TACT

As a teacher of actors and acting, I always try to have an eye out for any information or statistics that will give my students a greater picture of what’s in store for them upon graduation. I do not like them to think about their careers in a vacuum, nor do I like to feed them myths or illusions about their chosen profession. Since I am of the firm belief that many theatre departments nationwide are training their students without regard for the realities of the profession and the changes that have occurred over the past 30 years, the more data I can accumulate to make my case, the better. Theatre education in this country needs change at every level, and it needs to change not only because we want to produce higher-quality theatre across a wider swath of this country, but because we need to provide career options beyond the standard “pre-professional training” model which is focused almost exclusively on finding success in the NYLACHI scene.

The indie scene has seen a great rise in visibility over the past five years or so, due primarily I believe to the rise of the internet, theatrical blogging, and the web presence of such sites as TimeOut NY and TheatreMania. I think it’s also becoming the place where most graduating seniors bent on heading to NYC to begin their rise to fame and fortune find their first taste of doing theatre in NYC. As such, it bears significant study and observation.

A recent demographic survey released on January 20th by the Innovative Theatre Foundation, which is the producer of the NY Innovative Theatre Awards, is a survey that I think has flown under the radar a little bit in terms of its information and what it has to say about the “average indie theatre person.” I think that’s important because the most immediate place in NYC that any young actor is going to find theatre work upon getting their BA/BFA is in the indie scene. The data is not only telling in terms of what it tells us about the profile of a typical indie actor, it also says something about the nature of what we are doing as educators. Let’s see if we can get some sort of profile of the “average indie actor” by looking at what the numbers actually mean. And for now I will stick with actors because that’s what I primarily do – train actors.

• You’re highly educated, female, and you’re white. 84% of all OOB actors have a college degree: 60% with a bachelors, 21% with a masters, 3% with a PhD. 77% are white. 5% are African-American, 4% Latino. 53% are female, 46% male.
• You’re young. 67% of all indie actors are between the ages of 21-40, a 19-year span. The highest age group is 26-30 year-olds at 24%. The average age is 36, the median is 33. There is an attrition rate of 50% from the 26-30 age group (24%) to the 36-40 age group (12%). All the percentages over 40 are in single digits. Only 20% of indie actors are between 40-55, a 15-year span.
• You’re single and childless. 51% of you are single, and 18% are living with a partner (not married). 92% of you have no children. I am assuming this 92% childlessness rate runs across all age groups.
• Your average income is between $30-50K annually. Your average annual salary is about $38, 209, which comes out to about $18.37/hour (as a reference, the contractor re-modeling my bathroom makes $35/hr). But you’re doing better that the median hourly wage of all actors in this country, which is $11.61 according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Before you get too excited about that, though, realize that you’re probably living in Manhattan (54%), where according to the Real Estate of New York’s rent survey for January 2010, the lowest rent for a non-doorman studio apartment is in Harlem at $1,312/month. In addition, your money is not being made through the theatre work you do – only 8% of the actors in this survey made all their money through their theatre work. 40% had a full-time job outside of theatre, and 31% had part-time work, for a 71% rate of employment outside theatre. Also, most actors indicated that acting was not the only thing they did as a theatre practitioner. 25% of you also do administrator/producer work, and another 22% also identify as directors. The survey is not clear about how much of the income that the 8% who make all their money through the theatre actually make it through acting alone, without income from these other theatrical identities.
• 48% of you managed to get into AEA, 45% did not. Union workers made an average of $32,092 per year (again, not strictly in the theatre), while non-union actors made $30, 786. So for the privilege of being a union member, you made $1,306 extra, which probably went to paying your union dues. Don’t spend that all in one place.

So, in summary, if you’re now in college studying as a theatre major at the graduate or undergraduate level planning to break into the theatre scene in NYC via the indie route, the statistics say that, for your educational and monetary investment, here’s what statistically you are/will become: a white, female, single, childless degree-holding actor holding down two or three jobs, and making $18.37 an hour at the career you educated and trained yourself for, all the while living in one of the most expensive geographic areas in the US. The stats also say that by 40 years old you will have left the indie scene at the very least; the odds are you will have moved on to something else entirely.

Is this what we really want to have happen to the human capital that makes up our richest resource for a vibrant theatre?  -twl

As today is March 15, the famous “Ides of March” in Julius Caesar, it was fitting this morning to stumble upon this article in the NY Times as I began my morning read:

High School Musical Actors Envision Being Rising Stars

In today’s culture, the Ides of March represents a sense of foreboding and imminent doom. Here are some out-of-context quotes from the students interviewed to give you a clue about where I am going:

“It’s like winning a Tony while you’re still in high school.”

“As far as putting it on your résumé, it’s huge. Everybody in college theater departments knows Paper Mill — about these awards and their reputation for finding talent. It’s like a ticket to do anything you want in theater. People look at you differently once you win.”

“Being here makes a huge difference if you want to be in theater. Because our music and the theater programs win the most awards, they’re more renowned. You get more respect from your peers for being part of the spring musical here. It makes you a minor celebrity.”

“I want to go to a conservatory for college and then make my way to Broadway. That’s the plan. I want to dance, act and sing.”

“It’s really a remake of the Tonys. You sit there that night and watch all the other high schools show their talent, and everybody’s rooting for everybody else, but you still want your team to win. You walk out of there and you go: ‘All right, next year we have to take this to another level. We have to raise the bar and win this thing.’ I hope that’s us this year.”

You don’t need to be a soothsayer to figure out what I think about all this; you only need to read my last few posts. They make the kids drink the theatrical Koolaid at younger and younger ages. Doomsday is nigh.

For me personally, reading this article makes me feel as if I have been steamrolled. It took me too long to see the signs, too long to convert, too long to begin to do something about it, and the steps I did take were born out of a belief that rational discourse, facts, and data would be effective weapons to fight against this disease. The fact is, this is a theatrical cancer, and I did not catch the warning signs early enough. Like it or not, this will kill the type of theatre I grew up with, built my professional and teaching career around, and love very much. Nothing will stop it. Nothing.

I am complicit in my own demise, of course. It wasn’t as if I was born with or educated about ideas like grassroots or community-based theatre. These are ideas I came across and absorbed even as I pursued a professional/academic career. And while many of my choices were atypical, they were still centered primarily around industry standards. I did not exactly “drop out” of the professional theatre world; I just made slightly atypical choices (planning a classical acting career, teaching in a small undergraduate liberal arts situation, working in Buffalo, e.g.). So if I have been steamrolled, it’s because I continued to participate, however marginally, in the status quo, both academically and professionally. Even as I write this, the seniors from my department will be participating in their Industry Showcase on Monday. I took care to wish them luck, all the while knowing that the end result of all their work, money and preparation for this will be virtually fruitless.

But this intense and unprecedented concentration on Broadway and fame by high schoolers leaves me terrified. Part of the theory of social entropy to which I subscribe states that social distinctions decompose when entropy takes place. There can be little doubt within academic circles (and obviously now in high schools) that any sort of distinction of theatrical styles exists. There is, for all practical purposes, nothing else in public education, universities, the professional world, or the culture at large except Broadway. Any other theatrical distinctions that can be made simply are no longer relevant in any meaningful way. People who do manage to see theatrical distinctions or options other than professional/Broadway can easily be labeled as freaks, idealists, left-wing ideologues, or that most insulting of theatrical put-downs, losers who couldn’t “make it.” They are a niche, an easily ignored minority.

Right at this moment we are living through an economic collapse brought about by the concentration of a huge amount of economic power in the hands of a few financial corporations labeled “too large to fail.” Interestingly enough, regional charter banks appear to be very strong in this country (at least this is so in my region. Local and regional banks here, not connected to the collapse of the real estate market because they did not inflate the value of local real estate, are doing fine, thank you). Might there be some sort of lesson for us in this reality? Are we concentrating so much theatrical power into the “star system” of Broadway and LA that it runs the risk of going under? Wouldn’t we be better off with smaller, more diverse regional arts scenes, and spread the wealth and the talent accordingly?

While I like the above theory for the hope it offers, I also recognize the reality that underneath all this lies the spectre of the Ides of March. I think our doom lies along two possible paths. The first is the cancer metaphor. Cancer is a disease where mutant cells multiply faster than the body can adapt to or kill them, and thus they overrun the body’s natural operations. It can kill slowly (prostate) or quickly (pancreatic or lung), and it can also go into remission – but kill it does. The “Broadway mentality” is multiplying at a rate faster than any of us – artists or educators – can stop it. While it is hard to predict how long it will take to “kill” theatrical distinctions, kill it will. Remission is possible, but actual survival is highly questionable.

The second path is the dinosaur theory. It is theorized that the dinosaurs were made extinct due to a cataclysmic event: an asteroid hitting the earth and changing entirely the environment in which the dinosaurs thrived and to which they were adapted. Unable to adapt rapidly enough to the new environmental realities, they became extinct, and other life forms more able to survive in the new environment took their place. Me – well, I am clearly a dinosaur. The environment under which I gained my theatrical legs has clearly been impacted by these seismic changes in the theatrical landscape. I am now too slow of foot, too slow of brain, and dogged by old habits such that I cannot change fast enough. It appears that all I have left is to rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The Ides of March have come, Caesar, but not gone. –twl