Defining and defending the gray area: the invisibility of small professional theatre

I’ve spent nearly three decades working in nominally professional theatre. That is to say non-Equity but (usually) paid, albeit below a living wage, but with enough EMC points to join. Two theatre degrees, worked with some famous people, garnered multiple awards and nominations, co-founded a theatre company in Boston that’s still going strong, etc.

In a world that tends to divide theater artists into Equity Card holders and Ron & Sheila Albertson, I exist in the vast gray area in between. Maybe not professional professional, but demonstrably more than, say, the equivalent of a person who once successfully gave a Heimlich Maneuver declaring themself a doctor. My self-designation at the moment is Semi-Pro. It’s less of a mouthful than Nominally Professional Theatre Artist.

Of late, since I returned to DC, I’ve cut back my theatrical pursuits due to family obligations (he just turned three), and apart from an occasional acting gig, my primary connection to the world of the theatre is writing for DCTS; so, if you will, a Semi-Retired Semi-Pro. For now.

Here and in other large theatre towns there can be found dozens, if not hundreds, of artists also in this Gray Area, some passing through on a trajectory toward their Equity card and/or NYC, some struggling mightily to establish themselves and eke out a living, others who are perfectly content to exist here because the work is sufficiently fulfilling and they get their primary income elsewhere.

We are proud of our art, or should be. Yet we struggle to assert our visibility and legitimacy against forces from all sides; audiences that don’t know we exist, colleagues who can get very proprietary about professional status, relatives at Thanksgiving who ask us if we’re still doing our “little plays,” the egregiously absurd economics of urban millennial existence, and ever-diminishing arts coverage in the major press.

And to that last point. When we can count on one hand the number of full-time professional theatre journalists in the region, we obviously can’t realistically expect them to cover everything. That said, one would hope that, as part of their job, they endeavor to have some level of awareness of what’s going on in the Gray Area even if they aren’t able to see it or review it.

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So when the leading theatre critic in the region commits a faux pas in a recent WaPo interview/article in which they challenged the DC theatre community to stage a repertory of Shakespeare’s double-tetralogy of history plays, ignoring the fact that Brave Spirits was nearly halfway through a two-year project of doing exactly that (and doing a commendable job too), then amending the article hours later citing their “attempt,” then later claiming on social media that no, really, they actually did know about Brave Spirits all along, pretty much every DC theatre artist slogging away in the Gray Area winced at yet another humiliation, yet another erasure, and for the Brave Spirits company members, it must’ve been especially acute and painful.

Never mind the prospect of a pandemic shutting down or decimating the attendance of every public gathering for the immediate future — which of course would impact the entire arts scene, visual, performing and otherwise, not just Brave Spirits and the like. We’ve got a lot on our plate already.

For what it’s worth, folks, I see you, and I stand with you. Hoping that Henry V’s press night is still on, because I’m really looking forward to seeing it.

Because now, it’s personal.