Saturday, January 15, 2011
Spider-Man and Equity: By Nick Wyman, AEA President
Actors' Equity.org: "I have been very disturbed and distraught by the serious injuries sustained by our member Chris Tierney at the December 20th performance of SPIDER-MAN: TURN OFF THE DARK. My thoughts and prayers have been with him for the past ten days, and I have been in touch with him by phone and e-mail. Chris is a study in toughness and grace. Hemingway defined guts as 'grace under pressure.' Guts is what Chris Tierney has consistently displayed both before and after his accident.
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4 comments:
"Chris is not "a stunt man," as the newspapers keep referring to him in their churlishly patronizing way."
Then maybe equity should be looking into requiring these spiderman doubles to be trained stuntmen instead of dancers. While training dancers to do these complicated does seem to be a logical approach, stuntmen are a different breed of performer who are likely more capable of these sequences which in fact should classified as stunts.
While putting policies and procedures under scrutiny is a great idea to ensure safety, perhaps its time to examine the sequence as a stunt and what kind of regulations should apply.
I know that Broadway theater is suppose to be all about the money but you would think after the fourth injury of one of their actors they might finally call it quicks on a show thats running more previews than most runs of shows in New York. You would think that the people running this show would either hire actual stunt people to do these extremely dangerous stunts or change the stunt completely. It amazes me that this has crossed these producers minds yet. But what is really sad is that if this show actually ends up opening it will probably make back all its loses because people want to see a spectacle and maybe hope they see someone get hurt in a failed stunt.
Kevin is right, stuntmen may be more capable of doing the complicated sequences. Wyman said that he doesn't know what effect Chris Tierney's injuries will have on his career because he is a dancer. If you use regular performers to do these stunts who are untrained and if they do get injured, it could end their careers.
And in regards to what Abby said, it really says something about people who would only see this show cause someone could get injured.
This show could have its own blog devoted to documenting all of the issues it has encountered so far. We all are very aware that there are some serious safety issues with this show, and the latest incident only served to make the problem that much more known to the world.
I think Equity has done more than we give them credit for, which Mr. Wyman is good to point out in his statement here. I'm sure that without their oversight this show could have been one hundred times the technical and safety nightmare than it is today--so let's do give them credit for that.
But I do have to agree with my fellow commenters here that there is more that can be done. For instance, they can change the stunt to make it less dangerous to the person actually doing it and less scary to the audience. Thrilling an audience is one thing, but horrifying them is something completely different. And as Kevin pointed out, as this is most definitely a stunt, someone with specific training in these rough and tumble dangerous things should be employed to do them--not a dancer that they throw into a harness and have practice the moves for a few weeks. (Yes, I'm making huge assumptions here...oh well.) I'm curious to see how Spider-Man recovers from this and what improvements they make to ensure better working conditions for their actors.
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