So the Festival reached high. It also stretched large, toward plays requiring big casts, heavy staging demands, and elaborate sets—plays that commercial producers haven’t touched for decades, and that are increasingly neglected (or else “defined down” in terms of personnel and physical production) even among not-for-profit companies, for economic reasons even when others (e. g., generational popifications of taste) are not present. WTF was able to do this because of a rather ingenious contract that Nikos had worked out with the relevant unions (principally Actors’ Equity). Under terms of this agreement, the company was able to assemble each summer three tiers of non-Equity (i. e., unpaid, or paying) talent below the principal acting company, and to make use of these recruits, who at peak numbered a hundred, for all manner of technical labor, as well as for supporting and supernumerary parts in those big plays. As Jenny Gersten, the company’s Interim and former Artistic Director (she agreed to return for a year after a calamitous 2021) points out, this contract was a build-out of the old summer stock agreements, which always allowed for a contingent of apprentices taking their first steps toward professional status. (“No fee, no pay,” was the most inviting of the conditions advertised by the theatres in the trade papers every spring.) There was a crucial difference, though. Whereas stock companies were commercial, nominally for-profit companies, WTF was a non-profit enterprise, in a working agreement with another—Williams College—whose facilities the Festival used. That agreement has eroded in recent years. The Festival has been squeezed down in length, personnel, and number of productions. Its floundering after a coherent artistic direction has been worsened by the exigencies of the pandemic and the pressures of social justice demands, and the remains of the old arrangements with Actors’ Equity and the technical unions were blown away by the mismanagement of the most recent seasons. For those now trying to sustain the company, and perhaps restore some of its former luster, it’s an unenviable predicament.(I)
Footnotes
| ↑I | In a recent article, Jesse Green, the New York Times‘ chief drama critic, writes about the minimal salaries of workers in regional theatre companies, and the joint efforts of some of the smaller ones to address matters of inequity and transparency. He offers some specifics, which may well shock anyone unknowledgeable about showbiz, but no one else. He also devotes ample space to the Williamstown Theatre Festival, where in his youth he spent a summer among the apprentii. He is right that access to such a program rests on a degree of financial advantage (either one pays, or agrees to work unpaid); that if one looks at this as labor practice in any “normal” industry, it, along with many “intern” arrangements, can be considered exploitive; and that its effect can be discriminatory unless some equalizing practice is put into place. And I am glad that he is looking behind the scenes into the economics of theatre, and by extension the other live performing arts. I do hope that as he goes forward, though, he will do so with an awareness that these are not “normal” industries, but “stagnant” ones, unable to avail themselves of the productivity gains of modern technologies, and thus to keep pace with inflation and with commercial businesses competing for labor and materials. I also hope he thinks of the centuries-old traditions of apprenticeship in artistic and artisanal enterprises of all sorts—you must learn the craft to gain admittance to the guild. And, finally, fine as it is to advocate for fair labor practices, I hope he addresses the matter of where money is to come from for plays beyond chamber size, or for anything that may not have immediate popular appeal, if labor costs are to rise significantly. I will comment briefly on this in relation to our non-profit sector at the end of this article. |
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