Philip Carlson
The Actors Center Journal Vol. 2, No. 2
Phil’s Page
In my zeal to instill the wonderful way I think into as many minds as possible, I find myself doing lectures and workshops about acting and the business and getting a job and who might qualify to be a truly great actor and who is an opportunistic hack and whatever else I can squeeze into the discussion at colleges and universities and conservatories who are kind enough to invite me to do so. Well, maybe that is not the subject of the lecture I have been asked to give but I usually manage to get in a few names of people who do not deserve to be venerated (or, in some cases, live). And what I am finding in this world which is rapidly going to hell in a hand basket, is an extraordinary number of young people who want to act in the theatre, who want to be artists, who want to play the classics and who will reluctantly admit that, yes they would like to make money and they will do film or television but their heart belongs to art. No kidding. They are not trying to impress me – why should they? I am an agent, I want them to make money. I don’t want to hear that they would die to work in regional theatre for ten cents a week. Are they stupid? No. They are in love with acting. And with the theatre. Granted, these are kids in MFA programs or conservatories. They have already demonstrated a serious commitment to acting and to their willingness to take on vast amounts of debt, but ten years ago, all most of those kids wanted was to make money. What happened? Perhaps the economy. Whatever has happened I am glad that it has happened (not the economy but young people’s turning to a life in art) but where are these kids supposed to go? There is no place for them to go to. Yes, there are regional theatres but they are bringing in fewer and fewer actors from New York each year because they have less and less money (and the money they do have they are spending on staff, not actors but that’s another issue.) There is no place where this larger every year number of trained young actors can go to do theatre.
A few years ago, in preparation for the First Congress of Actors and Acting Teachers, Michael Miller and I asked first year students at ten different training programs to write something about what they expected from a life as an actor. We asked the schools themselves to submit the two most worthy essays to us and we would pick the one we deemed most elegant and deserving of being read at The Congress. In the end, we couldn’t decide between two essays and so we presented both. One of the writer’s was from Yale, the other from North Carolina School of the Arts. (Their essays are available to be read in the text of the first Congress on The Actors Center website which is www.theactorscenter.org.) They were both filled with extraordinarily eloquent and heartfelt words written by two young artists chronicling their beliefs, their hopes and dreams for the craft they hoped to receive and the profession they hoped to enter. All the eloquence and passion these two apprentice artists were expressing was focused on a life, they supposed, they hoped, would revolve around the theatre. What theatre?
There is so little opportunity for young, classically trained actors to use the training that they worked so diligently to acquire. There is a decreasing number of regional theatres that do classic plays (average pay – 700. per week) and in New York there is only The Public Theatre (550. to 750 a week, depending on the theatre), Theatre for a New Audience (555. per week) and Classic Stage Company (487. per week) which even attempt the classics. Good luck paying off student loans at those prices.
The wonder is that these aspiring actors are filled with the dream of theatre at all. Where does it come from, that belief, that ache for the power of the theatre? How is it still alive? But it is. I see it in these young people at the schools and they are suffused with the desire to act in the theatre. And I have served them in their careers for over thirty years now as an agent and I know that their dreams of theatre will dissipate over time and not too much time at that. Many of them will simply not be able to get work. The jobs are few and the competition is fierce and not all of these kids are dripping with talent. (Why are these schools accepting students they know perfectly well will never find a home in this business? Well, it’s a short answer I think and we all know what it is.) Many of them will not be able to afford the meager salaries paid by most theatres. Forget Broadway. That’s only a couple of hundred jobs a year and most of those salaries are merely adequate which, admittedly, is a big step up from meager.
What happens to those hopes and dreams of the survivors? Much of what happens, probably most of what happens is that the young and then the not so young actor can no longer afford the luxury of working in the theatre. He or she has found themselves working out of town and once too often missed a chance to audition for a job in film or television (where they might have a chance to make enough money to get through the year) and the actor becomes discouraged with the idea of working out of town and the agent becomes very discouraged and they jointly agree that it is time not to go out of town any longer. It is time to stay in New York and do new plays. So maybe they get a job in town at Playwrights Horizons (516 per week) or New York Theatre Workshop (600 per week on the main stage, 539 on their 2nd stage). And maybe they get a nice review and get to test for some television pilot. Then they get that pilot which goes to series (25,000 per episode) and they go to LA and they do not come back to the theatre. Or they do not get that pilot and they get fewer and fewer jobs in New York and they leave the profession altogether.
Oh, it’s so bleak. Yet still they come and still they want the theatre. Would it not be heaven on Earth if there were a National Theatre for them to which to aspire? A place where they could work and grow and raise a family (like Bob Prosky did at The Arena) and inspire other even younger people with the power of the theatre so that those even younger people might have a place to one day take them in, if they proved worthy, and nurture them instead of a void which silently and heartlessly turns them into disempowered and discouraged former actors. All it will take is someone with endless guts to call someone else with endless energy who will rope in a third person with endless resources and there it will be: A National Theatre. Where are you Harold Clurman?
