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It’s been a few weeks! (went through a couple of tech weeks...yikes!) But here’s this week’s video!

99 Seat Theatre in LA is in the news with a new plan proposed by Actor’s Equity...and it may change everything. Here is why I love 99 seat theatre, and why this change may not be the right one...

#I Love 99 #LAThtr #99 Seat #ILove99 #actors equity association #Theatre #Theater #Backstage

I voted NO. A yes vote would make many small theaters in LA turn non-union. Like many other cities. The assumption that there will be an influx of contracts is delusional. This is how members in other cities feel. A quote from Kerri Rambow in D.C., “I had two Helen Hayes Award nominations, but I couldn’t get hired to save my life. I was furious with Equity that they would prefer to have us sitting around on our rears collecting unemployment rather than honing our craft working with smaller companies.” #pro99 #ILove99 #AEAvoteNO #LAthtr #99porvida #Diversity99 (at Los Angeles, California)

#aeavoteno #diversity99 #lathtr #99porvida #ilove99 #pro99

I Sued Actors’ Equity (And I Liked It)

As Steven Leigh Morris recently wrote in the L.A. Weekly, “Over the past two decades, L.A.’s 99-seat theaters have been responsible for some of the most dynamic, innovative and evocative theater to be found anywhere.”

This was almost not the case. If Actors’ Equity had had its way in the mid-to-late 1980s, L.A. theater in intimate venues might've been eradicated. Some claim that was Equity’s goal at the time—to destroy the so-called “Waiver” theater in L.A. that had been in existence since 1972, whereby houses with fewer than 100 seats could avoid onerous union contracts and afford to use professional actors, with very few restrictions. Others claim the union was simply trying to fix what ailed the original Waiver agreement and make it fairer for its members. Whether the deal needed minor tweaks or a complete overhaul, the so-called Waiver Wars erupted in earnest in 1988 when AEA was perceived to be acting in bad faith, and it got ugly. After a pitched battle, Waiver was ultimately replaced with what is now known as the “99-Seat Plan.”

Whatever its motives were, Equity did not succeed in killing intimate theater in Los Angeles, accidentally or otherwise. Instead, because of pushback and compromise, and an eventual lawsuit from whence the 99-Seat Plan sprang, intimate theater has thrived—and it has not thrived at the the expense of mid-sized theaters, as many detractors had wrongly prognosticated. However, despite its demonstrable success, as Morris notes, "AEA has had a long history of hostility to the plan, which was essentially thrust upon it by its own membership. Terms of changing it were agreed to in an out-of-court settlement in 1989, after 15 Equity members sued their own union.”

I was one of the 15 so-called “dissident” members who was a plaintiff in that lawsuit. I am decidedly pro-union, but I believed strongly then, even as a teenager, that my now former union was on the verge of eliminating intimate theater in Los Angeles, and with it the wonderful opportunities that smaller houses presented to union actors. And I was convinced that AEA would, at some point, try again—and be willing to be underhanded in doing so, if past was prologue. Whatever its legacy—and I’ll leave that to others more well-versed than I to debate—our settlement put in place certain safeguards in case Equity tried to make future wholesale changes to the new Plan, and 99-seat-or-fewer theaters, employing union actors, continued to make an enormous cultural contribution to our city.

Well, I believe just as strongly as I did in ’88 that AEA is again on the verge of destroying intimate L.A. theater. With its upcoming referendum on a thoughtless, Draconian new plan it has concocted, the union is piggybacking on the otherwise noble fight to raise the minimum wage across the country, and using it as a pretext to fight an unrelated battle it has long been itching to re-litigate. Like neo-cons invading Iraq after 9/11, it is seizing a perceived opportunity to achieve what has been a dormant long-term goal, and it is doing so under the pretense that it is fighting for what is in its members' best interests. AEA imagines, no doubt, that it will ultimately be greeted as a liberator; liberating exploited actors, it would have us believe, from the clutches of greedy “producers” who want to take advantage of these poor sods’ collective desire to ply their craft at any cost.

Naturally, it’s all nonsense. The vast majority of “producers” of plays under the 99-Seat Plan are actors themselves, many a part of member companies—a substantial chunk of which will eventually disappear if Equity gets its way. These “producers” are artists facilitating art, and they are more akin to public schoolteachers who have to pay for their own supplies, than they are to some wily investor who’s figured out a way to make a buck on the backs of the vulnerable and the desperate. Make no mistake: AEA’s current proposal is not a noble fight for actors’ rights; this a self-aggrandizing power play, and a travesty-in-the-making.

I admit I can’t fully comprehend the grievances the union has long been nursing toward 99-seat theater in L.A., and I don’t understand why AEA has decided it suddenly needs to profoundly change the terms of what I believe has largely been a wildly successful Plan. To steal and paraphrase a line from the Humane Society, "No actors were harmed in the making of these productions.” Are there parts of the plan that can be fixed, perhaps brought into line with current fiscal realities, without taking drastic measures with devastating consequences? That’s certainly a reasonable proposition. In fact, our ’89 settlement created a still-extant Review Committee made up of equal parts plaintiffs' reps and AEA reps, to consider any proposed changes to the 99-Seat Plan moving forward, so it’s not as if eventual modifications were beyond contemplation. But from what I’ve seen, AEA's current proposal amounts to the nuclear option. Why not, as Bill Clinton said of the welfare program, “Mend it… don’t end it”?

Because seriously, when was the last time you heard of a producer under the 99-Seat Plan getting rich on the backs of poor actors? Who, pray tell, are these bogeyman producers with money falling out of their pockets? Could it be that they don’t actually exist? You almost have to be a masochist to produce 99-seat theater in L.A. Nobody—and I mean nobody—is doing it to get rich. And now AEA wants to take away the only incentive to do it at all: the mere fact that it CAN be done, and done well.

Demolishing the vast majority of some of the most exciting theater in a major American city, demolishing experimentation, demolishing innovation, and demolishing opportunities for its L.A. members—largely against their will—how does that serve the membership?

As Morris pointedly asks, “How exactly are producers of plays in small theaters, knowing ahead of time that their productions will lose money, abusing the actors who essentially volunteer their talent and have the right to leave at any time in rehearsal or performance for any reason? How does preventing union actors from working in such shows, or diminishing the status of such shows, better the actors’ situations or foster the art form?”

Both great questions. The answers, of course, are “They aren’t” and “It doesn’t.”

I am not a current member of Actors’ Equity, and haven’t been for a couple of decades, so I no longer have a dog in this hunt as an insider or a “dissident.” Not only don’t I have a clue about the inner-workings of the Review Committee our settlement created, but I am not even as active a member of the L.A. theater community as I would like to be. And yet I’m witnessing the current contretemps with a very heavy heart.

As a lover of theater, a lover of intimate theater, a lover of LOS ANGELES intimate theater, a lover of my friends who are deeply immersed in Los Angeles intimate theater, and as a proud former member of what was in my opinion one of the finest 99-seat member companies in our city’s history—The Colony, now an Equity house—I can say without a moment’s hesitation that any attempt by AEA to gut the 99-Seat Plan—to make producing quality theater in small venues in Los Angeles with union actors impossibly unaffordable for most—is a tragedy. And not the cathartic kind we pay to see.