AMERICAN THEATRE: The more I think about the incredible devastation this pandemic has wrought on our world and on our industry, the more I feel called to contribute to the conversation about using this leveling blow to rebuild how theatres work and how we treat our actors. As a theatre administrator, it feels like my Jerry Maguire moment (without the morning-after regret) to lay out the harsh realities of the structure we have created and the hopeful possibilities of where we could go if we stop talking and start walking.
7 comments:
This article really spoke to me. I think revolution is on everyone in my social circle's lips right now. I personally believe that to go back to "normal" after this is a complete waste of all we've learned and how we've struggled through the pandemic and stood up for black lives. It has become evident that in order to move forward changes must be made to our healthcare system and labor restrictions. Working long hours like the long rehearsal days mentioned in the article can seriously take a toll on a person's mental health. I'm am a culprit of working myself to my limit and recently I have been feeling the effects of it, so I am trying to give myself some slack and allow myself rest days every so often. Paid vacations are also so important because it shouldn't just be the wealthy that are able to take time off. Not just theatre, but absolutely every institution must change in order to progress.
In my anti-racist theater course, we discussed how we would recreate theater. This article is very similar to what we said. Theater needs to prioritize people over a product. Working long hours is not a sustainable practice especially when pay isn't that good. There needs to be a better dialogue between people in charge and people actually creating the theater. A way that theater can be held accountable. People should have lives outside of their jobs. They should be able to afford to have families and be able to afford to spend time with them. I very much agree with Jem, I think that going back to "normal" after everything that has happened would be a complete waste of time. Now is the perfect time to implement policies and change to positively affect theater. I hope that the initiative is taken to work towards this. People working in theater deserve to be seen as people and have lives and fair wages at the very bare minimum.
I definitely read this headline to the tune of the Beatles song, although I will say I thought from the title that the article would be even more anarcical than it was overall. I do commend that “American Theatre” is offering all of their works for free as a way to provide equity in the hectic times we have found ourselves in due to the pandemic. I think the headline photo being a shakespearean theater provides an incredible comparison of older theatre to the new theatrical revolution. I like the idea of using these circumstances to rebuild theatre, but I think it goes beyond that. We need to reconstruct people’s ideas of theatre and the constructs that surround it. This is the way to actually implement change. We need to change the work and its circumstances that the article describes, but we also need to change so much more from the price point barriers for the audience, casting and hiring biases, and how we treat awards for shows. There is a lot of work to be done on every level and I hope it happens in the best way possible all across the industry.
-Ariel Bernhard
I chose this article because I wanted to see if theatres were really going to use this downtime to talk about how to come back and rebuild a ‘different’ and ‘new’ type of theatre- even though the author is talking about a business model and not so much about how to fix the white supremacy system of theatre. Something that I do think makes sense is his call for 40 hour work weeks, paid vacation and personal time off- something that just doesn’t happen in many theatres. However, I can’t imagine how shops get things done in that time frame, partially because academic theatre shows no qualms in having students work around the clock, and never works to teach healthy boundaries. I do disagree with the idea that creative staff should also be hired on full time- I believe that it is the rotating job of these designers that keep theatres fresh- by constantly rotating through who designs which shows, more designers have a chance for their work to be shown, instead of theatres who, for example, hire the same costume designer for an entire season, or worse, years. I think overall his plan makes a lot of sense, but I feel that too many theatres are money driven to care.
The title of this article is unnecessarily condescending. The article itself was not condescending, but there is something that is really bothering me about the titles of articles this week I hit on in several comments this week. I know that there is something interesting in this phrasing, but it takes away the power of the content of the article. That initial moment of condescension sets a tone that the article itself has to work to undo, as well as getting its intended point across. Titles aside, the idea that we need to be focusing on process instead of product is so important. In my ART class, we were discussing the importance of supporting the actor ahead of developing the character, and the same is true for behind the product as well; we need to support the individual creative ahead of their product. We need to acknowledge and respect the theatrical community as people before we acknowledge what they produce.
I thought there were a lot of good points in this article, which basically boils down to that we need to value people over product, and reduce or eliminate the behaviors of the industry that made it toxic or difficult to work in, pre-pandemic. There’s been so many articles about how we can use this shutdown to really buckle down and make some systemic changes to how we do things, and I definitely think there’s merit to that. A lot of meaningful change can be pushed off by saying ‘it’s an ongoing process’, both industry-wide and by individual companies, making it hard to do any kind of sweeping change. A nationwide shutdown, in some ways, can really help spark that, because new policies can be built in from the ground up as reopening gradually occurs. I do think, though, that a lot of companies are on the financial brink right now and are going to be extremely wary about any changes that might push them over.
The title of this article really threw me off and definitely wasn’t what I was expecting. Like Emma Patterson said, it was very condescending and when I saw who the article was by I got a little scared of what I was gonna read. The article itself did make some great points about putting people over product, which is something theatres have a huge issue with, even educational theatre. Like they said in the article, ALL theatre should have a base of education but thinking about CMU Drama, sometimes it feels like exploited labor and I have no fucking clue what I was supoosed to learn. During this national shutdown in the entertainment industry, there really needs to be a shift in diverse hiring in front of and behind the scenes, as well as putting people’s health and lives over the shows. I understand that theatre people are all working towards the goal of putting shows up but health, rest, outside life, and fair working hours are more important.
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