Members of the Review Committee, created from the settlement of the 1988 Equity Waiver Wars, met Monday at the Matrix Theatre on Melrose. Simon Levy, producing director of the Fountain Theatre, said myriad options were being considered, including legal action.
4 comments:
I guess I would be curious to hear the actual terms of Equity's "minimum wage" requirement. I don't really see what this measure will do other than force theaters to reduce cast size and hire less actors. These small theater companies operate on such tight financial margins as it is, so I completely understand that a measure such as this must be a complete headache for them to have to deal with. The article explicitly states, "Many members told us they think of 99-seat productions as their 'gym'—a valuable space to strengthen their artistic muscles, hone their craft and take on roles they might not otherwise have the chance to play." With that idea in mind, why in the world would the union want to take any action that might reduce the amount of actors that can "hone" their creative prowess. It seems like almost making it more difficult to get practice time in the "practice room." I do think that some of these producers are overreacting when they think that AEA is trying to kill 99 seat theaters. But still, I don't really see how minimum wage is going to help anything in this situation.
It funny to think we are in an art school and so many of my friends are wanting to do acting for the rest of their lives, or at least as long as they can. And here at CMU they seem to choose the best of the best (of those who auditioned) and to think they are paying so much to be a part of a world that may be so brutal finically. These friends of mine express how they would love to be a part of a theatre company and perform forever, but will they be able to sustain with the amount of money that they will be provided to live. And I would like to think that all of them will be very successful and make a lot of money, but this is a dog eat dog world and that may not happen for all of them. And all of the work these people put into their performance, it seems like a great idea to find a sustained minimum wage, but I also see why it's so impossible because it depends on the theatre and what is happening with that company/performance.
Like Ben, I'm also very interested to know the terms of this equity agreement, especially because of the confusing nature of this article. I'm not quite sure what they're trying to get at when they spoke about diversity taking "a nose dive". Are they trying to infer that more diverse casts create smaller audiences and thus ticket sales go down and the returns are not as large? If not, that's a big statement that they might not want to be confusing. With the current economic status of regional theatres, I can see a cause for concern when theater companies are making less money and equity is expecting more, but how drastic is this change that it's not even "financially feasible"?
Additionally, it's very important to remember that the people causing these changes, the people that run equity, are mostly performers/managers themselves, so it should be a call for the performers to stand up and let equity know what the issue is if it really is going to cause serious problems for these theaters.
This also brings up a larger issue in that equity is not including theater managers and theaters themselves into the circle, which may be causing these kind of actor/theater conflicts. Would it do much harm to have theaters voicing their two cents/opinions (even if they were strictly financial) in the realm of equity?
Financially, theatre is a business with very limited means. I think the problem is in the fact that unlike some other countries, the U.S. does not fund arts and the artists. It is almost impossible for artists to support themselves on Neely their art, so they find day jobs, become exhausted and their arts suffers. It is a vicious cycle and while actors should be paid more, So too should regional theaters be able to pay them better.
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