It's Not Your Fault
Victim Blaming and the Myth of the Theater Career
The first thing I need to tell you is this: It’s Not Your Fault.
The Myth of the Theater Career that is internalized by artists through constant repetition first by authority figures and mentors, and then by peers, is that success is predicated on Working Hard and Wanting It Badly Enough. Oh, and a little luck. But mostly Working Hard and Wanting It Badly Enough. If you’re having a hard time getting a foot in the door, well, double down, take more classes, lose some weight, get a better set of headshots, audition more—GRIND!
And if you’re still struggling, well, you just must not be Good Enough. The cream rises to the top, you know! (So does pond scum, by the way.)
This is utter nonsense. Worse, it is victim blame. The fact is that we have created a system that abuses artists. (As I write this, the Writers Guild of America is on strike in Hollywood describing, in very vivid terms, how this is the case for TV and film authors. It’s no better for theater people.)
Let’s look at a few statistics. Each year, Actors Equity Association, the union for actors and stage managers, publishes a report in which they outline the statistics concerning employment for their members during the past year. If you look at the report for 2018-2019—the last year before the pandemic, a year generally regarded as a very good one for AEA members—you get a portrait of what you’re up against.
In that golden year, AEA had 51,938 “active members,” which is defined as members who “are continuing to seek work and/or pay basic dues in the union.” You know, the ones who are Working Hard and Wanting It Badly Enough. Of those active members, a total of 19,369 worked at least once during the season, an increase, we are told, of “1,535 over the past four seasons, which is a good trend to observe.” Yay, theater! But closer examination and basic arithmetic paints a slightly less rosy picture: 62.7% of AEA active members didn’t work a day in the theater during that year. That’s almost two out of every three active members.
It gets worse, I’m afraid.
Of those who were lucky enough to find a job, the average number of work weeks during the year was seventeen, or about one out of every three weeks. “This year’s work week total is the highest ever,” AEA crows, “surpassing the previous high established last season.” But what do those seventeen weeks represent as far as income is concerned?
Total member income for 2018-19 was about $479 million divided over the approximately 329,000 work weeks. That’s about $1455 a week on average—an average that includes all those stars slumming on Broadway and making a lot more than the rest of us, but hey, we’ll go with the average anyway. If you’re living in New York City, you’ll pay 28.5% of that in federal, state, and local income tax, leaving you about $1050. Oh, and you’ll be paying your agent 10% off the top, so now you’re clearing $900 a week. You also owe AEA dues of 2.5% of gross earnings, so another $36 (we won’t add in the $176 annual dues, which are billed bi-annually). When all is said and done, you’ll bring home around $3500 a month. (But in reality it is even lower than that because, as noted in an article in Broadway News about AEA’s support for an expansion of the Qualified Performing Artist tax deduction, “Experts estimate that entertainment professionals spend between 20 and 30 percent of their income on work expenses—from agent and manager fees to headshots, equipment and professional development.”) But we’ll stay with $3500 a month.
Now log onto Apartments.com and do a search to find out how much you can expect to pay to rent a studio apartment in, say, Brooklyn. How much do you have left for all the other expenses of life?
Remember, as an active member who has been employed, you’re one of the winners! Why, after sixteen weeks of employment you qualify for six months of Tier 1 health insurance!
The purpose of this isn’t to depress you—although it is definitely depressing—but rather to make explicit that the game is rigged against you, and that’s the case no matter how hard you work or how much you want it. It’s simply not sustainable or economically viable for artists.
And yet it is almost impossible to get members of the profession to acknowledge this. “Don’t stomp all over my dreams,” they cry out. “It’ll be different for me! I will Really Work Hard and I Want It So MUCH!”
There’s Gotta Be a Better Way
I’ll be describing some strategies and techniques that will empower you to become an “independent artist.” So what do I mean by “independent”? Think of the Declaration of Independence, in which the Founding Fathers declared themselves free of the control of England. Same thing here: independence means freedom from the control of others.
It is the freedom to control what you do, when you do it, and where you do it without asking permission of an external authority. It is the freedom to be in charge of your artistic development—the projects and experiments you need to do to expand your skills and imagination and fully embody your vision.
You’re in charge. You’re the boss.
This newsletter is about something I like to think about as “creative insubordination”; it’s about change, innovation, rebooting the system for making art more widely available and artists more strongly empowered. Disruption. What business guru Seth Godin called “making a ruckus.”
It isn’t about career management.
It isn’t about how to gain more attention within the current system by having a better headshot or resumé or audition piece or website.
It isn’t about networking or working your way up from the bottom, or asking permission to implement your ideas.
That’s how employees think. You’re not an employee, you’re an artist.
It’s about creating a whole new system that will make the old system irrelevant—at least irrelevant to you. Well, OK, we’re not making a whole new system, which would be overwhelming, but rather developing a different approach to your artistic life that is sustainable and fulfilling for you. And if you’re able to do so, you become an inspiration for someone else to try, and then they are a model for someone else, and pretty soon there is an alternative path (i.e., a whole new system).
So here on Substack we’ll be exploring a new approach to a career in the performing arts, and the choice of location is intentional. Substack describes itself as a “new economic engine for culture,” and it provides a place for writers to directly serve their readers, and be supported by them. Instead of being an employee of a newspaper or a magazine, writers sell their writing directly to their readers. There are, of course, plusses and minuses to that, but what is most important, at least to me, is that the writers are in complete control of what they write, when they write it, and where they write it.
It’s time for theater people to stop thinking like employees and start seeking a new model of artistic sustainability that puts artists at the control panel. Not administrators. Not boards of directors. Not government agencies or foundations. Not gatekeepers. Artists.
I think it’s possible.
And I think it is neccesary.