Where is Equity?

As Keith Olbermann notes on FOK News Channel, when AFTRA -- "not the most belligerent nor plugged in of outfits" -- is stirred up, you know you've gone too far.

Welp, I've found someone yet milder, Mr. O.

In the Wisconsin conflagration, we have heard from every corner of the union movement in terms of news releases and messages to membership. I haven't heard much from my union, Actors' Equity, but I was able to dredge this up from their website, in the form of an open letter/monologue/diary entry from President Nick Wyman:

I can understand why Governor Walker and thousands of employers around the country would like to get rid of unions. They usually make employees more costly by negotiating salaries and benefits employees wouldn't be able to achieve on their own. They mandate work rules that not infrequently add to the costs of doing business. They limit flexibility by insisting on a say in or approval of changes in working conditions. We unions can be a pain in the butt.

Forgive me, however, if I shed no more than crocodile tears for the poor, put-upon employer. Unions exist to redress what is historically and consistently an imbalance of power between those who hire and those who do the work. We have moved beyond the most egregious abuses of the late 1800's - dehumanizing sweatshops with their if-you-don't-come-in-Sunday,-don't-come-in-Monday attitude - but the constant pressure to improve the bottom line leads to coal mining companies ignoring safety protocols and school districts putting sixty students in a class. The cards are still stacked in favor of management, and that disparity will only get worse as a result of the "Citizens United" ruling giving corporations the ability to give unlimited funds to candidates. Unions are the best and nearly the only

zzzzzzzzzzzz...hmm? Wuzzat?

Are you kidding me? We have the occupation by citizens of a public space for weeks on end, half a state legislature flees across state lines, phone stings where elected officials admit to totalitarian shenanigans, physical altercations between protesters and right-wing media, and the best my union president can do is come kind of mealy-mouthed history essay.

I have more vociferous debates WITH fellow union members ABOUT Equity. A clear existential crisis has galvanized the entire labor movement, and my union parks this shit on their homepage -- without even a red TAKE ACTION label, because, hey who cares about Wisconsin?

Disgraceful.

money stuff

Hmm:

Any television executive knows that the big money is in reruns: Hit shows like “Seinfeld” and “Star Trek” keep raking it in long after the writers penned their last scripts. Now a group of theater producers is putting a twist on that business model, taking long-running Broadway hits and moving them Off Broadway to test if they can live on in rerun mode, where costs are lower and the profit potential is significant.

This is crap news in the big picture for performers. But given that Equity's all-or-nothing stance on any tier other than Broadway contracts, life below the elite level of contracts was crap, and they've done less than everything to give producers more options (cough -- showcase code -- cough). Now, the zero-sum game between producers and performers kicked into high gear, and there's no room for maneuver.

/end rant

[NYTimes]

Sausage Gets Made, continued [All's Fair (Six Western)]

Part of COItc's pipeline for 2010 includes development of the new play All's Fair (Six Western), the recipient of a performance residency at Centrum (Port Townsend WA). Throughout the year, we hope to post the thoughts of various members of the development team, and track its progress.

Below, the playwright recalls some of the thought process behind the work.

Can anything fruitful be born out of spite? Because to be honest, the first spark of what became all's fair (six western) came in 2007, sitting in the darkened lobby outside our inaugural production, The Danish Mediations, thinking about how much Actor's Equity pissed me off.

Being my first time around as a producer, everything about the process was strange to my eyes: Why did the showcase code cap the production budget and number of performances? Why didn't the code demand that producers share box office proceeds with Equity members (something we nevertheless did)?

I avoided going in to performances -- even performances with only four or five audience members -- because watching half a dozen imprisoned actors forced to mouth my words was pure hell. Since I also worked the door, those duties provided the perfect excuse to avoid going in, settling the cash box (even scant audience numbers taxed my math-deficient brain), setting up (and eating) the concessions, etc.

Jason Updike (of COI podcast fame) plays, essentially, me with Jason Altman and Gary Patent in The Danish Mediations (2007).

There were long stretches where I lay back in the dark, waiting for the act break or curtain call, and wondered what we thought we were doing. Nestled in a black box theater carved out of a cluster of SoHo apartments, the Access Theater is run by a friendly and committed staff -- but it's a fourth floor walk-up from its nondescript entrance at street level. There were many nights when I wondered how it must have looked from the outside, everyone killing themselves to create this polished theatrical piece which we promptly hid from public view as best we could.

Group photo of COI West Chapter; Gary Patent and Fayna Sanchez, both now of LA, in COItc's inaugural production.

The image etched most indelibly in my memory was the sight of audience members arriving at the fourth floor landing: out of breath, sweaty, and weary even before the show had begun. It was an extreme case, but I thought it was a fit image for many audience members in independent theater: while usually not as efficient at burning calories, it's still not easy to follow a particular company or actor or playwright before they've landed in the more comfortable niche of established off-Broadway companies. Aside from those who are extremely committed to attending live theater (who, like the mildly autistic who chart regional trains for the pleasure of checking a schedule, I find charming and creepy in equal measure), it's work for an audience to attend a show. Most people are tired from their day jobs, confused by traveling to obscure venues, hungry for a deferred meal. And I worried that the payoff was too fleeting to justify the output of energy.

How, I wondered in the dark lobby waiting for intermission, could we change the model? How could I offer an audience a more comprehensive experience? How could we increase their return? I was starting to get an idea.

To begin with, I had to take the asinine limitations of the Showcase Code as a given. It was a red herring to start bitching about the restraints placed upon producers by AEA's profit- and job-killing restrictions; sure, they are both of these things -- but that kind of woe-is-me thinking is counter-creative, it just affirms navel-gazing laziness. It's here, it's the rules. I needed to get over it.

But how could I increase the return on an audience's experience while staying inside the restrictions of a four-week Showcase run of 16 performances and a (since-revised) budget cap?

The set had to stay the same. The cast had to stay the same. But something had to be different, so the only thing left was the script. We had to create a serialized piece that could be laid out over four weeks -- one new segment a week. At the same time, I wanted to avoid a live-action soap opera: the plot had to be contained, whether an audience member chose to view all four segments or only one, they had to have a satisfying theatrical experience.

Moreover, the experience had to be informed by the segmentation -- we couldn't have it take four weeks to do the play simply because of a high page count. I had no idea what kind of story would work, though...

(continued)

learning from the nfl

It's the opening of football season, and watching this silly sport has made me think about lessons we could learn from them; after all, if you turn the step back, turn down the volume, and actually watch the game being played, it's not just surprising that it's a ratings and revenue juggernaut -- it's a freaking miracle.

I am an unashamed baseball partisan; as George Carlin pointed out well, the differences between the two couldn't be more pronounced. The biggest thing is quantity of product: while baseball is a summer-long slog, with a season formed over hundreds of games, football is a sprint: there are very few games to begin with, and if any given team's venue isn't sold out, the game is locally blacked out from broadcast. In short, the National Football League puts many hurdles between the product and its potential audience. The result? High ticket prices, high attendance, and the high valuation of football as entertainment -- much higher than its actual worth, I might add.

Producers of live theater who work under the Equity showcase code are restricted to 16 performances and a ticket price cap of $18. Moreover, no videotaping of your show is permitted. In their latest concession to an overwhelming outcry on the part of theater companies for reform, Equity raised the budget cap and increased the limit on rehearsal time, but kept the performance and admission caps. Those of us who work with union actors are restricted to a very narrow window during which we can attempt to attract an audience. And once it's over, it's over.

But looking at football this week, I'm wondering if we're looking at this the wrong way. Yes, there are arbitrary limits on when an audience is allowed to see our work, and once it's over, it's gone forever. But perhaps we need to look to football -- treat performances as a rare commodity that audiences would be privileged to witness rather than a product with which we're desperate to saturate the market, if only we were allowed.

Being allowed to charge hundreds of dollars for a ticket would help, too.

devil in the details (producing part two)

The introductory theater course at the small Midwestern college I attended as a smartass undergrad was pejoratively called "Baby Drama." Through the year-long course students (the majority of whom, of course, saw themselves as actors) were required to do units on every facet of theater, from design to technical theater. A unit that is woefully lacking is producing.

Every actor should produce at least once. (My union, Actors' Equity Association, does not agree. More on that below.) As I've noted before, producing -- in my estimation -- is notable by how unnoticeable the producer must become. This is a wonderful exercise for those who love being in the spotlight, as they must keep their hammy instinct in check.


It's right around here that anyone who's worked on COI productions will smirk, since the author of this blog is a repeat offender, simultaneously producing and playing leading roles in productions -- including the last four. Sheesh.

I will say in my own defense that I have always made sure to insulate myself as producer and performer/playwright by placing buffers -- directors and co-producers with veto powers and the freedom to make final decisions -- not to mention a willingness on my part to go along with those calls, even when I disagreed. If our shows haven't sucked it was not because I was in them or wrote them; it was because I made sure the final decisions on a lot things were in the right people's hands (hands that were NOT mine).


The theater company's name, Conflict of Interest, is an homage to the status under which I work as a producing Equity actor. I don't know where my letter went so I can't quote chapter and verse, but I am in violation of AEA's by-laws; I am under perpetual "conflict of interest" status for having being acted as both producer and performer. This is true even on shows I'm not producing. And I got the dunce cap after doing it just once -- a one-strike-and-you're-out rule.

This is because AEA is a labor organization, and views the theater industry as a classic labor model, analogous to, say, a car factory. In a factory, labor and management will never become one: an assembly line worker is not going to build a factory next door.


But of course theater is not at all like manufacturing: theatrical line workers (actors and stage managers) can and do build their own workplaces all the time. Instead of acknowledging the miracle of market flexibility that it is off-Broadway (ooh, sorry, we're calling it Indie theater now), actors lucky enough to make the union who also produce their own works are seen as enemies among performers, rather than potential allies among producers.


This rant is becoming stale in my mouth, since it's been my well-worn soapbox for a few years now. Rules are rules: they piss you off, and you work around them. The end. You can let them stop you, or you can refuse to do so.

Either way, rules don't care -- they just are. And the more you get worked up, the more the people who enforce them get worked up: the AEA point-person who first encountered COItc's name on showcase paperwork did not find the name endearing.

devil in the details (producing part one)

Theater is a game of illusions; convincing an audience that there is more (or less) than meets the eye is part of the game. Which is why my (amply articulated by now) abiding interest in politics makes sense: the magician's trick of making a routine practiced exhaustively appear spontaneous is a skill every politician envies. We're supposed to enjoy the spectacle, but not the circuitry behind it.

It makes the fact that making 2009 the year of Government is Trying to Kill us with Healthcare Reform Theater so fascinating, since it's the 40th anniversary of one of big government's more spectacular achievements. Yet, if you listen to certain elements of the right-wing extreme, government intervention has spelled only disaster throughout our history.

Craig Nelson's "Rocket Men," a riveting account of the Apollo moon landing, provides convincing proof that theater is like rocket science.

Not for the intelligence required, or the prestige, or the gobs of money that were and still are thrown at NASA (some would say at the expense of the NEA: President Johnson said "We can do it all," and how wrong he was).

Instead, I find the parallels between theater and rockets in Nelson's description of how rocket propulsion works:

The essence of rocketry is combining fuel, flame, and oxidizer in a combustion chamber to create a continuously exploding bomb, the force of which is directed through a throat, and then a nozzle. If the liquid fuel pumped into the chamber isn't immediately ignited, however, it builds up, causing varying degrees of explosion -- known as combustion oscillations -- some of which can be more powerful than the chamber is designed to hold. The result is that the motor regularly blows itself up [...]

Repeated trial and error of an engine model that contains thousands of parts, with every success preceded buy hundreds, thousands, of failures; as Nelson puts it, "more of an art than science."

You rarely can explain the moment where things went wrong: once a rocket explodes, the potential culprits number in the hundreds, scattered across an airfield. Here's where theater is a bit like rocket science but turned on its head: instead of finding the elusive detail that makes things go wrong, in theater you tend to hunt for that magic ingredient that made things go right.

Cast member Roy Clary ("Henry") and Associate Producer Jessica Hochman at The Third Seat's First read through on-site, Ceol Irish Pub.

Now, we've been lucky so far here at COItc in that our airfield isn't littered with too many shards of blown-up engines. I think we're rather pleased with our output -- even though we do try to learn from mistakes when we make them.

But if theater is like rocket science, producing theater is rather like the bureaucratic effort that went on behind the scenes to create and fund NASA; if successful, it's an effort that goes largely unnoticed. It's only when the rocket blows up that questions are asked about how that was allowed to happen.

Roy Clary and Laurel Lockhart ("Estelle") in the finished product.

There are two moments when the sister movements of Libertarianism and small-government Conservatism seem like good ideas: (1) when I get my pay stub with state, federal, and city taxes excised, and (2) when I do the paperwork for an Equity showcase.

Suddenly I wonder why it is that we've placed all these red-tape-ringed barriers to progress when the source of our greatness clearly lies in the derring-do of individuals who flaunt the status quo and bravely set out into uncharted waters. Ben Franklin didn't care about paperwork and approvals.

These are also the moments, of course, when I conveniently forget that Columbus had Isabella, the Founders had slaves, Babe Ruth never had to compete with black baseball players, and the Greatest Generation had the New Deal, the GI Bill, and Social Security. So shut up, Grover Norquist.

At the off-off-off-on-the-other-side-of-the-East-River-Broadway level where COItc dwells, producing duties tend to consist of caring for any elements of production not covered by someone else. You're not fighting for the glorious spoils, you're sweeping up table scraps: that set has to go somewhere after you close, and it's the producer's job to figure out where (answer: the producer's [my] living room). In the three years of sweeping in between designers' fiefdoms, I've developed theories as to why the rocket hasn't blown up too spectacularly.

A producer must be invisible
In a meeting of more than two people, a producer should be silent.

In a meeting of two people, a producer should *not* be silent. (Like the MTA says, if you see something...)

A producer must get the hell out of the way
It's a strange alchemy, and whatever personality type one is when they approach producing, it's guaranteed to be ill-suited to the job at hand. Type A know-it-alls will micromanage themselves into a disaster. Church mice will lose control of the ship. More than the actor, more than the director, the producer must be all things to all people. You must become the smoke-blower-in-chief. Most importantly, none of the good ideas can come from you -- they have to come from the people you hired.

Like the paper-pushing bureaucrat who lines up the government funding, when your job goes well, as a producer you are an unseen ally. The rest of the time every single actor, designer, and crewmember will curse you as the ogre responsible for their lack of resources, inability to create freely, and pretty much everything that needs to be blamed on someone.

The producer's hand is the invisible hand of government, paving roads, shoring up infrastructure, and getting none of the credit, but all of the blame.

[More bitchy wisdom to come]