I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about the imbroglio in the Los Angeles theater community over the past few weeks–since Actors’ Equity, the stage actors’ union, announced plans to change the city’s local 99-seat showcase code–and I keep coming back to a conversation I had with the artistic director of an arts center that presents independently produced theater productions (the sort of experimental contemporary performance I write about). He’d been involved in several projects and initiatives that sought to figure out how to better compensate these artists for their work, and among other recommendations, one such panel had simply suggested that artists make less art, on the dubious grounds it could increase demand for the remaining pieces.
To which I suggested that if the purpose was to pay artists some sort of minimum for their work, perhaps they should just form a union to require institutions such as the one he ran to ensure that artists made such a minimum while they were working there, and preventing his institution from presenting works that violated such wage minimums. To which he responded with some version of: “A union? Are you kidding me?”
The point isn’t to throw stones at some anonymous figure (who, for the record, has instituted several initiatives to ensure better compensation for artists). Rather, it’s to get at one of the core problems we in the arts face whenever we try to deal with these sorts of issues. Even the best meaning people, confronted with the practical reality that our behavior would have to change in order to achieve the ends we want, tend to retreat from the positions they hold so dear. It’s easy to say, “We value paying artists a living wage for their work,” but much harder to change our own institutional behavior to make that happen. And this is the problem which lies at the heart of the controversy playing out in Los Angeles in increasingly vitriolic terms.