On Theater, Community, and Money

As a member of a community that creates work, I lost sight of my own identity as a worker.

This month, The New York Times trumpeted the fact that Hamilton had raised its top ticket prices to upwards of $800. Two things came to mind when I saw that number — which is approximately eight times what I paid to see Hamilton in its initial run at The Public Theater:

1. I was supremely lucky that a friend in the know had tipped me off that I might want to, like, possibly buy some tickets while the musical was still in development.
2. $849 (the price of one top ticket) is almost exactly the largest budget I ever had when I was actively designing props in theater.

‘Hamilton’ Raises Ticket Prices: The Best Seats Will Now Cost $849

While productions like Hamilton get seemingly endless (and genuinely deserved) press coverage and accolades, the majority of theater produced in this country is produced in a different universe — a universe where the single review a show might get in a local alt-weekly can make or break that show. A universe where $800 is the entire budget for props, not the price of a premium ticket. What would be the meaning of a premium ticket, anyways, when the entire audience is sitting in folding chairs?

I used to work in that world. After graduating from college with a degree in theater, I worked in what is loosely called “storefront theater” — a couple hundred little theaters in my Midwestern metropolis, some located in literal storefronts, most seating a very respectable several dozen people, few capable of affording union contracts, and all running on the enthusiastic labor of people who generally were (and still are) wildly overworked and underpaid. The labor of people whose love for art pushes the limit every single day.

I’ve been thinking a lot about art and work because the biggest theater story this month was not, to me, Hamilton’s ticket price bump or even its success at the Tonys. It was a story published in Chicago’s local alt-weekly, the Chicago Reader, detailing two decades of abuse at one of those storefront theaters. I never worked at the theater in question, but I certainly knew folks who did — this is, after all, a small community.

At Profiles Theatre the drama-and abuse-is real

In brief, it’s the story of how a key player at a small theater known for gritty, fearless storytelling about violence and abuse managed to perpetrate, well, actual violence and abuse. For decades. On stage and off.

If you have a few hours, a lot of empathy, and a strong stomach, it’s worth a read — all 13,000 words of it. It is incredibly painful to get through, although it also chronicles the strong work that has been done in the last couple of years towards creating protections for non-union workers. (In the theater, union tends to refer to Actors’ Equity, which covers actors and stage managers, although there are also separate unions for designers and directors, etc., and when you get higher up the chain at bigger regional theaters there are union stagehands and technicians, etc.).

“Worker” is an interesting term to apply to people who create storefront theater, because so many of those people are described as, and would describe themselves, as artists, or members of a family or community. Look at the “teaching artist” rosters at the bigger theaters around town, or look at widely read and shared platforms such as HowlRound, which describes itself as “A knowledge commons by and for the theatre community.”

Or consider — really consider — the use of the term community. Is the advertising industry a community? The pharmaceutical industry? The defense industry? Big agriculture? Perhaps there are industry mixers where the heads of GlaxoSmithKline and Bristol-Myers Squibb bring each other homemade birthday cakes — I really wouldn’t know. Maybe everybody in Los Angeles who works in the defense industry hangs out at the same bars on the weekend. I’ve never worked in those industries — or, to speak more broadly, within “industry,” as we conceive of it in contemporary culture, at all. Perhaps Broadway is big business, but where I live, here out in the Midwest, theater is a community first and foremost. Sometimes I worried, towards the end of my time there, that it was a community that thought of itself as a community first and a workplace second. It’s part of why I eventually decided to leave.

It is also, of course, part of why I stayed for so long, even when I was basically losing money paying for gas, parking, food, and, yes, props for which I never expected to be reimbursed. I loved leaving my boring old 9-to-5 with a spring in my step as I headed out to see my friends at the theater. When you’re working on a show, you’re generally so busy that rehearsal and even tech double as your social life, which can be confusing because it blurs the line between personal and professional almost beyond recognition.

The Reader piece, while mercifully far from my own experience, is chock full of those blurred lines. When it was published, my Facebook feed exploded in a cacophony of reactions from people I knew from every show I’d ever done — and they were all talking to each other in the comment threads, because they all knew each other, because everyone knows everyone, which is both awesome and slightly terrifying and overwhelming at times.

I felt sick to my stomach. I’d been warned away from working at the theater in question — and I had never questioned why. Every frustration I’d ever had on every show I’d ever worked evaporated in the heat of the anger welling in me. I was glad that the article had been written, but I was not glad that it had needed to be.

Because I was never an actress, I told myself as I read the article, I was never in a position of extreme vulnerability like the women included in the Reader piece. I never put my body on stage. I never put my feelings on stage. But is that really true? Is that true of anyone who works in any artistic discipline?

My eyes once closed as I was driving home from a tech rehearsal. I was behind the wheel, alone in the car. It was two in the morning and I had to be at work the next day by 9 am. I was stubbornly working a full-time job in addition to doing storefront theater, because, as I now understand in retrospect, I had a very hard time adjusting to the notion of giving up the middle-class comforts I had grown up with just for the sake of pursuing art. So I worked a well-paying 9-to-5 and showed up at the theater from 7 to 10 and on weekends and I didn’t sleep much. During tech week, which requires even later nights and longer hours, I almost didn’t sleep at all.

(Sidebar: literally everyone who works in storefront theater has some sort of other job. The sane people have part-time jobs in flexible fields such as food service or bartending — and some folks use those teaching artist gigs at bigger theaters to supplement their work at the smaller enterprises. I had a full-time office job because I have a chronic condition which required comprehensive health insurance in the era before the Affordable Care Act — which is a whole other discussion.)

I was on a major highway when my eyes closed, and even though I’m not a spiritual person, I really do think that some force in the universe was watching out for me. My car did not crash. I wavered in my lane, but no one was nearby, and the sudden movement jerked me awake and I drove the rest of the way home. I stumbled upstairs, fell asleep in my clothes, got up the next morning and drove to work without taking the time to find my phone — which, I later discovered, I had actually lost.

I was devoted to that show, and to the theater company that produced it. It was one of those storefront theaters where the production staff honestly made me feel emotionally secure and safe and supported. And so I told a few friends about the incident and tried to laugh it off. Ha ha ha, this show is so much work it made me almost fall asleep while driving.

And yet… I think that now, so many years later, I want to break it down a little bit further.

At the time I blamed myself for overextending myself. No one told me to work a full-time office job in addition to theater. Most people I knew who worked in storefront had much more flexible and/or part-time employment. If I was more organized, perhaps, I could be a more efficient worker. If I was willing to settle for living with roommates, or making less money, I could lead a life with less stress. Going through tech and getting up and going to the particular office job I was working at the time was insane. If I quit… if… if… if…

I didn’t associate a thing about that show with abuse, and in a way I still don’t. It is — and I mean this so sincerely — one of my favorite productions I ever worked on. And yet there was something about the experience that crystallized an understanding for me: the understanding that unless you give everything you’ve got to your art, you’re doing it wrong. The understanding that if you give your all, you have nothing left. The understanding that sacrifice is what makes art.

With some time and distance, I have a few questions for that younger version of myself. Such as: is it really okay, for a stipend of a few hundred dollars, to give up the stability of regular employment, and, oh, I don’t know, health insurance? Do meetings after tech rehearsals have to let out at two in the morning? Even if no one made you get into that car, did you feel pressure to do so? Where was the pressure coming from? Was it truly internal?

I have been in situations where I’ve had questionable pressure put on me and I’ve been in situations where I have, frankly, put questionable pressure upon others. When doing props for a show, I once tried to make actors drink this disgusting food coloring and water mixture because I couldn’t afford real juice for the run of the show. I avoided the inevitable showdown until the last second instead of tackling it head-on, and so way too late in the process I had what could perhaps genteelly be termed a fight with the director, but there still wasn’t any money, and so the actors bought their own juice with their own money and everyone involved felt like garbage. I seem to remember that I cried over the juice. I felt bad for the actors, but I felt bad for myself, too.

That show became a hit that extended for months, and whether or not with the extension came more money to purchase juice I’m honestly not sure. I don’t remember. The production staff really take over the reins after tech, anyways, and the budget as it ultimately shook out once the show had closed is not something I would have ever seen. But how does something like that happen? Crying over apple juice?

I seem to remember, through the haze of suppression and shame, buying apple juice later at the store, on my own, but, you know, to drink, as part of my normal grocery run, the way a normal person would buy juice. And I stood there staring at the shelf and a complaint lodged in my throat and it caught there, unformed, choking me.

And I wondered, staring at a bottle of apple juice, to what extent was I just enabling my own misery. It’s incredibly dangerous and seductive to build would-be stoicism up into a mythology that supports abuses large and small. There’s nothing heroic about buying props with your own money. And there’s nothing about it that’s specific to theater, really, in the end. It’s how art gets made in America, most of the time — and the one-in-a-million billion-dollar juggernauts never quite counterbalance the reality that I have never known as many friends on food stamps as I did while I was working in storefront theater.

Compared to the women in the Reader piece I have experienced nothing. So I cried over some juice. Whatever. But my experiences are not nothing. I have cried in rehearsal rooms, during design meetings, in my car alone and sitting at home. I have bought props with my own money with no expectation of reimbursement — and sometimes I regret that the juice for that production was not included on that list. I have lied and taken sick days from my “office” job to fix things at the theater. I have used a saw without safety goggles and climbed up a ladder that should have been decommissioned years ago. I have used spray paint indoors. And I’ve let people down — particularly actors — and I’ve passed the buck when someone, it didn’t matter who, needed to stop passing it.

But I was never on food stamps, and that wasn’t only because of my day job. While writing this piece, I dug into those files that the IRS tells you that you really ought to keep to check my design fees for old shows. And I found something that took my breath away — something that I had almost forgotten. I found a contract for a show where my design fee was higher than my budget (i.e., a show where I was paid more dollars to design props than I was given to actually purchase them). And I remembered, with considerable pain, wondering on the day I signed that contract if my labor was really worth what I was being offered. Can I be worth that much? I thought. In the end, I’m not sure I was. But I’m mindful of the societal forces that teach women and artists to devalue their own labor. And some questions are absurd — such as, were you paid way too much to break down crying in front of the actors that one time, or not nearly enough?

I’m several years away from my own experiences in storefront theater now, but it wasn’t a clean break. I had to buy some apple juice today for a recipe. I don’t drink it on its own much but I needed to use up some pork from my CSA and the recipe I found required cooking it in apple juice. “I tried to leave you behind me,” I thought sarcastically in the direction of the plastic bottle in the cooler, “but I am more faithful than I intended to be.” The apple juice just sat there. It did not respond, but it was on sale. I bought it. I cooked myself dinner before 11 pm — something I was rarely able to do when I was working in theater. I ate dinner while writing this. And now I’ll go to sleep, and when I get up in the morning to go to work, I’ll take that empty juice bottle downstairs with the rest of the recycling.

But when I eat my leftovers for lunch, I will think to myself that something about the meat doesn’t go down smoothly. And I’ll wonder why, and I’ll force myself to finish eating it, and then I’ll walk out from the break room into the sunlight outside my place of employment and think, just for a moment, about the longest distance between two places. And then I’ll go back to work.

Katherine Greenleaf’s interests include politics, shadow puppetry, archiving, and chocolate ice cream.

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