Furloughs, furloughs, all across the land
Read me in Brooklyn Rail's September issue!
I’m in The Brooklyn Rail’s September issue with a look at furloughs devastating the theater industry. Check it out here. You can also find a copy of Brooklyn Rail near you, maybe. Like a print thingy in your hands. Wild.
After my piece went to print, I read Jenna Clark Embrey’s incredible Twitter thread on socioeconomic bias playing out in furloughs and layoffs across non-profit theater, and wished I had spoken to her for the piece. She graciously agreed to discuss the topic further for Transitions.
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(photo credit: Grace Brown)
Jenna Clark Embrey is a dramaturg and owner of Salt Girl Consulting. She created a crowd-sourced, anonymous Google spreadsheet which collects theater salaries around the globe. Embrey is currently on her second furlough as Resident Dramaturg at New York’s Signature Theatre through January 3rd, following a shorter furlough in April. I was so thrilled she agreed to go in depth on furloughs, socioeconomic bias in non-profit theater, and much more.
Many arts workers are keeping their furloughs private right now - as are many theatrical institutions. What prompts you to be upfront and public about it?
I know so many people who have been furloughed and very few are talking about it. On a personal level it's totally understandable, and on an institutional level, theaters don't want to appear like they're in financial distress. [But] I don't think we're going to have any productivity as an industry if we're not being transparent about what's going on.
I have quite a few young dramaturgs or dramaturgy students that follow me on Twitter, and I feel a responsibility to let them know the realities of our industry. Mostly so that we are producing young crusaders for a better industry.
Your Twitter thread spoke to these furloughs hitting mid-level and entry-level staff disproportionately, noting those staffers often come from less privileged backgrounds.
If you look at who is in the positions that remain very important, even during the shutdown, there is a correlation between those positions and people who have been able to afford to put in ridiculous hours over many, many years in their assistant level positions - and some as unpaid interns [before that]. When you have that kind of financial privilege, you have the ability to make yourself indispensable.
If you have a family that you have to support, you can’t afford to do this; if you don't have family helping you out with rent, you can’t afford to do this. There’s all these ways the system sets you up to fail. The very initial one being our complete reliance on unpaid internships - right off the bat, we're already saying certain kinds of people cannot work in non-profit theater.
What do you fear that socio-economic imbalance in furloughs does to our theatrical workforce in the long term?
I should pause and say - I do not begrudge any theater for having to do furloughs and layoffs. That is a simple mathematical principle of money in vs. money out. We have been put in this position due to a massive failure of our government. But when theater reopens, who is going to be able to come back to the workforce? Who is waiting for those jobs to come back, and didn’t have to find another?
There aren't going to be as many jobs to come back to. Our profit margins are going to be smaller for several years to come. Who are we going to be able to afford to keep on the workforce? Will we go back to even more over-reliance on unpaid internships? So all of those things are going to set back any modicum of work that we have done in addressing socio-economic bias.
Also - of the folks I know operating in a dramaturgical capacity, the majority of those furloughed or laid off have been women. That is another important thing to note.
Why are theaters not being more transparent about furloughs and layoffs given that, as you say, government failure is the main culprit?
There is a lot of caginess with regards to the Human Resources aspect of how we treat staff. Rich institutions often seem unaware that there is a vested interest in how organizations treat people right now. They’re just not aware that people want to know about that.
Right, and if artistic leaders are putting out a strong message that no-one should talk about what’s happening, that trickles down to individual staff staying silent.
As a microcosm example - a couple of years ago, I heard someone in a leadership position at a theater say that talking about your salaries was illegal. There is literally a federal law that protects you in regards to talking publicly about your salary.
Non-profit theater is functioning like a for-profit entity. And there is a certain level of ethics that I don't think we're holding ourselves to right now, as an industry. We are in the business of human connection, and human empathy, and revealing truths about human lives on stage. Yet we have no interest in actually upholding those values ourselves in our workforce.
What are some measures that could be taken to address these inequities going forward? You already mentioned ending unpaid internships.
We have to stop unpaid internships. Full stop, period, no exceptions. It is an unethical practice. And if you look at the federal regulations for unpaid internships, I would dare you to find a theater that is not violating them.
The other thing we need to look at is minimum and maximum salaries. We've seen time and again that non-profit theaters do not handle this with much grace. So when something is systemically unfair, that's when regulation needs to step in. The Off Broadway League and League of Resident Theatres need to set minimum and maximum salary guidelines for theaters, based on regions and percentage of budget.
We also need to be more transparent about salaries, which is something I've talked about for years - and not just in an anonymous Google spreadsheet. There need to be guidelines for: if you are an assistant, associate or manager, here is a narrow range of what your salary should be. Because it varies hugely theater by theater, even within the same region, and usually by department, and very hugely by gender.
What kind of pushback do you get within the industry around addressing these systemic issues?
I haven't gotten pushback from anyone, to my face at least, because the folks who would push back on it don’t use the internet.
One of the things that I struggle with, and that is a counter-argument to all of this, is that paying people more might mean producing less theater, which leads to fewer jobs. If we want to pay everyone more and do three shows a year, then we are employing less crew and less designers and less actors, and the system cannot hold.
Do you feel like a chance to redirect to new forms of income was squandered while the PPP loans were still providing support? Most theaters instead waited to see how things went, and now we have these furloughs.
Hindsight is 20/20. I just don’t think we knew. The PPP loans were hastily put together, poorly structured loans. It ended up depriving a lot of people of beefed-up unemployment that they could have been getting for months.
I am still at a loss as to what theaters could be doing to bring in revenue right now. I just don't think it's possible, on a scale enough to keep the roof over all of our heads. That's not the fault of theaters. That is the fault of our country right now. Every theater did the best they could thinking this was going to be over by now - or at least, have an end in sight.