Theater Careers

A Realistic Guide

Tim Donahue, Jim Patterson

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781611171976
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Theater Careers is designed to empower aspiring theater professionals to make savvy, informed decisions through a concise overview of how to prepare for and find work in the theater business. Tim Donahue and Jim Patterson offer well-researched information on various professions, salary ranges, educational and experience requirements, and other facets certain to enlighten students contemplating a theater career, as well as inform counselors, teachers, and parents of available opportunities and the demands of each path.

Theater Careers offers valuable details not readily available elsewhere, including

• Dozens of informative job descriptions surveying the impressive variety of theater careers, both on and off the stage

• Statistics on the working and earning prospects of various careers as drawn from the best sources in the business

• Thoughtful assessments of the value of education and training choices, including the most meaningful way to look at the costs of college—estimating net costs, which is seldom described elsewhere—and how to choose a school

Straightforward and objective, Theater Careers is an ideal reference for those seeking careers in the theater. Armed with this information, readers will be better equipped to pursue choices that best lead to satisfying and secure employment in the rewarding field of the dramatic arts.

CHAPTER 1

The Many Jobs in Professional Theater

Facts show that there are hundreds of different jobs available in the commercial and not-for-profit (NFP) theaters. It takes many kinds of workers to mount a production: playwrights, directors, actors, designers, managerial staff, and technical hands. Few people outside of the professional theater know what a great number of workers and what a variety of jobs it takes to put on a show or support an NFP theater. This fact is good news for young people eager to make a career in professional theater.

A quick survey of only five productions playing in New York City during one recent season, using issues of Playbill and programs for evidence, found remarkable differences in the number of positions listed in the credits for shows. The average number of credited workers on a show was just fewer than 150 in this small, unrepresentative sample. In the end it doesn’t matter if there is one actor or twenty-three on stage. The number of actors has little-to-no relationship with the number of workers needed to put on a show. See table 1.

Table 1: Selected Numbers of Credits in New York City Professional Theater Productions

Not all workers on a show, however, are credited in the program and thus are not included in the numbers in table 1. Most lower level and entry-level positions, such as stitcher, carpenter, deck crew, rigging crew, and so on are not listed in professional theater programs, In sum there are more workers on each of the productions detailed in table 1 than the program credits. Generally, not-for-profit theaters credit more people in their programs than do commercial theaters. In fact the difference between NFP and commercial theaters are important for job seekers to know.

Two Business Structures of Professional Theater

There are two main structures, commercial and not-for-profit, for professional theater in the United States. With few exceptions commercial theater is limited to much of Broadway and touring and some of off-Broadway.* Practically all other professional theater in the United States is not-for-profit. This includes virtually all regional theaters, that is, the professional theaters outside of New York City. The differences between the commercial and not-for-profit forms of theater are important facts to understand when considering what kinds of jobs are available in theater.

Commercial Theater

The commercial theater is usually constructed as a limited liability partnership or limited liability company that produces a single show on Broadway or off-Broadway and has rights to certain subsequent earnings of the script if the production is successful. The partnership generally lasts for eighteen years after the show opening. In the partnership there is a managing partner, traditionally called the producer, who makes all decisions and usually does not invest money in the show. The rest of the partners invest or raise money but have no say in running the show. Successful producers run offices and have staff on hand to carry out some functions for any shows they produce, but producers also hire consultants such as lawyers and insurance advisers, and they sometimes contract with key staff for specific shows, such as the general manager, whose duties are detailed later. Among their hires are the creative staff for an individual show, including director, designers, actors, and the like. Producers do not typically own the buildings in which their shows are presented. Instead they license theaters from the owner/operators or, for touring shows, enter into contracts with local venues and presenters. Thus some of the jobs associated with running the theater building are not filled by the producer but by the theater owner. Fig. 1 is an organizational chart for a fictional but typical commercial theater production.

Fig. 1. This is a typical organization chart for a commercial theater production. Solid lines show hiring and firing authority. Dotted lines indicate a collaborative relationship. For example, the playwright is not an employee of the producer, hence the dotted line.

For completeness we should mention that some for-profit corporations have produced commercial shows on Broadway and in touring. The most notable and successful of recent years is the Disney Corporation, producer of Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, Tarzan, and other shows.

Not-for-Profit Theater

By contrast the not-for-profit theater is formed as a not-for-profit corporation. As a corporation, the NFP theater doesn’t disband after producing a single show; rather it hopes to last in perpetuity. A NFP theater is a 501(c)(3) corporation—an Internal Revenue Service–approved designation—that makes it exempt from many federal, state, and local taxes. Donations to 501(c)(3) corporations are tax-deductible for the donors.

Not-for-profit theaters list in their programs and playbills many organizational positions that either do not exist in the commercial theater or are not typically credited in the commercial theater. For example, NFP theaters have development departments (involving fund-raising, donation, and grant management), many have education departments, and most run their own theater buildings.

Beginning NFP theaters usually rent performance spaces, but successful theaters often wind up owning at least one theater space. Therefore an NFP theater typically employs a number of positions that the commercial producer does not, these being people needed to maintain and operate a building. One NFP theater for example, Steppenwolf in Chicago, owns and operates its several performance spaces plus a parking garage as part of its theater structures. In the commercial theater, the theater buildings are licensed by show producers, and building employees such as box office staff, ushers, and the like are hired by the theater and do not report to the producer. Fig. 2 is a typical example of an organizational chart for a not-for-profit theater group.

The NFP theater typically raises funds from individuals and groups, and in addition to that it also applies for and has to account for grants from governments and foundations. Donations and grants—called “unearned income”—are typically about 40 to 60 percent of a not-for-profit theater’s budget. Some NFPs receive marketing support as donations in kind from local marketing or advertising agencies, but others have internal marketing departments. In many cases, a not-for-profit theater has educational programs for schoolchildren in the theater’s community. All these activities require specialized staffing that is not generally needed by the professional theater. Many—but far from all—not-for-profit professional theaters give at least some effort to developing and presenting new plays, and this activity requires personnel with special skills, education, and experience. There is probably more variation in the employment practices of the not-for-profit theater than there is in the commercial theater. Note that within the NFP professional theaters, there is great variation in size and sophistication, and thus also in how many and what sort of positions that are employed. Among the largest of these organizations, that is, those with the most employees, three so-called super-NFPs in New York City produce in Broadway houses and are thus eligible for Tony Awards: Lincoln Center Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, and Roundabout Theatre. There are also nationally known organizations such as the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, the Arena Stage in Washington, DC, and many others.

Fig. 2. A typical organizational chart for a NFP theater organization. In a NFP corporation, the board of directors manages the group for the public good; in doing so, it hires, evaluates, and fires if necessary, the artistic and managing directors.

Some important NFP festival theaters began as summer events but have grown to being six- and nine-month endeavors, such as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Utah Shakespearean Festival. There are NFP historical pageants that play outdoors in the summer months, many of which began in the 1930s, including Unto These Hills in Cherokee, North Carolina, and Tecumseh!, in Chillicothe, Ohio. There are regional theaters that engage an acting company for an entire season and others that hire actors for a single show. Then there are many smaller companies that are important within their communities just as there are many start-ups that hope to become essential to the cultural life of their hometowns.

Professional Theater Job Descriptions

This chapter presents many of the most often occurring jobs. The job titles that follow were gathered from issues of Playbill and programs of commercial and NFP theaters. Job descriptions for the job titles were summarized by reviewing job offers posted in trade journals and on the Internet to discover typical job duties and requirements.

Theater jobs can be divided into six different general areas:

Managerial

Artistic

Technical/crew

Theater support

Education (within not-for-profit theaters that have education programs)

Consultants/services

This classification of jobs is not to comment on the value of the job or worker. All theater jobs contribute to the success of the commercial or NFP theater. Most any theater job is “artistic” to some extent, but the divisions used here clarify essential differences. Playwrights are saved to the end of this discussion because they are usually not employees of either the commercial or NFP theater.

Because training and evaluation of musicians and other musical jobs are a specialized activity quite separate from that of theater artists, Theater Careers does not consider those job titles and descriptions. However, in union theaters, dancers are members of Actor’s Equity Association and choreographers are members of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, so they have been included here.

Few organizations would hire all the positions described here. Job duties differ greatly between organizations of different sizes. Outside of union requirements, employers have freedom in how they title jobs and how they assign responsibilities to employees, so these job descriptions should be considered general and typical. They are descriptive, not prescriptive. In sum these explanations of the positions are amalgams of job descriptions used by some NFP theaters and commercial producers, focusing on the essential duties.

In our research we have determined that NFP theaters with large budgets often have more highly developed and refined job descriptions than do smaller NFPs. One cause of this variation in sophistication of job descriptions may be greater job differentiation in a larger organization. When a group starts up, the founding artistic director and the board may find themselves doing whatever is necessary: painting scenery, cleaning toilets, ripping tickets, or the like. As the group grows with more staff, duties become more fully defined. A bigger organization has more at stake and becomes concerned about perpetuating the group and preserving it from risks, including those associated with litigation resulting from hiring and firing decisions. A small organization is unlikely to have a dedicated human resources department to prepare detailed job descriptions.

Differences in commercial and not-for-profit duties and/or job titles are described where relevant. The usual clichés of job descriptions, such as “and other duties as assigned” are omitted. Some of these positions might have subordinates with the titles “assistant,” “associate,” or the like, depending on the organization’s size. Also left out are requirements to direct staff or work under the approval of some other position. Nearly every job description of any specificity we consulted in compiling this list mentioned the need for at least some level of computer skills. Every organization today, even theater, is reliant on e-mail and other electronic communications that require capability with a keyboard and the ability to read, comprehend, and write clear prose.

Management Jobs

Producer

The producer’s job in the commercial theater is to create, organize, and direct the partnership that will stage one play or musical with the goal of making a profit for the investors in the production. To that end the producer chooses the material to be produced; attracts investors; hires legal counsel to draft partnership documents, options on the source material to be staged, and the like; hires a general manager who develops budgets and continues to oversee the details of project direction and decision-making; licenses a theater building for the run; hires the director and designers and is usually involved with casting at least the lead actors; and engages marketing and advertising staff to develop and implement a marketing strategy. For some musicals, the producer will identify source material in other media—novels, films, record albums—to be dramatized and then engage writers and composers to create a script. One producer defines the job as the “three Fs”: find it (the script), fund it (secure investors), fill the seats (manage marketing).

For long-running productions, the producer may be involved in deciding whether brush-up rehearsals are needed, in casting replacements, with continued marketing and press relations, and in deciding when and how the show will tour in the United States and be staged in other countries. Most often the producer will produce at least the early road tours, but in some cases the producer will license some other entity to produce one or more tours.

Since the 1990s most commercial shows have had multiple producers. Typically one of the producers will be designated the lead producer with the power to make d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1: The Many Jobs in Professional Theater
• 2: Theater Education Offers Many Paths
• 3: Choosing a University—Consider Time and Money
• 4: Theater Career Income Varies
• 5: Theatrical Unions Make Rules but Not Jobs
• 6: Theater Jobs Are Everywhere … but Mostly in New York
• 7: Real Theater Careers
• 8: Find Current Facts
• Afterword: Love Theater without a Career in Theater
• Appendix A: The American Community Survey
• Appendix B: The National Science Foundation’s “National Survey of College Graduates”
• Appendix C: IATSE Local Types
• Appendix D: IATSE Stage Employee Locals
• Selected Bibliography
• Index