So You Want a Career in The Theatre?

Not too long ago I found myself sitting in on a presentation, more a Q&A at a bagger weekend - or maybe parents weekend. One of those Saturday mornings I find myself in my faculty capacity talking to parents. In the course of this thing, one of the other faculty present brought up a tidbit I have since found is one of her favorites for this occasion, saying something akin to "at any given time more than 80% of Equity actors are unemployed."

Its possible she says this just to see the parents squirm some. There they are sitting next to their pride and joy children who are basking in the higher ed glow of the campus visit being told in so many words that their kids have no future.

In this particular case I took it upon myself to try to back them all away from the edge. I talked some about the difference between having "work" and having "a job" and how some actors work for a time and then don't work for a time and its built into how they are paid. I gave them a little line about how when an Equity member is working AGMA or SAG (or god forbid non-union) then they are in Equity's eyes "unemployed" for that time. Then some about how people who are essentially retired from acting keep their Equity membership for personal reasons. It seemed to help quite a bit. Several parents, mostly dads, stopped me after to say thank you.

Somewhere in the course of this rescue I mentioned that Actor's Equity is not like the Pipefitter's Local. They don't necessarily try to keep the workforce matched to the work available, and there's no hiring hall where you go to get into a show.

Which brings me to two articles from today's NewsPage:

• News from the Real World: You're the One That I Want
• News from the Real World: Stage Jobs Rise in West

The first is from the Times, although its been all over, about how the producers of the next Broadway production of "Grease" are going to cast their show through a TV reality show. I guess since they did it in England we have to do it here now. And that doesn't begin to convey the feeling I had discovering that there even was a production of "Grease" coming up.

Didn't it just close?

I guess the point I was looking for around this is that it is hard enough for Actors to land paying work anyway. Is there a real compelling reason to cast this way? It's not like they wouldn't have filled their audition call, and its not like they wouldn't have had dazzling talent show up for the auditions. One has to wonder if this is more about finding a "discovery" for the cast or finding the "disasters" they'll get to embarrass on the television show.

So through the miracle of the modern reality show we're going to convince even more people that maybe the career they have been looking for is Actor. Which rolls us around to article number two, which is supposed to be a positive sounding article from "Backstage" explaining that there have been more opportunities for actors in the past year. Specifically:

"In a report on conditions for the 2005-'06 season, Actors' Equity Association noted work weeks for actors rose by 9.6 percent in the Central Region, 4.5 percent in the West and fell less than 1 percent in the East. A work week is defined as one week of work for one actor. Overall, there were 299,493 work weeks. "

Which took me back to that weekend and the Pipefitter analogy. Doing the math, figuring an optimistic American 50 week work-year you come up with: 299,493 weeks/50 weeks/year= 5989.86 work years/year. Rounded and restated that means if Equity did work like a traditional trade union, they would close their books after accumulating roughly 6000 working actors because thats as many full time jobs there are.

But they don't work like that, and it's clear that the working actors don't all work 50 weeks out of the year. The article goes on to revise my colleague's 80% number:

"In a news release, Equity also stated the average number of union members working in a week was 5,759 (3,667 principals, 1,187 chorus members and 905 stage managers). With more than 45,000 members, approximately 13 percent were employed in any given week. "

87%.

I don't think that's going to make the parents feel better.