‘We are looking at the decimation of an industry’
Artistic Chicago is hemorrhaging jobs
Even at its peak, Chicago’s much-loved House Theatre was a lean operation. There were eight full-time employees, three part-time staffers and six hourly employees running the box-office. Each time House produced a show, which was usually four times a year, the company issued around 40 lengthy agreements with independent contractors: actors, designers, backstage staff. Since many of those contractors spent much of their working year at House, that meant the theater was responsible for the equivalent of at least 35 or 40 full-time jobs.
On Wednesday morning, I asked House how many people still were working there. And I got a quick answer back:
Two.
Nathan Allen, the artistic director, and Erik Schroeder, the managing director, are the lucky pair. Both are now collecting part-time salaries.
The performing arts mean many things to a city: tourism dollars, fun times, a
better quality of life for residents, superior educational resources for young people, moments for a citizenry to think about the most profound issues of life and death. And, of course, the opportunity to empathize with someone utterly different from yourself.
But they are also job creators. According to the League of Chicago Theatres, the performing arts sector directly supports roughly 10,000 jobs in Chicago.
Or, at least, it did. Precise figures are difficult to tabulate since we’re talking a blend of exempt positions, hourly jobs and work for independent contractors. And layoffs rarely are accompanied by press releases.
But work the phones and ask a few questions, and it becomes clear that the sector has been hemorrhaging jobs over the last several days. I’d venture more arts positions have been lost in the last month than at any point in the history of Chicago.
The House situation is not unusual. At Steppenwolf Theatre, 15 positions either were eliminated or frozen on July 10. In a statement Monday, Steppenwolf
said that a staggering two-thirds of its staff either had been furloughed or laid-off as part of the current crisis.
At the Joffrey Ballet, 10 full-time positions were eliminated this month, close to 20% of its workforce. Four more full-time jobs were reduced to parttime. Everyone else had to endure a two-week furlough, a salary reduction as high as 20%, and the end of the ballet’s contributions to their retirement plan. You don’t work at the ballet for the money, but there now are a lot fewer people getting to pursue their passion and pay their bills.
Those are just three examples. I could go on. The entire company of the Blue Man Group, part of the Cirque du Soleil fiscal woes, have been let go. It’s the same story at Teatro ZinZanni, the circus show downtown. In fact, it’s the same story almost everywhere you look. In the succinct words of Deb Clapp, the executive director of the League of Chicago Theatres: “We are looking at the decimation of an industry.”
We are indeed. And Chicago is staring it in the face right now.
You might argue that furloughs are inevitable, given the inability of theaters to perform indoors in front of more than 50 people under current city and state guidelines. But it’s not the furloughs that have been so surprising: It’s the permanent layoffs, indicating that the boards of nonprofit organizations just don’t see any imminent return to normal operations. Time and time again, I’ve heard that the job losses were necessary to protect the future of the institution.
Part of the reason for the crisis in recent days is the expiration of the federal Payroll Protection Program, the $669 billion scheme offering loans that were forgivable if employees were retained. In many ways, the PPP didn’t fit well with the arts. It meant that workers were retained when there was little they could do, when it probably would have made sense to apply that funding at the moment of potential institutional recovery and focus instead on short-term relief for individuals. It was, in the end, a Band-Aid that did not incentivize retaining positions in the long term.
So the city of Chicago now has to face up to reality: Its storied arts scene is shrinking fast, and many of its famed artists are leaving the profession.
What choice do they have? I heard this week from Kristin Ginther, a wardrobe supervisor at Teatro ZinZanni or, more accurately, an ex-wardrobe supervisor at that tenacious circus company. She had written to ask me to explore the difficulty theater artists were having at demonstrating how their skills at, say, stage management, could be applied to office work that required executive-functioning skills.
“We’ve all retooled our resumes, but the theater is so foreign to anyone who is not involved,” Ginther said. “If you’ve been a stage manager for 15 years, you can run a company. Please tell people not to dismiss our resumes, because they don’t understand the complexity of what we do backstage.”
Ginther was furloughed in March, and her health benefits expire in September, so it is a pressing personal matter. “I think my best option is administration,” she said, once I reached her on the phone.
I told her I understood the superior management skills you find in the highpressure world of the theater and would do my best.
To wit: Being a wardrobe supervisor for high-flying circus people more than prepares you for anything you might find in some earthbound office. Trust me on that, employers. You need to be creative, calm, precise, diplomatic, assertive, kind and ready for anything. Oh, and people’s lives depend on your organizational skills. Got that? People’s lives.
But I also said to Ginther how sad it felt to be having this conversation and to be realizing that Chicago is in the midst of a massive and maybe irreversible drain of experienced talent and craft away from the performing arts.
“I know,” she said. “It’s very demoralizing. This is a passion profession. I found it, I loved it and it is gone.”
Something needs to be done, fellow citizens. And fast.