From the Executive Director

Actors and Money

By Teresa Eyring

The late great director Garland Wright described theatre as “the shared act of imagining between actor and audience.” In his principles of leadership as artistic director of Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater he wrote: “Theatre is not a place or a thing but an act—an interchange that has consequence. Theatre is the means by which actors and audience choose together to examine and participate in the world—to recognize it, to experience it, and ultimately to understand it.”

In a 1992 New York Times story, Ian McKellen commented: “It’s in every human being to act. We’re all on in a variety of ways, and some become very accomplished at it. In the theatre, the actor is in total control. The director wasn’t in the house last night, the designer wasn’t there.… It’s just us and the audience.” McKellen observed that “a great actor is someone who can embrace the entire audience, turning just for this one evening a group of strangers into a unit of some sort.”

So often, when attempting to describe the essence of theatre and what distinguishes it from other forms of art and media, it is the exquisite interactive connection between actor and audience that we seek to capture. The impossible-to-replicate exchange of energy that occurs during the course of a live performance may even be considered a source of competitive advantage. But even if we agree that this communion between performer and audience is central to the theatre experience, what do we find when we examine in broad daylight the current financial realities of the stage acting profession?

In the career section of www.collegegrad.com, aspiring thespians will read that “actors endure long periods of unemployment, intense competition for roles and frequent rejections in auditions. Formal training through a university or acting conservatory is typical; however, many actors find work on the basis of their experience and talent alone. Because earnings for actors are erratic, many supplement their incomes by holding jobs in other fields.”

According to Actors’ Equity Association, just 18,000 of its 47,000 members were working in 2006–07, with the average number of work weeks at 17 weeks per actor in a year. Nearly 70 percent of these working actors earned $15,000 or less from work on stage; just 6 percent earned more than $75,000.

Even with this knowledge, college and university acting programs continue to go gangbusters, and the number of programs is increasing. In some cases, tuition fees leave students with enormous loan obligations, causing some of the most talented graduates to head straight for pilot season—with no hope of affording a career in theatre. Young actors devoted to the stage often pull together their own companies and pay themselves little or nothing in order to pursue their craft.

Is the situation an irreversible byproduct of market forces? Is there hope for something better?

There have been some notable occasions of organizations and funders attempting to envision a different state of affairs and bring it into reality. In the late 1980s and ’90s, the Guthrie raised the largest endowment the American theatre had seen up until that time and designated as one of its purposes the increase of actor salaries and the support of a large year-round acting company. While the Guthrie’s acting company is no longer fully intact, many of its members still reside in the Twin Cities with families, homes and continuing work in the theatre community—including at the Guthrie. The Fox Foundation Resident Actor Fellowships, administered by TCG, provide support both for actors to further their professional growth and for theatres to deepen their relationships with actors. In that program’s “extraordinary potential” category, which is focused on early- to mid-career artists, grantees can use up to $10,000 to pay off student loans.

A large percentage of Equity work weeks are provided each year by not-for-profit theatres, primarily through League of Resident Theatres and developing-theatre contracts, which offer a combined 36 percent of Equity actor employment. These organizations are repositories of a growing number of work opportunities for actors. However, as reported in the 2006 edition of Theatre Facts, theatres on average continue to experience declining working capital and difficulties in maintaining audience levels. Under these circumstances, the fundraising priority tends to be generating enough support to meet basic costs—and perhaps even to maintain stability.

Actors’ Equity’s visionary new executive director John Connolly, himself an actor, has begun reaching out to the theatre community to discuss how we can make progress for actors and theatres through new ways of thinking about these issues in a world that is rapidly changing. As that discussion progresses, we at TCG believe some areas for examination that could benefit actors, build audiences and strengthen theatres include:

• How to ride the wave of opportunities offered through new technology-based media platforms;
• How to better utilize old technology—such as videotape—to promote, disseminate and celebrate the work of theatres and actors;
• How to capitalize on the ever-increasing interest in international dialogue and exchange;
• How to collaborate on building a stronger national arts policy.

Along with AEA, innovative funders and TCG theatres nationwide, we look forward to a productive investigation of these and other topics aimed at enriching actors’ lives and work.