II. Theater
Olde William used the melancholy Jacques to channel his own musings on life, "All the world's stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances, and one men in his time plays many parts..."
Of course, in 1600 this notion wasn't fresh. Shakespeare's mesmerising, rhythmic words only serve as the best description of this behavioral phenomenon. Yet, philosophers of ancient times wrote about it, including the father of dramatic theory himself Aristotle (check out his Poetics).
If you think about it, this makes theater the oldest of all arts. Since the beginning of times, humans put on various situation-appropriate personas and played out their dramas, tragedies, and comedies. The mere understanding that everyone acts, creates a subconscious desire to observe others. The concept of "people-watching" is the most primal theatrical experience. Humans always gathered in designated places (clearings in the woods, forums, public houses, squares, boulevards, ballrooms) to witness the spectacle of "acting in public."
Then, there were those who possessed a talent to turn themselves into different people on cue and had a desire to show it off for the amusement of others. First, they would simply replicate actual events and emulate real people. When that wasn't enough, they wrote fictive situations with imagined characters.
This created a demand for people who could write better stories with multiple characters. The actors playing those characters needed to be coordinated in time and space, instructed on how to understand the writer's ideas... And thus the collective effort known as performance arts were born.
I adore theater. For me, there is nothing more powerful than the intimacy and the immediacy of a high-quality theatrical experience. No other high-art form can compare to looking straight into Kevin Spacey's eyes when he personifies a dead-end insanity as O'Neill's Hickey; or contemplating the perversity of marriage as lived by Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin in Edward Albee's masterpiece Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; or play after play marvel at the surgically precise dissection of human conditions by Donald Margulies, Theresa Rebeck, or Tracy Letts.
Theater is a wonderful litmus of true acting talent. It's not like the movies, where performing amounts to a series of dress rehearsals with the best one going to print. There are no reshoots or outtakes: it's right here, right now, and then gone forever. From time to time, you witness magic conjured by an actor, whose name you've never heard before. And frequently you squirm in your seat seeing Hollywood A-listers failing to deliver.
Sometimes you get fabulously lucky when, trusting your intuition (and Scott Rudin's impeccable sense of quality), you go to see a tiny production of a three-person play in a small theater on Barrow street, and discover a gem of one of the best contemporary plays you've seen: Adam Rapp's chamber tragedy Red Light Winter.
And, if you are a real theater freak, you may jump on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and hit an artistic jackpot - become one of only 500 people who were fortune to witness the marvel of The Pod Project.
So, are people who create these incredible, unforgettable artistic experiences - the playwrights, the directors, the actors, including the super-stars with household names, adequately rewarded? Let's see.
We will start small. The Pod Project, with its 13 stations, each occupied by a single actor performing in front of a single spectator, was produced on a $20,000 budget. It was financed primarily by the contributions from the creator Nancy Bannon's friends. With just one spectator in each pod at a time, only 13 tickets per performance could be sold ($35 a ticket, if memory serves). They had just enough rent money for a two-week run. With two-three performances a day, slightly over 50% of the investment was recovered. I believe, each actor received about $500 for the entire engagement. After paying all expenses, the creators of this, one of a kind, event didn't get any pay at all.
This type of micro-budget theatrical endeavors are typical for Off-Off-Broadway, with average total budgets of $18,000, of which over 35% is eaten away by the space rental. Set design, lights, sound, props, costumes, hair, and make-up can all be obtained in NYC for about $2,800 (16% of the budget). Some sort of publicity and advertising is a must - another 15% of the funding. You can easily find a qualified stage manager to cover the entire run for about $300. The directors bring home $500 . The engagements are usually short - 2-3 weeks.
For each performance, the actors come on stage and transform themselves into characters, living through love, loss, insanity, obsession, or what have you. 38% of them don't get paid and those who do make about $400. And the author? Most likely, she and her volunteering helpers are the ones who put all pieces together for the sake of showcasing the play. Essentially, nobody makes any money. They do it out of love for their arts and everyone hopes that something will come out of it "in the long run."
Off-Broadway productions are still relatively small, but far more established. They are usually put on in better known spaces (such as Theater Row theaters, Lucille Lotrel's, Peter Norton's, etc.), which, on average, can fit 200-300 of avid theater-goers. With the median ticket price of $65, a limited run (let's say 12 weeks) of a popular play can generate over $2 million in ticket sales. To fill the seats, off-Broadway theatrical organizations try to stage works by playwrights with some cred for edgy, frequently controversial, material, which, in turn, can attract actors with known names. The preference is usually given to psychological dramedies with smaller casts (for economical reasons, if nothing else).
This is how we got such memorable wonders as the NYC revivals of Lanford Wilson's Burn This with Edward Norton and Catherine Keener, Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party with Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Wallace Shawn's Aunt Dan and Lemon with Lili Taylor and Kristen Johnston; world premier of Jonathan Marc Sherman's Things We Want directed by Ethan Hawke with Peter Dinklage, Josh Hamilton, Paul Dano, and Zoe Kazan; the first staging of the two-act version of Edward Albee's Peter and Jerry with Bill Pullman; Propeller Theater's Shakespeare at BAM, and many other notable productions.
Of course, no matter how dedicated to their craft and how tempted to test themselves against the brutal nakedness of the stage, these actors don't work for free (nor should they). In fact, except for some volunteering ushers, everyone involved in an off-Broadway production usually gets paid at least the minimum regulated by their respective unions.
Obviously, the $2 million in tickets sales will not cover a production budget of a play performed 60-100 times. This is why most theatrical organizations dominating off-Broadway are non-profits: The New Group, MCC Theater, The Signature Theater, Second Stage, Playwrights Horizons, Lincoln Center Theater, and BAM. They rely heavily on subscriptions, grants, donations, patronage, and bequests.
On the other hand, Broadway productions are all for-profit (not to be confused with profitable) enterprises. The commercial scheme behind a Broadway machine is not much different from a standard business model: develop a show's idea or acquire/opt a play, attach possible talent, pitch the project to investors, fit the budget to the obtained capital, hire the team, conceptualize PR and advertising, and go to work with a purpose of selling enough tickets (from discounted mezzanine for Wednesday matinees at $65 to premium seats at up to $350 per ticket) to generate a satisfactory return on investment.
The profitability concerns start at the bottom - at the playwright level. According to one of the most prominent of American stage writers, Tony Kushner, "no writer can make a living writing for stage." If you are writing for Broadway and live in New York City, no matter how good and lauded you are, you will not make enough even to cover the rent. If a writer is a member of the Writers' Guild (WGA) he must be paid at least the minimum prescribed by this union: currently $63,895 (my God, I know secretaries who make as much). It appears that the highest contract payment in 2012 season was around $120K. Of course, if the writer has a powerful agent, some royalties will be added as well. Then the total earned will depend on the length of the play's run.
Just like the fiction writers, many playwrights supplement their income with teaching. Some succeed writing for television and the big screen (David Mamet, Alan Sorkin, Alan Ball, Theresa Rebeck, among others). And good for them: not only that they make more money there, but they also access larger audiences (successful plays, on average, are seen by maybe 100-200 thousand people). But the painful truth is that, while the best of stage writers are busy in Hollywood, they are not writing plays. Thus, the great American Drama suffers.
Broadway directors are members of a union as well - the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, which dictates the minimum contract fees of $62,280. All Broadway directors' contracts include royalty clauses. Unlike the writers (who, if they are very prolific, are most likely to write a play a year), the directors can stage more than one project in a span of 12 months, thus multiplying their revenues.
Again, the very medium of the theatrical experience, the actor, who has the guts to come on stage in front of a live audience and forget himself in the tribulations of someone else's life, is the lowest paid stage asset. Still, those who get to be on Broadway consider themselves lucky. Not only because they do get paid (the minimum guaranteed by the Actors Guild is $1,600 per week), but also because this is their chance to be noticed by the theater-going casting professionals and to establish contacts with other actors and playwrights, who may move to Hollywood and remember them one day... Hey, this is the profession they chose, might as well try to make a living out of it.
As I mentioned, many actors, who started on stage and became big stars, from time to time come back to experience the raw test of theater. Of course, their agents and managers would never let them work for $1,600 a week (they need to keep their own 10-15% cuts lucrative too). But, comparatively speaking, they are willing to go on stage for peanuts (such is the power of theater!).
As this "post" has now officially reached the size of a long e-mag article, I cannot go through all the data I've got about stars' theater-vs-movies compensation. Just a few examples then. In 2006, Julia Roberts headlined 12-weeks run of Three Days of Rain ( a disappointment, to say the least). Her pay rate was $50,000/week, or total of $600,000. At the time, her salary for a lead role in a feature (average shooting time 3 month) was $15 million.
In 2009, we were blessed to witness the phenomenon of an Englishman Daniel Craig and an Australian Hugh Jackman eerily transforming themselves into two gritty Chicago cops in Keith Huff's A Steady Rain (playwrights LOVE that rain-on-stage effect). Each of them was paid $100,000/week over a 16-weeks run. By then, Daniel Craig has already achieved the status of possibly the best James Bond of all times and finished shooting his second 007 installment, Quantum of Solace - reported salary $7,200,000. Hugh Jackman just completed X-Men Origins: Wolverine, in which he turned from human to mutant and back for a paltry sum of $20,000,000.
Of course, it is not economically proper to compare theatrical and cinematic financing, especially when it comes to blockbusters: they differ in the most important factor, which drives all the numbers - the size of the audience. The only stage productions that attempt to match the international multi-screen reach of the film industry are the Broadway cash cows, better known as big-budget musicals.
They are deliberately intended for long-runs and cater to the endless rivers of out-of-town visitors. How long a run? Just to give you an idea: according to NY Times calculations a $65 million production (Spider-Man, the most expensive musical to date), housed in a 2000-seat theater, will need to survive for at least 4 years before it recovers the initial investment.
In their mass appeal and risky investment undertakings, Broadway musicals are similar to the big studio movies with high gross expectations. It is no wonder that many of currently running musicals are based on movies, and many successful stage spectacles are transferred to the silver screen (the latest, Les Miserables, is to open on Christmas Day). And that brings us to the next installment in this series.
