn’t return home until after 1 a.m. And to be clear, the employer wasn’t bending or breaking work rules. This is the intensity that the American theater has been relying on for generations. The workers have helped sustain a model that simply needs to be rewritten.”

At its annual convention last year, Equity delegates endorsed the elimination of 10 out of 12s — along with five-show weekend-performance schedules and six-day workweeks. But while these were just recommendations for future contract negotiations, some theaters have already begun to experiment with the ideas.

For Donya K. Washington, the festival producer at Oregon Shakespeare Festival [in Ashland], the experiment has its roots in 2016. It was then, while working at a different theater, that a production department head told her how the 12-hour tech calls for actors were nothing compared to what he experienced. To manage his crew, implement changes and debrief later, he arrived at the theater well before the cast and stayed well after. As a result, he was working 16-hour days for days at a time.

“That’s not sustainable,” Washington said in a recent Zoom conversation. “I didn’t know what to do about it, but it stuck in my head.”

After arriving in Oregon in 2019, where she was drafted onto the team creating the intensely complicated schedule that allows a repertory company to function, she started looking for ways to eliminate the 10 out of 12s. It was then that a worker “began proselytizing” for another quality-of-life improvement: the five-day workweek. “We had just finished building the calendar for the 2021 season, and my brain broke,” Washington said.

But the pandemic — which closed the festival’s theaters for 14 months — gave her time to think. Over the course of 50 calendar drafts, she played with the parameters. What if the company produced five shows instead of the usual 11? What if they mounted one show at a time instead of several in rep? In one of those passes, since the exercise “wasn’t real anyway,” she decided to see if “you could do a five-day, 40-hour week and still get a production up. And lo and behold you could.”

On a spreadsheet, anyway. In reality, when the festival fully reopened this April, the five-day week was not quite attainable. (They got as low as five-and-a-half.) But Washington feels it will be possible in the future, by adding about two additional weeks of rehearsals per show to make up for the lost time. The cost, she said, “would not be ginormous.” Already 10 out of 12s have been eliminated without trouble, reduced to 8 out of 10s — a step in the right direction. “And even if just from a business perspective it makes sense,” Washington added, because happier, healthier, better-rested companies produce a better product.

“Sometimes we have a mind-set of doing something for the sake of doing it, because that’s how it’s always been done,” she said. “But step by step we have to retrain ourselves. And not just actors. Even I have to remind myself I’m not supposed to work seven days a week!”

When I pointed out that we were having this conversation on a Sunday afternoon, Washington smiled and shrugged.

The theater is unlikely to become a model workplace anytime soon. It’s always going to be a very tough life choice for most people. But who gets to make that choice is one of the things at stake in the calls for bettering a work-life balance that more often presents itself as a work-nonwork nightmare. Those who can’t afford to be penniless must generally opt out of theatrical careers, and if they do get a job they can’t afford to complain.

Among that group, traditionally, have been parents of young children. Even if you have a stay-at-home partner or the means to hire full-time care, the mismatched hours of a baby’s schedule and an actor’s can be unbearable. Gray, the “Hadestown” star, was horrified to find that her older son, now 6, at some point started to cry whenever she sang, having learned to associate the sound with her going away. “It’s brutal,” she said, “when your child hates what you do. I felt like a deadbeat mom.”

Not that working while pregnant was less worrisome. “We sign contracts that say we must always be able to fit the costume,” she told me, adding that she hid her second pregnancy “because there are so many stigmas.”

But general acclaim for her performance in “Hadestown” — and a 2019 Tony Award nomination to cap it — emboldened her when her contract was up for renewal. “I asked for an alternate for the Sunday matinee and Tuesday night, so that I could be home at least one day when my kids are too.” Previously, like most actors, her only day off was a Monday.

When the producers, to her surprise, said yes, Gray found that the block of three days off, Sunday through Tuesday, made a huge difference. Finally getting enough sleep, she could “bang out” her two-show Wednesday “like nothing.” Her partner felt supported, she could play with her children, she could see other people’s work and attend the galas where connections are made. And even though the pandemic soon shut down that arrangement, it remains a model. Elizabeth Stanley, the star of “Jagged Little Pill,” made a similar deal when she returned to that show from maternity leave, splitting the role of Mary Jane with her friend Heidi Blickenstaff.

[Jagged Little Pill played 5 December 2019-17 December 2021 at the Broadhurst Theatre.]

These are, so far, one-off solutions, available to women considered important to the commercial success of a show. To test whether the idea of supporting parents could work in the nonprofit sector, the Playwrights Realm, an Off Broadway company devoted to early-career playwrights, created a pilot program called the Radical Parent-Inclusion Project. Roberta Pereira, the Realm’s executive director, explained that during the 2019-20 season, which included a production of Anna Moench’s “Mothers,” the company basically tried every possible accommodation to make parents welcome not only onstage and backstage but also in the audience.

Among those accommodations was a caretaker reimbursement of up to $750, available to anyone working on the theater’s programming that season. (The credit was good for any kind of caretaking, including eldercare.) Rehearsals were cut back to 30 hours over the course of five days from 36 hours in six, necessitating an extra week to make up the difference. Broadway Babysitters, an arts-focused child care company, was hired to mind children during open auditions and callbacks, and a 4 p.m. matinee was added to the schedule. “For children who are younger and take naps,” Pereira said, “that was a much better time than 2 p.m.”

[Mothers was staged at Manhattan’s The Duke on 42nd Street, 25 September-12 October 2019.]

The free child care was not just for performers, by the way; audience members brought a total of 22 children, half of them less than a year old, to the matinee — which perhaps as a result sold out.

“Not that every theater should try this at the level we did,” Pereira said, “but you could see which things work for you. Some cost nothing, some cost a lot.” In all, the season’s caretaking enhancements added about $38,000 to the company’s $1.3 million budget, most of it covered by increased grants from its usual funders. That’s in line with what PAAL, the Parent Artist Advocacy League for Performing Arts and Media, has found at other theaters experimenting with child care programs. For Elevator Repair Service, a New York-based company, the cost of those programs amounted to less than 2 percent of the budget, PAAL reported.

As a result, Pereira said, actors who effectively used to pay to be in a show — or just to audition for it — may no longer have to make the choice between plays and parenting.

Achieving a better work-life balance is something you might expect to read about in emails from the human relations departments of companies promoting Yoga Thursdays. And though by no means common in American business, child care stipends are at least a familiar concept. But some of the other changes happening in the theater are intensely specific to the needs of the stage.

One is the growing presence of intimacy directors, who help shape moments of physical contact in ways that feel safe to the people performing them. Intimacy Directors & Coordinators, one of several organizations created to further the field, defines its aim as the creation of “a culture of consent” in storytelling  [See “Theatrical Intimacy Designer,” 26 May 2019, and “More On Theatrical Intimacy,” 29 August 2019.]. Though that culture was traditionally the responsibility of a show’s director, the history of abuse in rehearsal and production has led many actors to advocate for the hiring of dedicated professionals on every show where the subject may come up — which is to say, virtually all of them.

“To not have someone in that position is asking for trouble,” Audra McDonald told me in a recent phone interview. She first worked with an intimacy director in 2019, when Claire Warden helped stage the nude scenes and other physical interactions between her and her co-star, Michael Shannon, in “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.” Having been in previous situations where she felt she “didn’t have the right to speak up about what was happening,” McDonald found Warden’s presence “revelatory.”

[Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune ran at the Broadhurst Theatre, 30 May-28 July 2019.]

“Knowing what the boundaries and parameters were for what Michael and I had to go through on that stage, we could push up against them as hard as we possibly could while knowing what lines not to cross,” she said. “It’s about knowing where the bottom of the pool is, so you feel safer about diving all the way down and then swimming as fearlessly and fiercely as you want.”

“Pass Over,” Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s harrowing play about the precarious lives of two young Black men, also had an intimacy coordinator, Ann James. But its producers offered the cast another protection against the potential trauma of the story: a mental health allowance.

[Pass Over was staged 22 August-10 October 2021 at the August Wilson Theatre.]

The allowance permitted actors to seek reimbursements of up to $250 a week for expenses deemed beneficial to their “health and wellness as it relates to performing this show eight times a week,” the policy stated. Matt Ross, the lead producer, added that the definition of “health and wellness” was deliberately broad; it could mean, for instance, a therapist or a voice lesson or a massage.

Cody Renard Richard, the production stage manager, said it was only fitting to offer that support. “From their first class, actors have been asked to bring their traumas into a certain space, been nagged to call up personal stuff so they can cry in a scene. To ask them to open their wounds like that and not give them the help to deal with the result is incredibly unfair.”

The additional cost of the mental health stipend, along with the production’s intimacy coordinator and the equity, diversity and inclusion consultant, Nicole Johnson, was “minuscule,” Ross said. “Probably less than 1 percent of the overall weekly costs.”

But low cost is not the main selling point for advocates of such changes; undoing the harm built into the system is. And one of the reasons there is so much resistance to what seem like obviously worthy goals is that the harm has never been evenly distributed. When I spoke to Wayne Cilento, who originated the song “I Can Do That” in the 1975 musical “A Chorus Line,” he seemed proud of his ability to work on that show despite what he described as constant back and knee injuries. Later, in Bob Fosse’s “Dancin’,” which earned Cilento a Tony Award nomination in 1978, he missed only two performances in one-and-a-half years “while other people who didn’t have my urgency were dropping all around,” he said. “Stepping out was not my way.”

[Broadway’s début production of A Chorus Line played at the Shubert Theatre, 25 July 1975-28 April 1990; it originated at the New York Shakespeare Festival, 21 May-13 July 1975. Dancin’ opened at the Broadhurst Theatre on 27 March 1978 and ran there through 29 November 1980, moving to the Ambassador Theatre from 30 November 1980 to 27 June 1982.]

Still, in preparing to direct and choreograph a revival of “Dancin’” for Broadway, he said he was more conscious of looking out for his dancers than Fosse was. (Fosse “never had a conversation about how’s your back or how’s your hamstring.”) For the tryout at San Diego’s Old Globe this spring, he cut the material from three acts to two and divvied up “his” track — the sequence of dances he’d done in the original production — among several men because it now seemed too much to ask of just one. For the planned 2023 Broadway production, he is rethinking the number of swings and covers to step into any role at any time so that injured dancers will feel less pressure to perform. And he is much more collaborative with the ensemble than Fosse was with him.

[Dancin’ was staged at the Old Globe from 19 April to 5 June this year.  The planned Broadway revival is tentatively scheduled for the August Wilson Theatre, 20 November 2023-8 February 2024.]

“But it’s a fine line,” he said. “Incorporating the ensemble in the conversation makes them feel trusted and cared for, and it’s good for the show. But — this sounds awful — even though I want to hear your problems, at some point I don’t want to. The bottom line is: What you have to do for the show is what you have to do for the show. And the director, the choreographer, is the one who decides what that is.”

Cilento is touching on a problem that underlies the uneasiness some people feel about the changes advocates are seeking. So much of what we are used to in the theater, so much of it thrilling, is ultimately the result of individual virtuosity being inspired by individual vision, even if the individual with the vision is a tyrant. When everyone is equally empowered what happens to it? If the theater ever does become a worker’s paradise, will it still produce heavenly art?

Another source of unease is that those of us — I include myself — who grew up in the harsh, sometimes inhumane ways of thinking about the theater may have developed a kind of Stockholm syndrome. About the harshness we are blasé or even sentimental. When, in “A Chorus Line,” Cilento sang, with the rest of the ensemble, “What I Did for Love,” we understood the response to be: Everything. Anything. The gift was ours to borrow.

Now I’m pretty sure that’s not the right answer.

[Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for the Times; additional details are in the afterword to “Article 1,” 23 September.

[The fourth and last essay in Green’s series, “The Reformation,” will be posted on Sunday. 2 October.  Please come back to Rick On Theater for the conclusion to the series.]

"The Reformation" – Article 2: "When Paying Your Dues Doesn't Pay the Rent"

by Jesse Green 

[Green’s second essay in the series “The Reformation” appeared in the print edition of the New York Times in the “Arts & Leisure” section of 10 July 2022; the online edition (from which this text was drawn) was updated on 24 August (When Paying Dues Doesn’t Pay the Rent, How Does the Theater Survive? - The New York Times (nytimes.com)).

[For readers interested in the whole series, an article by Callie Holtermann that I consider an introduction to “The Reformation” was posted on 20 September and Green’s first essay was republished on ROT on 23 September.]

Frank talk about salaries and the end of unpaid internships are positive steps, but the cost may be fewer opportunities to learn the ropes.

A woman who has been working for about 16 years in a costume shop at a midsize theater in a midsize city in the Midwest agreed to discuss her job. A typical 40-hour week finds her cutting, draping, patterning, tailoring, altering, stitching, dyeing, distressing, repairing and “whatever else comes up.” The pay is $18.64 an hour, but only during the theater’s nine-month season. During her three-month furlough, she collects unemployment and goes without health insurance, “praying to Baby Jesus,” she told me, “I don’t hurt myself over the summer.”

I first learned about the woman when she wrote about her work — “first hand” is the job title — on Nothing for the Group, a newsletter devoted to a conversation about pay equity in the theater. In a feature called Bills, Bills, Bills, it publishes workers’ anonymous “money diaries”: not just the numbers but the thousand little cuts that come from undercompensated employment. The Times confirmed her identity and job duties, and agreed to maintain her anonymity so she could speak freely about her pay. An expert professional in her 50s, she makes, after taxes and other deductions, less than $20,000 a year from the work she “for the most part” loves.

[According to the Music Theatre Wichita (Kansas), the First Hand assists the Cutter/Draper in the construction of new costumes and the preparation of stock/rental costumes for use in a production. The First Hand advises the costume technicians in the sewing and construction of costumes.

[Nothing for the Group (https://nothingforthegroup.substack.com/) is a weekly newsletter about the American theater edited and largely written by Lauren Halvorsen, a dramaturg and writer based in Washington, D.C. Since its launch in July 2020, the newsletter has accumulated a subscribership of over 5,000.  Nothing for the Group launched “Bills, Bills, Bills,” a monthly series of anonymous money diaries from theatre workers curated by Jenna Clark Embrey, in June 2022. This column, the inaugural of the feature, was posted on 1 June (https://nothingforthegroup.substack.com/p/bills-bills-bills-1).]

Despite its good cheer, her diary is poignant. She waffles about the $115 a month deducted from her paycheck for parking: Maybe she could save the money by biking — but what about the weather? A highlight of her week of scrounging leftovers and skipping meals is a neighborhood meeting that, though “not terribly exciting,” provides free food.

She is not an outlier. Lauren Halvorsen, who runs Nothing for the Group, and who was the associate literary director at the Studio Theater in Washington, D.C., until the mass pandemic layoffs of 2020, said she could not afford some of the freelance work she has been offered since then, even though she was just “scraping by.” [The Studio Theater features frequently in my theater reports on ROT from Washington. ~Rick]  “The pay is so awful I’ve had to say no,” she told me. “The thing I most love I can’t do anymore.” After 17 years in the theater, she got a day job at an engineering firm. Likewise, the Midwest first hand has been studying to become a home inspector.

The dramaturg Jenna Clark Embrey, who curates the money diaries for Nothing for the Group, still works as a dramaturg but is now a communications consultant as well. In addition to her anecdotal feature in the newsletter, she created the Theater Salaries Spreadsheet, a crowdsourced database that sheds an embarrassing light on a traditionally shadowy playing field.

Even considering the number of entry-level positions and the small size of some of the unnamed institutions, the financial details of the 543 jobs currently listed are disheartening. A company manager at a Chicago nonprofit makes $28,500. An artistic assistant at a Virginia theater with an annual budget of $5 million makes $26,000. An assistant director of education for a Tennessee theater handily undercuts them at $21,000. These are professional, full-time jobs.

Nobody doesn’t believe in fair pay. And few would deny that theater employees, like other workers, are too often compensated at rates well below the minimum wage, let alone the living wage, in their communities. Yet a pervasive story theater people have told themselves forever says that scrounging and sacrificing and “paying dues,” sometimes indefinitely, are part of the identity, even the glamour of the field. Poverty may be seen as a sign that progress, if it comes, has been earned by suffering. A few years ago, a Chicago director told me that a major marker of career progress among her colleagues was when they needed just one day job to support their theater habit, not two.

But like certain old plays, those old stories are falling out of favor. In part because the 18-month shutdown gave theater people the time to scrutinize their circumstances, and in part because other equity initiatives were at the same time roiling the field, a consensus for change has begun to emerge. Prestigious institutions are being forced to alter or eliminate their unpaid internship programs, smaller companies are voluntarily restructuring their compensation packages and a movement to make fair pay practices standard if not compulsory is gaining traction in Chicago and spreading to other cities.

In the first installment of this series, about the culture of cruelty built into the American theater, I noted that change, even to achieve universally admired goals, is never free. That’s literally the case with pay equity. The money to more fairly compensate low-paid workers must come from somewhere. In a few theaters, but probably not the ones that can most afford it, that may mean paying top earners less. In others, the money may come from increased fund-raising, which itself is not cheap. (Development directors can command big salaries.) But in many, it will come from curtailing or eliminating core functions that until recently would have been considered sacrosanct, definitional — and whose loss will have profound implications for the future of both the art and the business.

So the question is not just how much we’re willing to spend on fair pay but also how much it will cost.

When I spent a summer at the Williamstown Theater Festival [in Massachusetts], 40 years ago, my cohort of apprentices had no clue that we were “workers,” let alone professionals. We understood ourselves to be gofers and dogsbodies who, in exchange for proximity to Frank Langella and Blythe Danner, and a chance to play Fairy No. 13 in a supersized “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” were expected to perform all kinds of unpaid labor, some of it unsafe and some of it degrading. If Langella’s toilet needed cleaning, there was an oversubscribed sign-up list of volunteers eager to do it. And if another star groped you at a party, well, maybe you’d get to be Fairy No. 12.

The Massachusetts festival is radically different today. Jenny Gersten, who was hired in November as its interim artistic director, said in an interview that the old model, which she observed firsthand during 13 years in two stints on the leadership team, was not sustainable. It had arisen, she said, “from the summer stock model of the 1950s, which was very much a ‘let’s put on a play’ ideology.” Workers, she said, were expected to “get by on whatever the equivalent of ramen was — probably Velveeta and Spam. Whereas now we see that working 16 to 18 hours a day without pay and proper safety accommodations is” — she paused — “problematic.”

As recently as 2019, the festival produced seven highly professional shows during its eight-week season, four at the 173-seat Nikos theater and three, often featuring large ensembles and elaborate designs, at its 511-seat Mainstage. (The 1980 “Cyrano de Bergerac” starring Langella featured a cast of 64.) To fill that stage, and essentially build it, the festival depended on its corps of 70 apprentices, most of whom, far from being paid for their work, instead paid for the privilege: $4,250 for tuition, room and board. (At a slightly higher level of serfdom were 50 interns, who paid only $650, for housing.) The promised learning experience was delivered in the form of hands-on hard labor and the occasional tongue-lashing.

But at the beginning of 2021, as conversations about representation and good labor practices were coming to a head everywhere, the festival’s board of directors received a broadside from an anonymous collective called WTF, Williamstown?! Filled with devastating detail, the document described an inherently inequitable and exploitive program, not only in terms of pay and treatment but also access. Among its contentions, as Gersten, who was not then working for the festival, described it, was that the “pay-to-play” model meant apprentice and internship programs were effectively open only to people of means, and were therefore predominantly white. “Which was true,” Gersten said.

That summer, as the festival embarked on a scaled-back and entirely outdoor pandemic season, Mandy Greenfield, the artistic director at the time, replaced the apprenticeships with an early career program for students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds. But unrest emerged on a different front as professional sound technicians working on the musical “Row” walked off the job in protest over the low pay and unsafe working conditions that they and others in entry-level jobs endured. [With a book by Daniel Goldstein and music and lyrics by Dawn Landes, Row was a world premiere musical that ran at WTF from 16 July to 14 August 2020.]

Greenfield stepped down after the season. As Gersten returned she already knew that the festival’s problems could not be addressed within the framework of its traditional ambitions to be a major training program and a major production organization at once. What had seemed like temporary pandemic accommodations were going to have to be permanent.

The result in 2022 is a drastic change. There are now just 20 trainees on campus, 10 of them from Williams College, which has hosted the festival since its inception. The trainees are provided with free housing and meals and paid a $2,500 stipend for a seven-week “intensive.” They divide their time — about 46 hours a week, spread over six days — among workshops, classes and departmental rotations. At the same time, with no free labor, and in order to eliminate hasty changeovers between shows that kept workers up for days at a time, Gersten has cut the summer season from seven complex productions to three smaller ones. The first, a five-person “comedy thriller” called “Man of God,” began performances on July 5. [A one-act play at the Nikos, Man of God by Anna Ouyang Moench ran until 22 July.]

“We might be able to expand the season in the future,” Gersten told me, “but I don’t think we can ever get back to the size we once were. The cost of paying all these people, doing fewer shows, with more dark time between them, has increased our expenses 40 percent and reduced our income. We are making it work, but only with a great deal of subsidy from individual donors. And though the trainees are getting a kind of firsthand knowledge — watching someone in the box office deal with an irate customer or sitting with me as I talk to a playwright — it’s not the same value as actually doing the work.”

It’s a painful paradox that improving pay for the festival’s professional staff means having fewer shows and thus less opportunity for them to practice their craft. And that improving the conditions for trainees means cutting their ranks by nearly 90 percent. Nor is this just Williamstown’s problem. Protests have recently plagued the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, the Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia and, in New York, the Flea, which essentially rebirthed itself in a different form, and the Lark, which shut down completely. As more and more theaters start to institute similar reforms, what will the future of the business — and the art — look like?

Here’s how Elsa Hiltner sees that future. All theaters will end unpaid internships. Those with annual budgets greater than $1 million will meet minimum-wage rates, and eventually living-wage rates, for all workers. Compensation categories, or each worker’s actual pay, will be clearly defined and shared. The highest salary in an organization will exceed the lowest by no more than a factor of five. Schedules will be set “to the greatest extent possible” to fit within a 40-hour workweek.

Those are among the benchmarks for certification by the Pay Equity Standards, a new program developed by Hiltner, who worked in theater production for 15 years, and her colleagues at the Chicago-based advocacy organization On Our Team. Two small companies in that city — Collaboraction, dedicated to social justice, and 2nd Story, dedicated to “real stories by real people for real change” — are the first to meet all the requirements. On June 29, they received, among other things, the right to use (but only for the rest of 2022) a handsome laurel-wreathed badge in their marketing materials. Six more theaters around the country are working toward certification in 2023.

They are smallish companies. New York nonprofits with artistic directors making $1 million or more per year — and with pay spreads that may approach a factor of 50 — seem unlikely to apply. Still, as with LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] certification or fair-trade stickers or organic-food labels, the hope is that the badge will eventually help consumers of theater choose work that aligns with their values. While waiting for that to happen, theaters may benefit, Hiltner says, from a happier, harder-working staff — and from the positive response she sees from funders and donors to institutions that actually “live out their missions.”

But it’s also the case that funders and donors generally prefer to contribute to theaters that make a lot of theater. That’s one of the problems facing PlayCo, a New York City company implementing a new compensation model this year.

As described to me by Kate Loewald, PlayCo’s founding producer, and Robert Bradshaw, its managing director, the plan is designed to address not only the usual inequities by raising everyone to at least the living wage but also to adjust the misalignment of pay between staff (who may be full-time) and artists (who usually work for a month or two).

It does so, in part, by putting every job in a clearly defined and equalized pay category: A stage director is compensated at the same rate as Loewald and Bradshaw, a staff associate director at the same rate as a freelance costume designer. Because all the categories are “transparent,” everyone knows what everyone’s making, which in almost all cases is more than before. (The exception is Loewald, who took a cut.) Based on an estimate of 250 hours of work, directors formerly paid $3,500 will now be paid $7,100.

To accommodate this policy, and other labor initiatives as well, the company’s board has agreed to raise the annual budget, which stood at $1 million before the pandemic, by about 20 percent. It has also agreed to lower ticket prices from a base of $35 to $25, with cheaper seats available. As a result, at least for now, PlayCo will be able to be the sole producer of only one show a season, instead of its usual two or three, risking a spiral of disinvestment. A unique element of the city’s theaterscape — PlayCo has focused on adventurous global work — is thus diminished.

“This has to be,” Loewald says. “We will develop the theater we want to be around.”

For Hiltner, that’s the bottom line. “The negative things you ‘give up,’” she says, “are not really losses.” In part, I agree: At many theaters, fewer shows might mean better shows. At others, I’m not sure less product would be a good outcome. And what about gorgeous but expensive design? Hiltner was a costume designer before joining the exodus of artists forced out by low pay.

Still, creativity, like water, takes the shape of its container. And what is the creativity of the theater about, above and beyond that of other industries, if not to imagine, rehearse and revise better worlds, both onstage and off?

Pay equity need not, after all, be a zero-sum gain. (Soho Rep [a New York City Off-Broadway theater company], which recently introduced a living-wage job creation program, is actually planning to expand its programming.) If theater, as Hiltner puts it, operates under a scarcity model — “there’s not enough and there will never be more” — perhaps it’s because we undervalue it ourselves. Noxious stories about the value of suffering and a lifetime of scrounging exist to convince ourselves of the false idea that a passion cannot be a profession.

“If the arts industry starts valuing the art,” Hiltner says, “that will ripple out and impact the way people donate and the way corporations and foundations give support. If we stop thinking of resources as scarce,” she adds, “maybe they finally won’t be.”

[Jesse Green is the chief theater reviewer for the New York Times.  His latest book is Shy, with and about the composer Mary Rodgers.  He’s also the author of a novel, O Beautiful, and a memoir, The Velveteen Father.  (There’s a more detailed bio of Green in the afterword to ROT’s republication of his first installment in the series on Friday, 23 September.) 

[At the end of his third essay, Green will make a remark about performers’ need to perform.  He will cite “What I Did For Love,” the song from A Chorus Line that essentially states the central theme of the play about dancers in the chorus of a musical.  Green’s implication is that the drive expressed by the dancers in A Chorus Line is shared by performing artists of all types: dancers, actors, musicians, singers, acrobats, clowns—whatever. 

[By the same token, an actor friend of mine from my earliest days trying to break into the profession used to say something that applies to all performers as well: “Actors will work for nothing . . . if you let them.”  (I told him we should get T-shirts printed up!)  Despite the truth, logic, and sensibleness of all that Green argues above, I think my friend is right . . . and it will ever be thus.

[Green’s third essay in “The Reformation,” “Shutting the Door On a Hard-Knock Life,” which examines the physical risks of a life in the theater, will be republished on Rick On Theater on Thursday, 29 September.  I hope all of you who’ve been reading this series will be back then for the continuation of Jesse Green’s series of articles.]

"The Reformation" – Article 1: "Is It Finally Twilight For Sacred Stage Monsters?"

by Jesse Green

[The first article in Jesse Green’s “Reformation” series was published in the print edition of the New York Times of 12 June 2022 in the “Arts & Leisure” section and was updated online (Is It Finally Twilight for the Theater’s Sacred Monsters? - The New York Times (nytimes.com)) on 1 August.  (This included a correction to Karen Olivo’s use of the pronoun ‘they.’)]

Many of the “great men” who helped America create its classics, its institutions and its own acting style were tyrants. We need to cut them loose.

Despotic. Agonizing. Crippling. Sadistic.

Those are just some of the adjectives victims use to describe their tormentors in Isaac Butler’s jaw-dropping book “The Method.” [See Kirk Woodward’s “The Method – a Review,” posted on Rick On Theater on 12 March 2022.  Butler’s book was published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2022.]

But the method they’re talking about isn’t a blueprint for a fascist takeover or C.I.A. interrogation. It’s a blueprint for the American theater.

“The Method,” which bears the subtitle “How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act,” is the story of how the precepts of Konstantin Stanislavski, a Russian actor, director and theorist born in 1863, were interpreted in the United States by some very vicious teachers — mostly men — whose behavior now looks outrageous to us. By comparison, Stanislavski himself was a pussycat, even though he berated his longtime leading actress, Olga Knipper, the wife of [playwright Anton] Chekhov, so cruelly she came to call him a “monster.”

But Stanislavski’s New York and Hollywood acolytes would soon outshine him in monstrosity. Attacking students — mostly women — seems to have been the special skill of Lee Strasberg, who as a founder of the Group Theater in the 1930s, and the artistic director of the Actors Studio from 1951 until his death in 1982, did as much as anyone to promote the master’s system and create our idea of what American acting is.

Nor was the bad behavior limited to teachers; what the educators did verbally, the directors who took the Method from the periphery to the center of American culture in the 1950s often enacted physically. Gropes, slaps and seduction were tools in their arsenal. Elia Kazan, a founder of the Studio and one of the greatest stage and film directors of the time, felt that bedding young hopefuls, including Marilyn Monroe, was “a totally natural extension of the director-actress relationship,” Butler said in a recent interview. Getting the performances Kazan wanted involved a “very active casting couch.”

Today we would call it, at a minimum, grooming, and cancel him. Strasberg would be cited (as he was, even then) for emotional cruelty, others perhaps for battery. Though he was the kindest of that coterie, the teacher and director Harold Clurman thought nothing of getting an actor’s attention by throwing a chair at him. Now, he’d most likely be brought up on charges before Equity, the actors’ union, and fired or forced to undergo anger management training.

And that would surely be just. With #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and other epochal changes roiling American life, the theater has finally begun to talk openly about its foundational and continuing inequities. Sometimes the talk is just lip service, to be sure, as toothless statements on company websites attest. But more than ever, practitioners and critics are asking difficult questions about how we make actors, how we make plays, how we make seasons, how we make money — in short, how we make theater.

It’s about time. For too long the industry has accepted all kinds of impropriety and unfairness as the supposedly inevitable cost of greatness. It has tolerated working conditions and wages that in some cases approach the Dickensian. For the sake of profit or what we glorify as the demands of art, it has laughed as bullies like the producer Scott Rudin terrorized their underlings, and has winked at the sexual misdeeds of men like Harvey Weinstein. In the process, the theater — like most other art forms but perhaps more intensely — has found a neat way to keep its doors largely shut to those who by reason of race, class or connection are not already part of the club.

Only recently has anyone been called to account, as a trickle of public allegations and cloudy repercussions have sidelined the playwright and artistic director Israel Horovitz, the director Gordon Edelstein, the casting director Justin Huff, the actor Kevin Spacey and the costume designer William Ivey Long. Actually, Long, who has denied accusations of sexual abuse by at least two former assistants, isn’t so sidelined; though he “parted ways” with the production of “Diana, the Musical” in 2020, his work on that show has nevertheless been nominated for a Tony Award at the ceremony honoring achievement in the theater on Sunday, June 12. [The 2022 Tony winner for Best Costume Design of a Musical was Gabriella Slade for Six.]

But maybe, in the wake of the existential crisis of Covid-19, when the ingrained practices of decades ground to a sudden halt, we are finally approaching an inflection point. What’s on the other side of that inflection is worth thinking about, including the potential benefits — and costs — of the fairer theatrical future many people are working hard to create. It’s a future in which pay transparency and equity, humane treatment of workers, respectful training of all kinds of students, diversity in employment as well as in product are crucial parts of the picture.

And in which sacred monsters aren’t.

Still, if we are approaching a Great Man Götterdämmerung — if those monsters, some of them superb at what they do, are finally beginning to face the music — we’d better look closely at the tune. What are we losing when we banish them? What are we losing if we don’t?

As it happens, the history of musicals is a good place to seek answers. In the way that musical theater incorporates and exaggerates all the qualities (and problems) of nonmusical theater, so too have the men we reflexively call the Broadway musical greats — the creators and directors and choreographers behind classics like “Oklahoma!,” “Gypsy,” “Chicago” and others — incorporated and exaggerated the traits of Strasberg and his ilk.

It’s important to be clear that those traits were more than flirtatious winks and forceful direction. Strasberg’s interpretation of Stanislavski often included shrieking at actresses: tearing them down to build them up. He told the young Patricia Bosworth, who later described several such encounters in her memoir “The Men in My Life,” to “take off your clothes, darling” — forcing her to perform in bra and panties in front of a packed class to understand her character’s shame. Arthur Penn, another Studio luminary, later claimed to be helping her access the emotions for a scene by dragging her, protesting, into a pitch-black prop closet and locking her inside until she screamed.

The primordial musical link to that heritage, and also its most vexing example, may be Jerome Robbins, who along with Montgomery Clift, Sidney Lumet, Karl Malden, Patricia Neal, Maureen Stapleton, Eli Wallach and Marlon Brando was a member of the inaugural Actors Studio cohort of 1947. It was then, according to some versions of the tale, that Clift told Robbins, his boyfriend at the time, that he was stymied by Romeo, the character he was working on for a scene study class. Robbins told him to imagine he was in a gang.

It took more than a decade for Robbins, working with Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, to turn that germ of an idea into “West Side Story,” a show regarded upon its 1957 opening as a game-changer, and later a classic and lately a problem. By then Robbins’s behavior was already notorious. An apt if unprovable story describes the cast members of an earlier show — sometimes said to be “High Button Shoes” in 1947 — watching silently as Robbins, their brilliant choreographer, backed up further and further downstage while delivering his typically acid notes, until he finally fell into the pit.

If no one felt like warning him, that was only fair payback to a man who, coming from the world of ballet, expected silent obedience from his dancers — and later, as his portfolio grew to include direction and “conception,” from everyone else as well. To improve the dancing of Mickey Calin, who played Riff in the original production of “West Side Story,” Robbins “pounded him into dust” before “molding him back into clay,” as Tony Mordente, who played A-Rab, told Amanda Vaill for her Robbins biography, “Somewhere.” Robbins got the performance he wanted, but did his methods have to be so cruel?

For him, apparently so. Robbins’s process, perhaps based on his emotionally violent family history, “was to make the cast seethe with hatred for one another — or for him,” Vaill writes. “It was almost as if he couldn’t create without confrontation and pain.” In the index, “Robbins, cruelty of” gets its own entry.

But here’s the bizarre thing, though we see it repeated everywhere in theater, now as then: Many of his dancers, most of his collaborators and nearly all of his audiences (who in those days knew little of the backstage truth) admired Robbins anyway. They were able to put his behavior to the side, even including his having named names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1950. So great was his artistry, or at least the opportunity of being attached to a winner, that Zero Mostel, the star of “Fiddler on the Roof,” agreed to work with him on that 1964 musical despite having been blacklisted himself. And Jack Gilford, who co-starred with Mostel in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” which Robbins doctored, was one of the names he named.

Perhaps they believed, at least in this case, that greatness was inseparably joined to awfulness; you couldn’t have one without the other. Then too, the awfulness wasn’t doled out evenly. If Robbins’s tantrums suggested that he took too literally Stanislavski’s nickname — “the big infant” — his favorite dancers, like Chita Rivera, who thrillingly played Anita in the original production of “West Side Story,” nevertheless called him “Big Daddy.”

Today, Rivera unequivocally defends Robbins — and also Bob Fosse, whose nastiness may have been worse than Strasberg’s and whose casting couch may have been busier than Kazan’s. “There has to be a leader,” she told me in a recent phone conversation. “If dancers aren’t pushed to their limits, they would not be as good as they can. They’re the vessel, not the creator.”

And if sometimes, being a vessel, they get dumped on, well, that’s part of the process too. “Outside the room you give consolation to whomever was attacked,” she said. “But inside, the room is sacred.”

Rivera sees it as the performer’s job to come into that room supple and strong enough, with sufficient “lightness” and faith and good humor, to take whatever gets dished out. “We were used to pain, we were used to extremes” — which was a good thing because for those, like Calin, on whom the choreography did not fit easily, adjusting to it was torture. Not Rivera; when I asked if she ever felt she was in emotional or physical danger working for men who treated others so poorly, she had a one-word answer: “No.”

But then Rivera, a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, may have once-in-a-lifetime standing — and standards. Today’s performers are “too sensitive,” she said. “They’re spoiled. If a director or choreographer raises his voice, they’re insulted!”

It’s true: Today we are wary about raised voices, let alone hands. We want the making of theater to be nice, which for Rivera’s generation would have seemed almost irrelevant. The question is whether that niceness, or at least a reasonable level of respectful collegiality, safety, fair play and the rest, requires a sacrifice in quality — and, if so, whether we’re willing to make it.

There have, of course, been inspiring teachers and successful creators who were not monsters, but the monsters had a way of legitimizing bad behavior generally. Hal Prince was often considered the nicest of the great men — but ask Patti LuPone about him.

Alas, our history — and even our recent past, in which Rudin, who habitually bullied his underlings, has been the pre-eminent presenter of “quality” commercial work — does not elevate the saints. Rather, it suggests an overwhelming correlation between the most acclaimed achievements of the American theater and the lordliness, fury, and cultlike subjugation that allowed Robbins and Fosse and Kazan and Strasberg — and for that matter, the venomous Laurents, the horndog Richard Rodgers and the megalomaniacal Joseph Papp — to thrive. Should the link be severed so their success cannot be used to encourage and justify more monsters in the future? And what would that severing look like — rampant cancellations of work old and new?

In considering change, we should keep in mind what would have been lost if such men were subject to contemporary expectations: not just the plays and musicals we consider classics (partly because they’re the ones that got produced) but also the blameless performers who became great under their tutelage, the valuable institutions they founded, the “method” — indeed the culture — they invented. Without Robbins we arguably don’t have Rivera; without Fosse, Gwen Verdon; without Rodgers, Sondheim; without Papp, “A Chorus Line”; without Stanislavski, Chekhov; without Kazan, Tennessee Williams; without Laurents, “Gypsy” — on and on.

In other words, without monstrousness, we do not have what we have been conditioned to think of as the theater itself.

For many people, that’s no longer a good enough argument for tolerating it. Karen Olivo, who won a Tony Award for playing Anita in the 2009 revival of “West Side Story,” told me recently that “if harm comes to someone, even if not to me, it’s not worth it, ever.”

Olivo, whose uses they/them pronouns, has encountered plenty of “egregious” behavior in their 25 years in the business, they added. At a final callback for a show early in their career, the producer “walked up to me and put his hand into the back pocket of my jeans” slipping in a piece of paper with his phone number written on it. Later, “he kept sending me flowers and asking me out,” and even though  “I was the most vulnerable person in the room,” no one said anything about it. Even on “West Side Story,” Laurents, whom Olivo “loved until the day he died,” turned on his star, as he’d turned on so many, when they started missing performances. “For someone who isn’t primarily a dancer, that Robbins choreography is brutal,” they said. “It was killing my body.”

Still, it was not because of those personal experiences of physical damage and emotional harm that Olivo left the commercial theater. It was the silence that followed the revelations of Rudin’s unfettered bullying that led, last year, to the announcement that they would not return to their acclaimed performance in “Moulin Rouge!” when the show resumed after a pandemic pause.

Instead, Olivo has been teaching, most recently at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, their alma mater. “I don’t want my students to think it’s OK with me that they can be made to suffer, even if it makes a show better,” they said. And though Olivo recognizes the trade-off — and understands why for someone like Rivera the calculus was different — they remain sure that in tolerating monsters “we lost a lot more than we gained.”

It’s hard to measure what economists call opportunity cost in a field like theater. But for every great artist like Robbins or great show like “West Side Story,” there are probably at least as many we never got to see, or that never got written, because Robbins and “West Side Story” took up so much of the limited cultural space available. In so doing they defined and hardened our idea of what is worthy of that space, furthering the cycle of exclusion.

Only now is the theater rediscovering some of the artists thus excluded. To judge from the likes of a Black playwright like Alice Childress, the loss was incalculably large. One of her plays, “Trouble in Mind,” itself about denying the experience of Black theater artists, was blocked by white producers who conditioned their support for a planned Broadway production in 1955 on her making the story less critical of its white characters. She refused, and there is some irony in the fact that the play’s eventual Broadway debut, last fall, has been nominated for a Tony Award as a “revival.” It and another Childress work (“Wedding Band,” a 1973 play that ran Off Broadway this season) are excellent, challenging, unique and urgent — and ought to have been seen much sooner.

[It should be noted that Wedding Band, about an interracial couple in the Jim Crow South in 1918, was presented on ABC-TV in 1974, directed by Joseph Papp with a cast led by Ruby Dee and J. D. Cannon.  Papp had produced and directed the play two years earlier at his New York Shakespeare Theater (now known as the Public Theater).]

There are most likely hundreds of other fine plays thus lost. Even James Baldwin was stymied as a dramatist by such cultural gatekeeping. His 1964 drama “Blues for Mister Charlie,” loosely based on the murder of Emmett Till, underwent a tumultuous rehearsal period, with its original producers demanding the same kind of softening that Childress faced down. After a Broadway run of four months, “Blues” all but disappeared; despite its merits and the acclaim of its author in other mediums, it has never had a major New York City revival.

And who were those original producers? Yes, the Actors Studio, which in addition to its other peccadilloes had a race problem it refused to acknowledge.

To say those were different times is no excuse. For one thing, they weren’t: Our theatrical world may have softened around the edges, but at its core it is fundamentally as harsh as it was in its supposed glory days. Directors are still forcing themselves on cast members, acting teachers are screaming at students, choreographers are putting dancers’ bodies at risk. For another, was there ever a time when predation, humiliation and violence were acceptable? Yes, bad behavior led to good work in many cases. Does that mean we must keep rewarding it?

But mostly the “different times” excuse is insufficient because it fails to acknowledge how much of what we find inevitable in the theater was actually not; the inevitability was the handiwork of surprisingly few people and can, with diligence, be disassembled. Indeed, it must be if we are to make any progress — not just in terms of quality-of-life issues but in terms of the quality-of-art issues a critic supposedly cares about most.

The separation is not so clear to me anymore. I don’t believe in canceling art because of disreputable artists; I look forward to the upcoming “Dancin’” and no doubt an umpteenth “West Side Story.” Stanislavski and Strasberg still have something to teach. And as far as the living monsters go, I genuinely hope for their rehabilitation. I might enjoy another Scott Rudin production if no one is harmed in the making of it.

But let’s make them the end of the line; it will not be a net loss to the culture if the spaces such men occupied, and turned into gilded niches from which to demand obedience and veneration, are vacated now. I cannot say with assurance that new occupants will create works as flattering to my taste as the old ones did, but perhaps they will change and amplify my tastes. That’s a good thing, and so is this: In trying to get our attention, they probably won’t throw a chair.

[Jesse Green has been the co-chief (with Ben Brantley, until Brantley’s retirement in 2020) and chief theater reviewer for the New York Times since May 2017.

[From 2013 to 2017 he was the theater reviewer for New York magazine, where he’d also been a contributing editor, writing long-form features, since 2008.  Before that, he wrote about theater and other cultural topics for the “Arts & Leisure” section of the Times while covering broader subjects for The New York Times Magazine.  Articles he’s written for these and many other publications have been recognized with nominations and prizes from the National Magazine Awards and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, among others.

[His latest book, Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers, written with Rodgers (1931-2014), was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in August.

[Earlier books include the novel O Beautiful (Ballantine/Random House), which Entertainment Weekly called “one of the best first novels of the year,” in 1990.  Green’s also the author of The Velveteen Father: An Unexpected Journey to Parenthood, a memoir published by Villard/Random House in 1999 that was named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by the Los Angeles Times Book Review, one of the 10 best memoirs or biographies of the year by Amazon, and one of the best parenting books of the year by Child magazine.  It won the Lambda Literary Award for Biography or Autobiography in 2000.  His short fiction and essays have appeared in many magazines and collections.

[Before turning to writing, Green worked in the theater as a gofer, a copyist, and a musical coordinator on Broadway shows.  He’s also written cryptic crosswords and other puzzles for many publications.  He’s a 1980 magna cum laude graduate of Yale College, with a degree in English and Theater.

[The next essay in Green’s series will be “When Paying Your Dues Doesn’t Pay the Rent,” whose topic I think is self-evident; it will be posted on Monday, 26 September.  Please comeback to Rick On Theater to read the remaining installments of “The Reformation.”]

"The Reformation" – Introduction: "A Revolution Behind the Curtain"

by Callie Holtermann 

[Jesse Green is the chief theater reviewer for the New York Times.  Over the summer, he wrote a series of articles examining the conditions in the theater in the United States, to be published in Sunday’s “Arts & Leisure” section. 

[There are four essays in the series, published under the omnibus title “The Reformation,” starting on 12 June with “Is It Finally Twilight For Sacred Stage Monsters?” which looks at the powerful bullies and tyrants in the business.  The following three pieces, one each month through September, cover other problems besetting the people who make their lives in the theater.

[At the time of Green’s third essay, 7 August 2022, Callie Holtermann, a writer for “Times Insider,” a feature which purports to explain who the Times is and what it does, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how its journalism comes together, published this short article, “A Revolution Behind the Curtain,” on page 2 of the front (news) section.

[I’ll be posting the four essays in Green’s series in order of their publication, but I’m posting Holtermann’s article, which I view as a belated introduction to “The Reformation,” first despite its later publication date.]

A new series of essays captures American theater as it attempts to reject some of its foundational inequities.

Forty years ago, Jesse Green, then a recent college graduate with a degree in English and theater, was a general assistant at the Williamstown Theater Festival [in Massachusetts]. He made waffles, cleaned toilets and performed other work, all of it unpaid and “some of it unsafe and some of it degrading,” he wrote later.

The festival introduced a young Mr. Green to the excitement of professional theater, but it came with a warning. “In order to be worthy of the great art form, we also had to be subjugated,” he said.

Now the chief theater critic for The New York Times, Mr. Green examines, in a series of essays called “The Reformation,” the long-held notion that actors and others who toil in the theater must suffer for their art. The four essays, all written by Mr. Green, explore the consequences of the American theater industry’s long-overdue admission that bullying, dismal pay, dangerous working conditions and mistreatment and exclusion of artists of color cannot be excused as the purported cost of great art, he said. Blending reporting and criticism, he aims to understand how calls for change in each of these areas will reshape the industry and the work it produces.

Mr. Green began developing the series during the period of darkened marquees and Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020. Criticism of the industry had swelled into a 29-page set of demands from the coalition known as We See You, White American Theater, which included suggestions to rename half of all Broadway theaters, impose term limits for industry leaders and require that at least half of those in casts and creative teams be people of color.

“That was sort of a hook: Here is a really well-stated list of complaints and suggestions and demands,” Mr. Green said. “I began to think, so what are the theaters going to do about it? And also, what am I going to do about it?”

He brought the idea to Nicole Herrington, The Times’s theater editor, who agreed that the moment was worth documenting. “Who knows if in 10 years from now, 15 years from now, we might look back and this was a pivotal moment or not?” she said. “But we wanted to take stock of what was happening.”

The essays are being published once a month through the summer, connecting the end of the last theater season to the beginning of the next one.

The series’s inaugural essay, published a few days before the Tony Awards in June, examined the abusive practices of some of American theater’s foundational creators, directors and choreographers. The second considered calls for pay equity in theater, and the third, which appears in the Arts & Leisure section on Sunday, is about the physical and emotional demands made of theater artists. The fourth installment, to come later this summer, will address diversity and equity in theater. [The four essays are listed by headline below, in my afterword. ~Rick]

The assignment is a change of pace for Mr. Green, who often writes reviews of new shows as quickly as overnight. He referred to the interviews, thinking and preparation for “The Reformation” as “the huge part of the iceberg under the water.” Writing the 2,500- to 3,500-word reported essays, the first drafts of which can take a few days or longer, is “the tiny little tip that’s sticking above the water,” he said.

His monthslong research process has included interviews with almost 30 people, most of whom are not celebrated stars.

He spoke to a costume designer in the Midwest who makes less than $20,000 a year, an associate literary director who was laid off in the depths of the pandemic in 2020 and a dramaturg who took on a second job as a communications consultant — all for the series’s second essay, about the harsh financial realities of a life in theater.

Such weighty themes are challenging to reflect in artwork, said Felicia Vasquez, a staff editor for art and print who designed the series. She knew Deena So’Oteh, an illustrator whose Halloween cover for The New York Times Book Review featured five pairs of bloodshot eyes rolling back into the head of a spectral figure, could handle the job.

“My work in general skews a little moody,” admitted Ms. So’Oteh, who sketches out several concepts for each illustration on her iPad. In most of them, large objects loom over smaller ones, casting long shadows across the page: “There is this juxtaposition of one individual versus this giant system,” she said. 

[So’Oteh’s artwork was reproduced on the digital versions of Green’s articles, but I didn’t replicate them for the blog posts.  Readers with access to the Times website can see the illustrations there.]

Mr. Green believes that system has reached an inflection point and that its art may evolve in ways both exciting and provocative to the old guard.

He welcomes the possibilities. “The theater must change,” he said. “It has to take into account the demands and wishes of people who have pretty bravely come forth in the last few years to say what’s wrong, and allow the form to become what it becomes next.”

[Callie Holtermann joined the New York Times in 2020.  “Times Insider,” an offering of podcasts, stories, events, and newsletters, takes audiences behind the scenes and into the workings of the newsroom.

[“Is It Finally Twilight For Sacred Stage Monsters?” Jesse Green’s first article in “The Reformation” will be posted in three days.  The other three articles, “When Paying Your Dues Doesn’t Pay the Rent,” “Shutting the Door On a Hard-Knock Life,” and “Racism Erodes the American Theater,” will follow every three days after that.  Please come back to Rick On Theater to read the whole series.]

"Smithsonian and U.S. Army join forces to save works of art and culture threatened by war"

by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport 

[The report on the present-day work of the U.S. Army’s Monuments Officers, posted below, was broadcast on the PBS NewsHour on 7 September 2022.  An extension of the World War II operation to secure art stolen by the Third Reich in occupied countries and from Jews and other disenfranchised and imprisoned people in Germany and Austria that became known as the Monuments Men, the task of the modern version has become the protection of art and ancient artifacts from damage by acts of war.

[The efforts of the World War II predecessors were chronicled first in the non-fiction book by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History (Center Street, 2009), and then in the subsequent 2014 film The Monuments Men, directed and co-written by George Clooney (who also starred), produced by Columbia Pictures in association with 20th Century Fox, and Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, Germany.]

A new collaboration between the U.S. Army and the Smithsonian Institution is expanding the numbers and capabilities of monuments officers in times of war. Their mission is to advise military commanders on how to minimize damage to art and key sites and to aid foreign allies whose cultural heritage is at risk. Jeffrey Brown reports for our arts and culture series, “CANVAS.”

Judy Woodruff: They’re known as monuments officers, and a new collaboration between the U.S. Army and the Smithsonian Institution is expanding their numbers and capabilities in time of war.

Their mission, advise military commanders on how to minimize damage to art and other key sites during conflict and aid foreign allies whose cultural heritage is at risk.

Jeffrey Brown reports for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Monuments Officer: I have got the base of the mask right here to secure it.

Jeffrey Brown: The National Museum of Pinelandia faces imminent attack, and its precious artifacts must be documented, photographed, packed, and moved to a new location within two hours, amid quickly changing circumstances.

On the scene to help, the U.S. Army’s Corps of Monuments Officers, Colonel Scott DeJesse.

Col. Scott DeJesse, Cultural Heritage Preservation Officer, U.S. Army: You have to be able to speak both languages. You have to be able to speak the language of protecting cultural property, and you must also have your military language and understand the processes.

Jeffrey Brown: People have one or the other often, right?

Col. Scott DeJesse: Have one or the other. And we’re bringing those world’s together in a way that has not been done before.

Jeffrey Brown: Pinelandia, of course, is a fictional country. And this was a simulated training exercise in a large hall at the National Museum of the U.S. Army in Fort Belvoir, [Fairfax County,] Virginia.

The precious art gathered from garage sales, flea markets, even dumpster diving, nothing worth more than a few dollars. But the military officers were the real thing, 21 specialists in art history, archaeology, curation, and other cultural heritage areas, six of them international officers here to train and network, the rest the first cohort of a joint initiative of the U.S. Army and the Smithsonian Institution.

Some were reserve officers moving to this new unit, including Captain Sonia Dixon, who’s also a doctoral candidate in art history.

Capt. Sonia Dixon, Cultural Heritage Preservation Officer, U.S. Army Reserve: I’m passionate about learning about so many different people and their cultures. And I am passionate about the military.

And to get the opportunity to do both of them at the same time and to show people, even if you come from an academic background, you can still have practical ways to help people in the real world.

Jeffrey Brown: There were also six civilian cultural experts new to the military, having completed physical and other requirements, among that group, Hayden Bassett, an archaeologist and curator at the Virginia Museum of Natural History [Martinsville], where he’s been using satellite imagery to document destruction in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Now he’s also Captain Bassett in the U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command.

Hayden Bassett, Cultural Heritage Preservation Officer, U.S. Army Reserve: This is our opportunity to engage with cultural heritage on another level.

I have always had a respect for the military. I never thought I would have the opportunity to take my particular skill set and apply it in a military context and serve in that capacity.

Jeffrey Brown: This was not the career path you were on.

Capt. Hayden Bassett: Certainly not.

Matt Damon, Actor (in film clip): Monuments Men.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s a new take on an idea that goes back to World War II popularized in books and film.

Matt Damon (film clip): So, you want to go into a war zone with some architects and artists and tell our boys what they can and cannot blow up?

George Clooney, Actor (film clip): That’s right.

Jeffrey Brown: And a group then called the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Task Force, often referred to as Monuments Men, scholar-soldiers rescuing artworks and other cultural treasures seized by the Nazis throughout Europe.

In more recent wars, however, the story has at times been less heroic, most notably in 2003 with the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, when the military was criticized for failing to heed warnings about the value of the collection and the need to protect it.

Cori Wegener, Director, Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative: That was a moment in time that really galvanized public opinion even more about the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and it really impacted our mission as well.

Jeffrey Brown: Cori Wegener, a museum curator, was then an Army reserve officer, deployed to the Baghdad museum to assess the damage and salvage what was possible.

Cori Wegener: Walking into those galleries and seeing smashed objects on the floor, even though I was an art museum curator, I didn’t really know how to go about evaluating or salvaging objects. And I felt a little bit lost. I wanted to make sure nobody was placed in that position again.

Jeffrey Brown: Today, Wegener heads the Smithsonian’s Cultural Rescue Initiative. And it was she and Colonel DeJesse who designed the intensive 10-day training program that included courses in forensic documentation and practical problems like drying out damaged artifacts, and briefings from international partners, such as a Ukrainian museum director working to secure objects there.

There was a symbolic moment at Arlington National Cemetery, with a wreath laying at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, including the nephew of a monuments officer killed in action in World War II, and the simulated museum evacuation, which included a jolting moment after one of the role players, acting as a security guard, accidentally, on purpose, put his foot through a painting.

That was just one moment of chaos amid constantly changing circumstances.

Capt. Sonia Dixon: It is not just we are looking at the art objects. Cultural heritage is so diverse, so dynamic, and, depending on the culture, it changes. It can be an object, and it can also be an intangible thing.

Jeffrey Brown: For his part, newly commissioned Captain Bassett was suddenly officer of the day, in charge of this operation, and found himself facing a commanding officer who arrived on the scene to ask some tough questions.

Commanding Officer: Cultural artifacts, they are important, but they are number two to human life. That’s the priority for our combat forces, OK? So if you need me to divert combat forces to protect the site, then I need to know that. Is it a company? Is it a platoon? What is it?

Jeffrey Brown: We’re you surprised by his questions?

Capt. Hayden Bassett: Oh, absolutely.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes?

Capt. Hayden Bassett: Part of my job during that was to be able to effectively communicate why cultural heritage is important, why, in this case, the Army or the coalition forces were expending resources to invest in cultural heritage protection.

Jeffrey Brown: And that, of course, remains a question. Why and how much should the U.S. care about preserving culture in situations when lives are at stake?

Colonel Scott DeJesse, who, by the way, is also a painter in civilian life, is a veteran of cultural protection in a military context. And he puts the issue in military terms.

You’re not suggesting that sending art historians out into the battlefield will win victories? Or you are?

Col. Scott DeJesse: I would say it’s a strategic imperative.

The part that we're moving into is the — not only a justification for doing it, but a validation for doing it, to validate the success for the mission. If the commander says, our lines of effort are to build partnerships, strengthen our partnerships with the host nation, well, we’re the experts that know, hey, this is how you build a partnership, by working, by protecting each other’s — what our societies mean.

Jeffrey Brown: Cori Wegener frames it from the civilian side, as a responsibility for museum and other professionals.

Cori Wegener: How can you ask the military to perform their duties for a treaty about protecting cultural heritage, if we don’t tell them what cultural heritage is? We’re teaching them how to do it, not just why they have to do it.

Announcer’s Voice (at “pinning ceremony”): Captain Hayden Bassett.

Jeffrey Brown: The training program’s end was marked by a pinning ceremony for these official newly minted monuments officers, now ready to deploy as needed around the world.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.

Judy Woodruff: Redefining the U.S. military.

[In his more than 30-year career with the NewsHour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe.

[As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors, and other artists. Among his signature works at the NewsHour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Coordinating Producer of CANVAS at PBS NewsHour.]