TACT

As my fellow blogger, Tom Loughlin, has said, it is going to take a lot of tact to get these ideas about the theatre curriculum to be accepted. So I am going to get us off on the wrong foot entirely with the following modest proposal that has absolutely no tact whatsoever.

The buzz word in American education these days, thanks to the totally misguided No Child Left Behind Act, is “accountability.” The Provost where I teach at UNC Asheville says we must create a “culture of evidence” concerning what we do. We all nod vigorously, and then go back to rehearsal. Commonly, theatre professors, when faced with the A-bomb, respond with the intellectual equivalent of putting our hands over our ears and shouting blah-blah-blah at the top of our lungs. Either that, or we open our eyes wide and lisp, “Doctor Provost, we don’t know nuthin’ ’bout no accountability. Why, who ever heard of such a thing being applied to the arts?” And for reasons I have yet to fathom, administrators seem to buy this feigned (or real) ignorance. “Well, you know,” they harrumph, flicking the tip of their ballpoint pen, “as long as you do a decent production of Once Upon a Mattress next semester that we can bring the Trustees to, we’ll just look the other way this time.”

But I just finished reading Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play by Todd London and Ben Pesner, and the portrait of the so-called profession was just so awful that I can’t maintain my politeness anymore. Plus I’m sick, which makes me cranky.

Anyway, here is my proposal: tie the salaries of theatre professors to the income of their students.

But wait, wait — before you put your hands over your ears and shout blah-blah-blah — I’m going to make this easier, because that wouldn’t be fair, would it? I mean, that level of accountability.

So here are the rules:

1. For every student who makes from theatre work in a year more than the mean annual theatre income for an Actors Equity member of approximately $7000*, you get a 2% raise. (Hey, given flat budgets, that’s a great deal, right?)
2. For every student who doesn‘t, your salary is cut 1/2%.
3. And just to make this a bit easier still, we’ll only count half of your students, and you can choose who are in that group before the graduate (so you’re not held accountable for those who are getting a degree in theatre without, you know, much talent — ’cause those are the ones keeping your FTE afloat, right?)
4. BUT you don’t get to count anyone in the upper 50% you didn’t choose (so at Illinois State University, for instance, where John Malkovich’s entire mainstage career consisted of playing the guy who delivered the ant farm in The Man Who Came to Dinner and who was thought to be too weird to be an actor, they can’t count him), AND
5. You don’t get to count people who are making money in theatre doing things you didn’t teach them to do (so if someone is doing well making commercials for Pizza Hut, but they didn’t take an acting-for-the-camera class with you, you can’t count them, or if they have become head of marketing for a regional theatre without having taken a theatre administration class with you, you can’t count them either)
6. Finally, we won’t start counting them negatively against you until Year 3 of their career, but you can count them positively before then.

(In the interest of full disclosure, according to Actors Equity the unemployment rate during any particular week is about 86%, so if you are an Equity member, your odds of working are about 8:1, or the same odds that you have of shooting craps (7 or 11) at your local casino! The odds increase considerably when you add in non-union actors, but who cares about them, right?)

This seems like a pretty sweet deal, I think. Only 20% of your top 50th percentile need to make the paltry amount of $7000 in a whole year from what you’ve trained them to do for you to make 2% for each of them, and it takes four students who don’t make that amount to wipe that 2% out. Sweet! I think parents would really like that deal — you could tell them your salary increases year to year as proof that little Buffy isn’t throwing your tuition money down the drain.

But I guarantee that if I tried to get this adopted at my school, or your school, the faculty would squeal like stuck pigs, and so would most faculties across the country. Because you know as well as I do that every faculty member would make a smaller salary every year until, eventually, they were paying for the right to teach classes and have health insurance. In other words, they’d be the same as artists.

And I further guarantee that, if we instituted this policy (or a variation on it — I’m not an inflexible man), we would suddenly have a lot more educators interested in reforming theatre education, taking a broader view of the skills taught,  and/or more teachers way more interested in making the theatre system in this country operate with some sort of rationality.

Which is why we won’t institute it. We’re all Bernard Madoffs running elaborate Ponzi schemes and hoping we can retire before it all comes crashing down. But all signs say that the whole thing is tottering right this very moment — so now what? Duck?

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* By the way, as I interpret the report (and it isn’t easy, given AE’s built-in motivation to keep the reality of its dismal employment figures foggy), this is the median income of all working actors and stage managers in Actors Equity; the actual median of all members of Actors Equity is $0, since fewer than half of them made any money at all from theatre during the past year. Let  me repeat something I’ve said often: we can’t offer pre-professional training in our conservatories, MFA and BFA mills, because there is no profession.