the week of november 30 - december 4, 2020
can’t pay artists and add them to your board if you fire them first!
Welcome to Nothing for the Group, the newsletter where one dramaturg rounds up one week in theatre news, reviews, and takes.
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this week in debacles: the flea
The Flea’s Board of Directors has notified members of the theatre’s Resident Artist programs — including its non-Equity company The Bats, Resident Directors, and Serials Writers Room — that the programs will cease to exist after December 15th.
The resident artists had been privately negotiating in good faith with theater leadership for months to transform the Flea into an inclusive, artist-centered institution, following a long overdue public reckoning of the theater’s labor practices and treatment of BIPOC artists. In June, actor and ex-Bat Bryn Carter posted a letter in response to the theater’s Black Lives Matter statement, pointing to a disconnect between institutional public allyship and the lived experiences of artists within those organizations, and detailing the exploitation, racism, and bullying she experienced at the Flea.
The Residents Artists of The Flea followed up with a widely-circulated collective letter and list of demands, detailing multiple exploitative practices including “intimidation, disrespect, abuse or in some cases, deliberate acts of sabotage and retaliation masked as punishment for non-compliance…We have seen how you choose not to pay your artists, while sabotaging paid opportunities from elsewhere. We have seen these same artists paid to cater your events and galas, rather than for their creative work.”
Two days later, The Flea accepted full responsibility and vowed to transform the organization, announcing that it would start paying artists instead of expecting them to work on a volunteer basis. The theatre also committed to adding resident artists to the Board, as well as including them in the season planning process, and implementing institution-wide anti-racism training. The Flea also declared it was “pausing all production activity to reflect on the misalignment of our values and actions and to transform our institutional culture and producing model.”
(Helen Shaw wrote an excellent recap of the Flea’s long history of wage complaints, and the self-organizing of the resident artists for Vulture earlier this year, if you want the full story, which you do.)
I first heard about the Board’s decision to suspend the resident artist programs earlier today on Twitter and within an hour someone sent me a copy of the letter. (Once again, I’m going to remind everyone that I’m not a journalist — I’m just a dramaturg who hates textbook union-busting tactics and loves putting terrible institutions on blast, so don’t ask me to investigate anything, I don’t have the skills and I’m very biased!)
I’m going to reprint the letter here in its entirety:
Dear Artists,
We hope this finds you and your families safe and healthy and that you were able to have a restful holiday weekend.
We wanted to share with you where we are as The Flea embarks on the next phase of its work, in which all artists, and BIPOC artists in particular, will be recognized and uplifted.
Even as The Flea grows from a deeply necessary cultural reckoning, we must also grapple with leadership changes and the severe and prolonged economic downturn triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to ticket sales and other revenue streams disappearing, nonprofits like ours that rely heavily on the generosity of others have found it nearly impossible to maintain the pre-pandemic level of fiscal security and, even with vaccines on the horizon, that trend is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Already, it has forced the theater to reduce our inhouse staff to just three people. Like so many of our peers, The Flea has a responsibility to act in recognition of the economic realities of the moment, which have a serious impact on programming, the breadth of our next season (whenever that may be), the number of artists we are able to support and every other aspect of our operation.
With that in mind, we must share that the current version of our Resident Artists programs, including The Bats, Resident Directors and Serials Writers Room, will officially end on December 15, 2020.
Over the next several months, The Flea will embark on a new mission, vision, values process and strategic fund-raising plan that we hope will lead to a new artists' residency program, one that will be able to offer material support to participants. Artists who have been members of our programs in the past will be invited to apply for this program. Our vision is to be able to provide meaningful financial backing, albeit to a smaller group of artists. We look forward to continuing The Flea's commitment to nurturing talent, creating opportunity and amplifying new voices. Niegel Smith, our Artistic Director, will continue to shape the direction of the theater, developing and implementing new and innovative programming. We are extraordinarily lucky to have him leading our artistic team.
All staff and leadership will be regularly trained in anti-oppression, diversity, equity and inclusion, and conflict resolution. We will also hire an HR consultant with experience in anti-racism to implement a safe grievance procedure for all employees, contractors and artists who work at The Flea. This consultant will report directly to the Board. In addition, Niegel is currently participating in leadership training through the Art Equity's Leaders of Color Institute.
As we turn our attention to stabilizing and transforming The Flea, we wanted to take this opportunity to recognize the tireless dedication of all the artists who have collaborated with The Flea and express our profound gratitude for the groundbreaking and beautiful art created over these many years.
With best intentions,
The Board
Can’t pay resident artists and add them to your board if you fire them first! (Also, I can’t believe “with best intentions” is the sign-off here; I almost thought it was parody at first. I hope the board receives some of that “regular training” and learns the difference between intentions and impact, which is covered in the first five minutes of any decent EDI workshop.)
The Flea also released a vague statement about transition and evolution on their website, providing no details (or even mention!) of these major artistic shake-ups but promising “good things are coming.” I hope they’re better than the roll-out of this decision, which is a case study in public relations ineptitude!
I have personally heard from several Flea artists, and one gave me permission to anonymously quote them:
“Resident Artists from every discipline spent many hours from the beginning of this until now, drafting proposals, delivering our demands and reimagining what a theater company can look like. We worked with a mediator, whom [the Flea] consistently went behind, and the board agreed to board representation for artists, a living wage, and artist representation on season planning, and radical transparency. Basically instead of listening to the artists they took the easy way out. Terminating all of our contracts and thus their accountability to our demands...they will work on anti-racism on their own terms.”
“The artists have done everything we can over the last 6 months. Forming committees within a couple of days, organizing a walkout for a meeting in about 24 hours, forming a list of demands, interviewing and selecting a mediator within about a week’s time, organizing company wide meetings to maintain a unified front, etc., and they worked unbelievably slowly and reluctantly through it all. And then within a few hours were able to wipe it all away with much urgency. We have been clear, direct, accommodating, and diligent this entire time. And they have given nothing but roadblocks and hurdles, all of which we have surpassed to this moment.”
I’m looking forward to hearing the Flea artists’ public response and any call to action. The Flea is an organization that spent years exploiting young artists and profiting off their free labor, as they built and opened a new $25 million three-theater complex. At what point does the greater theater community stop artistically and financially supporting this institution?
One last thing: at some point today, the Flea deleted their official Twitter account — a real dumb move, because anyone who understands the basics of social media knew what would happen next. (Theatres are so bad at so many things, but the total bafflement at how Twitter works is a field-wide problem.) Anyway, the new fake account is a vast improvement:
virtual theatre
The National Theatre launched an at-home pay-per-play streaming service , featuring previous NT Live broadcasts and a selection of plays from the NT’s archive being released online for the first time. New titles will be added monthly. The initial available productions include Phèdre; Josie Rourke’s production of Coriolanus; Billie Piper in the Young Vic production of Yerma; Amadeus; Medea; Othello; The Cherry Orchard; Lucy Kirkwood’s Mosquitoes, which starring Olivia Colman; and Inua Ellams’ version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters.
The Wilma Theater’s digital capture of their site-specific production of Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning is available until December 13th. Directed by Blanka Zizka, the production was “created in a closed quarantine ‘bubble’ at a private location in the Poconos, following strict health guidelines.”
The Jungle’s virtual performance of Kate Cortesi’s Is Edward Snowden Single? is streaming through December 20th. Directed by Christina Baldwin, the volcanic comedy features two virtuosic actors (and some whimsical animation) playing twenty-plus roles.
A reading of Stacey Rose’s As Is: Conversations with Big Black Women in Confined Spaces, will stream on YouTube for four days, starting at 2 PM on December 8th. Directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene, the presentation is part of MTC’s Ted Snowdon Reading Series.
Jackalope Theatre’s New Frontier Series — which follows a cohort of commissioned playwrights and production teams as they navigate the new play development process — starts on December 8th. The projects include Daria Miyeko Marinelli’s CROPT (Mikael Burke, director; Hannah Hopkins, dramaturg), Omer Abbas Salem’s Being Julia Roberts (Sophiyaa Nayar, director; Nadya Naumaan, dramaturg), and Terry Guest’s Michael Jackson and the Devil’s Book (Wardell Julius Clark, director; Jared Bellot, dramaturg). Each play will receive a virtual reading this month, and a second presentation later this spring.
audio plays
Ike Holter’s new audio play I Hate It Here: Stories from the End of the Old World premieres on December 10th. The project is described as “an anthem for our time,” with writer/director Holter using “vignettes, monologues, and song to take listeners from an office to a wedding, high school, outdoor brunch, front porch, and more to capture the many ways it feels to live in a world wracked by changes both personal and systemic.”
Williamstown Theatre Festival’s season on Audible launches this week with the release of A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Robert O’Hara. The company will release three more audio productions this month: Anna Ziegler’s Photograph 51, directed by Susan Stroman (December 10th); Stacy Osei-Kuffour’s Animals,
directed by Whitney White (December 17th); and Shakina Nayfack’s Chonburi International Hotel & Butterfly Club, directed by Laura Savia (December 29th).Vie Boheme’s audio play Centerplay, part of The Jungle Theater’s fall virtual season, starts streaming December 8th. An adaptation of her one-woman show, Centerplay is “an immersive and multi-layered sonic journey. Using spoken word, poetry, and song, Vie Boheme submerges the audience in the auditory realm to share the stories of black women - inviting listeners to see the complexity and nuance of experiences that are often over-simplified and minimalized.”
2021 season updates
Signature Theatre in Virginia announce their 2021 cinematic season, featuring five fully staged plays and musicals made exclusively for the screen and professionally filmed. The line-up includes the concert Simply Sondheim, Daniel J. Watts’ The Jam: Only Child (directed by Liliana Blain-Cruz), Mark Sonnenblick's Midnight at The Never Get (directed by Matthew Gardiner), After Midnight: Celebrating the Duke Ellington Years (directed and choreographed by Jared Grim), and Dominique Morisseau’s Detroit ‘67.
The New Group announced their 2021 digital projects. The works include Beckett’s Waiting for Godot featuring Ethan Hawke, John Leguizamo, and Wallace Shawn; Warren Adams’ The Dinner; John Epperson’s Lypsinka Must Be Destroyed… Again (directed by Chloë Sevigny); Richard Thomas’ Singing Heads (directed by Monet); Donja R. Love’s I Need Space; Diane Exavier’s Bernarda’s Daughters (directed by Dominique Rider); and the documentary What I Did for Love, where a filmmaker follows “a group of New York theatre folk, led by director Scott Elliott and actor Edie Falco, who, missing their work and each other so terribly, can’t help but turn their lives upside down in order to rehearse Thomas Bradshaw’s incredibly timely take on Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull.”
things I read this week
Helen Shaw’s breakdown on the budgeting, blueprints, and technology of producing the viral hit Circle Jerk
Rebecca Ritzel’s follow-up on Ari Roth’s exit from Mosaic Theater Company, detailing multiple failures, including a botched institutional response to a sexual harassment complaint, a drunk onstage actor, and other disturbing problems. (A+ to the NYT for having a DC-based reporter with a deep understanding of the local theatre landscape report this out.)
I was not planning to take last week off from the newsletter, but it was the first time in nine years that I haven’t had to use a vacation day to not work the day after Thanksgiving, so I really leaned into my four-day weekend. (Also, it was a holiday, so there was, in fact, nothing for the group. I feel like I made up for this week, though.) This issue’s coming to you a little early because even though I’m not a journalist, I do like breaking news. We’ll be back to our regular Friday delivery next week.
I don't know...are you sure you aren't a journalist?