nothing for the group is 3!

an annual report (except you actually want to read it)

Hi friends (and enemies),

Nothing for the Group is (almost) three years old! In 2021, I launched paid subscriptions and many of you will be getting your annual renewal notifications in the next few days. (Check your spam/promotions tab!) I have vowed to only write one subscription pitch a year, so here are some highlights from the last twelve months to entice you to stick around:

• Nothing for the Group’s readership increased 53% to 6,450 subscribers. Each weekly round-up averages between 8,000 - 10,000 views. (The newsletter as a whole received 55,000 views in the last month, which blows my mind.) Nothing for the Group’s reach is entirely due to word of mouth, so thank you to everyone who forwarded it around their office, added it to a syllabus, or recommended it to colleagues. (I love getting texts from my friends saying, “I’m at this thing and someone is talking about the newsletter and explaining to me who you are lololololol”)

• I wrote 46 weekly round-ups highlighting productions, workshops, festivals and digital work, season announcements, awards & commissions, institutional debacles, scams and clownery, and the latest power shifts in the regional theatre game of thrones. As much as I love ripping apart terrible PR statements, amplifying the range of artistry and innovation happening across the country — especially during a time of field-wide scarcity — is my favorite part of this project.

• We published 13 money diaries as part of our monthly Bills, Bills, Bills series. Jenna and I are floored by the series’ popularity and the conversations generated by these columns. As I recapped in our anniversary edition, the first diary we published—from a furloughed costume shop worker in the Midwest—was the lede in the New York Times' feature on pay equity. The January column from a freelance director in NYC was the first Nothing for the Group post to hit 10,000 views. Over 100 theatre workers from around the world applied to contribute. We haven’t received a cease-and-desist from Destiny’s Child. Wins all around!

• I also wrote a few subscriber-only essays, including my 2022 year-in-review. As a treat, I’m going to lift the paywall for a week or so on that piece and an old edition of Season Planning Futures:
  

  2022: The Year in Review

  season planning futures #1

  If you like these, consider a paid subscription! (More on that in a sec.)

• I started getting endless pitches and press releases from publicists who have definitely never read this newsletter! (I am still cackling at the one that said, “We’d love for you to feature [redacted] in the Nothing newsletter.”)

• I dramaturged my first play since 2020, which meant I got to hear and say the title of this newsletter in its original, true context: during a production meeting.

As always, there are three subscription tiers:

• $100 a year

• $50 a year

• $5 a month

If you’re an existing paid subscriber, you will receive an email notification seven days before your auto-renewal date. If you’re currently a free subscriber, you can upgrade to a paid tier by clicking the subscribe button below. Payments are securely processed via Stripe. The beauty of Substack handling payments (and taking 10% of my earnings) is that it’s very hands-off for me, but if you run into issues, please email me. (Substack also has a good reader FAQ on subscriptions and payments.)

If your financial situation has changed, or if you want to redirect your money to another cause, that is A-OK by me. Please don’t feel like you need to justify your decision to cancel or pause a paid subscription; I am very sympathetic to fluctuating incomes and priorities.

The weekly Friday round-ups and Bills, Bills, Bills will always be free for everyone — and paid subscriptions help ensure that. The revenue compensates me for my time and labor and allows me to practice my own values when it comes to paying folks for their work: editorial support; graphics; Bills, Bills, Bills contributors; and many subscriptions to newspapers, magazines, and trade publications. (I will give you all the NYT gift links I can!)

If you think Nothing for the Group is a valuable resource and you’d like to help sustain this project, I’m very grateful for the financial support, but it’s truly opt-in.

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Earlier this year, my friend Liz said, “Can we talk about how you getting laid off from Studio ended up being best thing that ever happened to you?” I started the newsletter during the tumultuous summer of 2020 — the world was imploding and I was newly unemployed, feeling like a total loser three weeks shy of my 35th birthday. (Right after my layoff Zoom, I was crying on my front stoop, sitting six feet away from Liz, grasping for silver linings like “At least I won’t have to moderate a talkback ever again?”)

I’ve spent the past three years rewiring my relationship to work and ambition as the theatre industry experiences its own long-overdue labor reckoning. I was beyond burnt out: a combination of 15 years in the bleed-you-dry non-profit trenches and societal always-be-hustling mentality. (I loathe millennial girlboss culture yet I’ve internalized its worst tenets!) But even before the pandemic, I was frustrated by the career opportunities and compensation for mid-career dramaturgs.

In the mid-2010s, I was offered my long-time dream job running the literary department at a large regional theatre. I was all set to move halfway across the country for the fourth time in eight years until I learned the salary range: $37,000 - $42,000. (This was less than I was making as the associate literary director at Studio at the time.) I turned it down, leveraged a job offer I knew I wasn’t taking to finally secure a raise at Studio (two years after I had received a title-only promotion), ended up getting eight months of back pay, and used that money to take a solo road trip around Iceland. (I have no regrets. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.)

Beyond learning how to rightly scam my way into a deserved pay increase, this was the moment I realized that my next job probably wasn’t going to be in theatre. I was exhausted by the requisite extreme geographic flexibility and the presumption that theatre workers can continually uproot their entire lives, with zero regard for family and community ties or limited finances, in pursuit of all-consuming ‘prestigious’ positions that pay insulting rates and leave no time for a personal life.

I never could’ve envisioned my current freelance career, but it’s slowly morphing into everything I’ve wanted but couldn’t conceptualize while I was working in theatre full-time. I have the agency to select my collaborators and choose projects that exemplify my artistic values. I actually have my own artistic values because I’m not clocking endless underpaid hours in service to an institutional mission. I can say no to work that devalues my expertise. (And I can turn down moderating talkbacks!) I’ve built a niche but impactful platform to champion artists and break down industry nonsense beyond the beautiful gossipy confines of my group texts. I wish I could write and dramaturg full-time — your girl still needs her non-arts day job for health insurance — but as traditional mid-career opportunities erode, I’m game to forge my own path.

Thank you so much for the ongoing support, whether it’s a paid subscription, reading and sharing the weekly round-ups, sending me nice emails, or patronizing the work of the featured creators and theatres. I’m still figuring out the sustainability and shape of my dramaturgical career, but Nothing for the Group is the beating heart of it.

xo
Lauren