For theater producers and casting directors like Victoria Pettibone, winters in New York City can be rough going. It’s not that sunnier weather is elsewhere or that all the tourists take off after New Year’s. For Pettibone, ’97, who has cast actors in Broadway shows like Rent and Hairspray, the problem is wedded instead to the annual exodus of talent known as pilot season. Starting in January, many of New York’s most experienced stage actors head to Los Angeles to make test episodes of new television series that networks will show to advertisers in the spring. Pettibone, the founder of the nonprofit Women’s Expressive Theater, knows that the perfect leading man or woman might be snatched away. “There’s always a fear we’re going to lose our No. 1 choice actor to a pilot in the middle of the run of the show.”
Pettibone’s sentiment could reflect the anxieties of an entire discipline. It has never been easy to make a living in theater, but the lure of a steadier paycheck, combined with the explosion of opportunities in digital entertainment, can entice artists who originally trained for the stage. Many Cardinal thespians who burned the midnight oil for Gaieties or wrote one-acts for Ram’s Head look to Hollywood for job security that is rare in the live performing arts. Arts advocates worry that performers and other talents are being driven toward less creatively daring, mass-produced entertainment. When Hollywood beckons, they fear a “brain drain” in New York, the city long immortalized as the prime destination for American theater.
“I can’t characterize it as a drain,” says Teresa Eyring, ’82, who recently became executive director of Theatre Communications Group, the national service organization for American nonprofit theater. The demand for new content generated by media ranging from cable television to YouTube “is making it possible for actors to have a diverse portfolio of options” with which they make their living. Similarly, Mara Manus, ’81, executive director of The Public Theatre in New York City, sees that the financial advantage offered by film and television can help actors “subsidize” theatrical careers.
But for most working actors today, striking a balance between the two worlds is an ongoing struggle, and no one in the industry disputes that making a living on theater alone is nearly impossible.
“The system is broken,” says Warren Leight, a playwright and the executive producer of Law and Order: Criminal Intent. Leight, ’77, labored for years on his autobiographical play about a jazz musician before Side Man received a Broadway staging and the 1999 Tony Award for best play. “I don’t know of too many professions where you work for free for four years, and then—if and when the payoff comes—it’s a $12,000 return.”
To Leight, the economics of theater prohibits even the most gifted of playwrights from making a living without outside income. In exchange for a run at one of New York’s prestigious nonprofit theaters, which alone requires beating competitive odds, a writer will sacrifice as much as 40 percent of his or her subsidiary rights. Once agents, lawyers and taxes are paid, says Leight, “you’re taking home what boxers take home.” The union rules that protect actors don’t apply to writers. If a hit play runs for two years, “everyone except the writer has received a pension and health insurance.”
The success of Side Man, however, led to Leight being hired to write for Law and Order: Criminal Intent, where his responsibilities have expanded to include those of co-executive producer. He is not alone. Playwrights now staff many television series, including Lost, CSI and Brothers & Sisters, and writing for television is no longer stigmatized as less creative than writing for stage or films, according to Charlie Rubin, another Law and Order: Criminal Intent writer and co-producer.
Those who jump into the world of television soon discover that the disparity in pay between stage and screen is staggering. Creating the story and script for a single episode of a drama on a major network typically earns a writer $20,000 to $30,000. Those who quickly assimilate television conventions may be hired as producers—undertaking additional creative responsibilities and being paid even more.
Cardinal thespians who burned the midnight oil for Gaieties or wrote one-acts for Ram’s Head look to Hollywood for job security that is rare in the live performing arts.
The wage differential also applies to actors. An actor lucky enough to land a role in an off-Broadway play at one of New York’s larger houses may earn from $400 to $800 a week, as determined by a complex system of pay scales issued by the Actors Equity Association. However, that same actor hired for one week as a featured guest star in a New York-based, one-hour prime-time television drama could earn 10 times that amount.
Compounding the financial struggles of individual artists is the fact that the theaters that employ them face rising costs. On Broadway, home of for-profit commercial enterprises, costs rose an inflation-adjusted 64 percent between 1992 and 1999. Despite the temporary market paralysis caused by 9-11, costs have continued to rise at astronomical rates. Broadway has defended its bottom line by raising ticket prices (including $300 “premium seats”), casting more movie and television stars, and programming more fare that has “presold” appeal—revivals, shows adapted from hit movies, “jukebox musicals” and British imports.
At nonprofit theaters, which deliver the majority of risky new work to audiences, attendance levels have been stagnant or falling all over the country. A TCG survey found that audience attendance at 100 “trend theaters” dropped 5 percent between 2000 and 2005. This decline in attendance means that theaters’ earned income is dropping, and nonprofit institutions must rely more on foundation grants and private giving. Such funding usually is project-based—allocated for capital campaigns or the mounting of specific programs—rather than for day-to-day operating expenses, such as long-term employment for actors. The concept of a resident company, in which actors could count on a steady stream of income from the same institution, has long been considered an endangered species.
Way off Broadway, Elizabeth Martin struggled to produce theater without sinking financially. Martin, ’00, trained with Shakespeare & Company in the Berkshires and co-founded the Greenville Shakespeare Festival in New Hampshire in 2002. She labored 18-hour days overseeing its first two seasons—and soon found that the work depleted the creative intensity that had brought her to nonprofit theater in the first place. “In trying to keep a smaller theater in the black, there’s a huge amount of pressure to get a show up as quickly as possible,” she recalls, “because you’re paying people for their rehearsal time and you’re not getting any income until the show opens.”
Martin soon discovered another outlet for her interests. In Greenville’s second season, she and fellow actress Lauren Hynek realized that each of them had started a screenplay. They teamed up to create a horror movie, and the pair moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career that, if successful, offers more opportunities to call their own shots than answering casting calls. They have had one script optioned and written four others. Martin is optimistic that “eventually I could make a living wage by writing screenplays. In theater, there’s very little hope of ever getting there.”
Jonathan Goldman jokes that he “embraced the conflict between Hollywood and art very early.” Goldman, ’99, wrote plays while he was on the Farm, but says he knew even then “it was impossible to make a living as a playwright.” When he was a sophomore applying for an internship, he submitted a “spec script”—a sample episode—he wrote for Seinfeld. “It was so funny,” Goldman notes wryly, “they decided to assign me to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.” As a paid intern at Paramount, Goldman sat in on creative meetings and realized that what he loved doing could become a career. “The fact that those TV writers made a lot of money wasn’t the critical point. The fact that they got paid was the thing,” he remembers. “They were making a living as writers!”
After graduating, Goldman returned to Hollywood, where he has served as associate producer for the 2003 film Under the Tuscan Sun and written and directed a short film, Kind of a Blur, starring Sandra Oh. Although Goldman has not ruled out writing plays or novels, he knows this would require “starting from scratch.” With an agent and a network of supporters in a fiercely competitive industry, he says having a foot in the Hollywood door makes it ever harder to leave this career track.
Andrew Leeds, who starred in Falsettos on Broadway and in the national touring company of Les Miserables before coming to Stanford, fears that actors too far removed from their stage careers develop “paycheck addictions. . . . Once people get a taste of that money, they get used to the lifestyle, and need to keep making that kind of money.” Leeds understands how Hollywood momentum can keep someone away from the theater. He and David Lampson, both ’00, competed in a reality TV show for screenwriters, Situation: Comedy. Their idea, Stephen’s Life, was one of two scripts among thousands chosen for production. He notes, “I wouldn’t have been aggressively pursuing a writer career had Situation: Comedy not opened up all these doors.”
And even when actors and writers are willing to forgo L.A. paychecks, they may not get support from their representation, Pettibone notes, “because their agents are running a for-profit business.”
Combining a return to theater with his day job required Herculean commitment from Leight, who often got three hours of sleep a night while overseeing the off-Broadway staging of his 2005 play No Foreigners Beyond This Point during the Law & Order production schedule. But Leight says writing for both stage and screen makes writers better. Playwrights have more time to develop an original voice in theater and, in contrast to writers who head directly to Hollywood, they have more opportunities to work with actors and see reactions to their work from live audiences. That, Leight adds, “teaches you far more about your craft then if you are just writing scripts for films that never get made.”
Playwrights now staff many television series, including Lost, CSI and Brothers & Sisters, and writing for television is no longer stigmatized as less creative than writing for stage or films.
Hollywood studio executive Lisa Fragner also is quick to praise theatrical training. Head of development at Blue Sky Studios, the computer-animation unit of 20th Century Fox, Fragner, ’91, describes the “Vanilla-ization” phenomenon that every moviegoer can recognize: “A lot of writers in Hollywood are trying to create the next version of the latest hit,” the umpteenth variation on Scream. In the challenge to find scripts that don’t exude an aura of imitation, she actively recruits playwrights—for example, David Lindsay-Abaire, who worked on Robots, and Peter Ackerman for Ice Age. Playwrights are a known font of “fresh, intelligent, character-driven” stories whose work can “make films smarter, more layered and more complex.”
Her work at Fox illustrates just how interdependent the two industries have become, despite—or perhaps because of—the asymmetry presented by theater’s poverty of means and the screen’s presumed artistic timidity. There’s increasing awareness about the value that theater—particularly nonprofit theater—can bring to mass-produced entertainment. Nonprofit theaters commission plays, develop work and cast newly minted actors, incubating talent in a setting somewhat shielded from the risk-averse, profit-driven marketplace. But it will be a challenge for theaters to make this cultural contribution if they fail in the face of rising costs or lose their audiences to digital media and commercial competition.
One increasingly popular response to this circuitous problem is an arrangement known as “enhancement.” Commercial investors fund a new play in exchange for the “first rights” to take it to a Broadway venue if success breaks out. Enhancement seldom involves film rights—reformulating a play for Hollywood is a substantially larger effort than reworking a show for Broadway. However, producers who have cultivated a reputation for identifying commercially viable work can use their influence to bring plays to the attention of TV and film studio executives.
Meanwhile, for many actors, no form of recorded entertainment can top the satisfaction of performing for a live audience. Doan Ly, ’99, has the moving expenses to prove her allegiance to the stage. A few years ago, she was working in New York and feeling that there weren’t enough opportunities for her, as an Asian-American actress. She moved in 2002 to Los Angeles, where “my chances rose exponentially.” In 2005, she returned to New York and since has performed in Two Noble Kinsmen at The Public Theater and Richard II at the Classic Stage Company. “Television definitely pays the bills, but it doesn’t really sustain you creatively,” Ly says. Andrew Leeds is more emphatic: “I’d much rather be doing stage work than anything else. It’s more exciting and creative and a lot less about advertising dollars.”
Actress Kathleen Chalfant, ’66, who starred in Angels in America on Broadway and in the TV series The Guardian, puts it in perspective for neophytes. “Everybody realizes that you have to make a living,” she says. “The thing about being in your 20s is you have a smaller nut; you have less to support, so you should get all the experience you possibly can. The worlds of possibility in New York for an actor are unparalleled, so if actors can find a way to do theater, they shouldn’t miss it.”
Wendy Weisman, ’00, a writer in New York City, is a frequent contributor to American Theater magazine.
