Performers represented by Actors Equity Association, the national labor union for actors and stage managers, are typically engaged for eight-show weeks, but productions can increase that number under certain circumstances. Work rules that would seem ludicrous in any other business are, in the theater, built into the contracts. Perhaps the most pervasive and pernicious maxim is the one that says the show must go on no matter what. And Broadway dancers, many trained in a system even more repressive than the theaters, have traditionally been expected to perform like robots, retire early and shut up in between. Musicals have often romanticized the idea that a good artist is a starving one. The men who created the dominant forms of American theater assembled their power by extorting it from others.
Stanislavski saw his students as votaries in an ascetic cult. Suffering is a badge of honor, and the theater is properly a purple-heart club. Caring for actors, some say, is coddling. The idea that theater is a calling, not a job, and that the two categories are mutually exclusive, is so ingrained in the industrys ethos not to mention its business model that demands for shorter working days, more understudies, intimacy coordinators, mental health stipends, child care reimbursements and other accommodations are often met with doubt or derision. Some people will not even agree that it should. Can the theater, they ask, find a way to uphold them more holistically as humans, even as they continue to gut themselves every night? In sync with the resurgence of labor activism nationwide, actors, dancers, stage managers, technicians and others have been questioning the nuts and bolts of their contracts both the documents that detail their jobs and the wider assumptions about what they owe an audience.
This summer Ive been grappling with those demands, and in earlier parts of this series Ive looked at ridding the art form of the great man inheritance that built cruelty into its DNA and the movement for fair pay.īut getting back to business has also reminded show people of the specific weirdness of their work. Its no surprise that, as theaters reopened, calls for change therefore emerged with greater urgency. The pause also gave theater workers, perhaps for the first time ever, plenty of time to consider the lives their profession requires them to lead. The pandemic put a temporary end to all that, reuniting families and helping injuries heal. If they are parents and nevertheless insist on sleeping more than five hours a night, they may see their children as Amber Gray, a star in the original cast of Hadestown, told me barely more than 50 minutes a day. They strip themselves, often literally, and enact trauma over and over. In return for the privilege of scraping by in a field they love, they are commonly expected to endanger themselves physically and emotionally. And they are only the most visible part of the story of harm endured by theater workers onstage and off. (Handler quit Williamson got applause.) For much of the early 2010s, the mayhem of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark was an endless source of schadenfreude.īut concussions, broken ribs, a fractured skull, a crushed leg and an amputated foot those are just the Spider-Man injuries arent actually funny. In 1991 we all gossiped merrily when the tempestuous Nicol Williamson ignored his fight choreography in I Hate Hamlet and struck his co-star Evan Handler with a sword. I am ashamed to admit to laughing when I read about the dancer who fell into the ∺nyone Can Whistle orchestra pit in 1964, landing on a saxophone player, who promptly died.
I was a 22-year-old girl who didnt know how to say this doesnt feel safe to me, she wrote on her Instagram page nearly two decades later, after suffering intense pain every single day for seven years, two surgeries and much heartbreak.Īt the time, people bad-mouthed her for missing performances.ĭisastrous tumbles and physical danger are so much a part of theater history that theyve become treasured backstage lore instead of causes for concern.
Thats what Laura Benanti says happened to her in 2002. Getting to play Cinderella in a Broadway revival of Into the Woods sounds like a young musical theater performers dream, until you break your neck doing the pratfalls built into the role.