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.]
