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[0:05] Lauren Van Hemert: This is the Beltline to Broadway podcast.

[0:08] Lauren Van Hemert: I'm Lauren Van Hemert, your host, and on this episode, I'm chatting with Bear Bellinger and Matt DeSilva about Actors Equity and open access.

[0:28] Lauren Van Hemert: When Actors Equity announced that its open access policy would take effect immediately last July, equity and non-equity workers on both sides of the issue took to social media to express their views.

[0:46] Lauren Van Hemert: On one hand, according to Kate Schindle, the president of Actors Equity, this policy builds a union that uplifts the entire theater community, especially those who have not felt included or welcomed in the past.

[1:02] Lauren Van Hemert: Critics, however, say that this new policy is bad news for an industry already hard hit by COVID and question the union's motives.

[1:13] Lauren Van Hemert: To help me understand open access better, I reached out to Actors Equity and was put in touch with two of its representatives, Bear Bellinger, one of the union's central principal counselors, and Matt DeSilva, a delegate to the Actors Equity Convention.

[1:32] Lauren Van Hemert: As a side note, this conversation was held via Zoom, and since that technology doesn't always render the best sound recording, I've captioned the episode and posted it on both YouTube and our website.

[1:48] Lauren Van Hemert: Here's our conversation.

[1:50] Lauren Van Hemert: So talk to me for people who may not be a theater artist or theater maker. Talk to me about what joining the union entailed prior to this open access policy taking effect.

[2:07] Bear Bellinger: Back when I was looking to join, the most common way at least was an accumulation of, I think the most common way, I don't know, was an accumulation of what's called EMC points, Equity Membership Candidate. If you were working at equity theaters on a non-union contract, each week you worked was a point. It used to be 50 points to join, and then I think like it was like three or four years ago or two or three years ago that they dropped it to 25 points. So that was one way, and then another way was just being offered an equity contract. So being hired by a producer essentially to do a job, which, you know, in both of the situations we were sort of relying on our boss essentially to determine who was able to join the union and receive all the protections and benefits of being in the labor union. Bear, did I get it?

[2:51] Matt DeSilva: Yeah, you've got two of the three. The only other way into the union used to be that you could join the union if you were a member of one of our sister unions. So if you were a member of SAG, AFTRA, or AEA and wanted to join, you could pay to join and become a member of Actors Equity.

[3:43] Bear Bellinger: I want to go back to April 2021. A lot of theater workers marched down Broadway, and they were mainly protesting Scott Rudin, but they also took the opportunity to protest the union, which they saw as being ineffective in protecting the membership from racism, sexism, and unsafe work environments.

[4:09] Bear Bellinger: So after that, they had a convention, and during that convention, several BIPOC members walked out. But most of what we've heard about that convention was behind closed doors. I shouldn't say behind closed doors; it was open to delegates, but it wasn't open to the public. And most of what we've heard about that convention has been via social media. So tell me about the convention, Matt. You were there, you were a delegate, and what happened there?

[4:41] Matt DeSilva: Yeah, I mean, it was three days. We heard and discussed and argued passionately and voted on a number of different resolutions, many of which I'm really excited about. Many of which, you know, coincidentally ended up being related to all the open access stuff that's now happening, which tells me as someone who's new to equity governance that there are a lot of folks who are looking to get involved and take Actors Equity into a sort of new direction, which is really exciting. As far as, you know, the way things ended, there's some unfortunate stuff that went down. I don't know exactly what happened to be a hundred percent clear. I know that there were BIPOC members who felt that the space was not necessarily as welcoming as it needed to be, is probably the sort of most basic way of putting it.

It just shows that even though we are making strides as a union, there are still interpersonal growing pains and unfortunate white supremacist sort of ideology—not ideology is a strong word—but the union itself is still a reflection of American society in general. It's a microcosm in a lot of ways, and that there are going to be missteps and shitty things that happen. Putting it, you know, bluntly, you can be frank; it's fine. A shitty racist thing happened. I don't know who, I don't know exactly who or why or what the intent or motivation was, but the result was folks not feeling comfortable in the room and then opting to leave.

[5:22] Bear Bellinger: What's your impression of the convention and how it went down? I also am a BIPOC member of the Author Council and our delegation. I would say in terms of specifically open access, in terms of what we just put out, the convention put forward proposals that supported and passed proposals that supported what had already been in the works for a few months at that point. In the case of the convention, the convention is a reflection of American society at large. You know, there's not an institution in this country that's going to suffer from some institutional racism that does not suffer from the effects of white supremacy culture in some way, and our convention and our union are not absolved of that either.

That being said, I can't throw the entire convention out because I can't throw the entirety of every structure in America out right now. We live in this country that was founded upon and has been built upon the backs of, you know, specifically Black, Indigenous people in this country to begin with. And so we live within that at all given times. I live within that in my everyday life. There are things that we need to fix, and those things that we need to fix for the country also affect Actors Equity Association. There's a lot of work to be done, and we are working towards that.

[8:32] Matt DeSilva: And you know the truth is, on this platform in Actors Equity, in the theaters that I'm close to here regionally, the work is ongoing. It's not just a one-and-done thing.

[8:46] Bear Bellinger: So it's ongoing work, and it's hard work. So I appreciate what you're saying for sure.

[8:54] Matt DeSilva: Yeah, and I think crucially it also, it's about engaging members of our union and sort of creating as democratic an organization as possible, which I think one of the reasons I'm very excited about open access is I see it as an opportunity to get more voices in our union and hopefully get more voices organized in our union to continue that work and to keep pushing for things that folks want and not just relying on, you know, top-down service model organization and more of like a member-driven organizing model of an organization, which, again, I do think there are a lot of people on our national council and certain delegates and just member rank-and-file members who are really waking up to that or really sort of engaged in that.

Myself personally, I joined the union back in 2015 or 2016, and I didn't really think about it much for a few years as far as what it really meant. But then I sort of had a wake-up call politically, professionally, whatever you want to call it. And it's been really rewarding in the last couple of years to get more involved and to sort of feel like part of a collective, you know, that we can do more things together, organized together than I could do on my own.

[10:44] Bear Bellinger: So what happened between April and July to result in the open access policy? Sounds like the groundwork for open access happened even before the convention.

[10:59] Matt DeSilva: So the groundwork for this convention starts last year when Actors Equity put together an anti-racism statement. After that, our diversity inclusion strategists put together a diversity inclusion retrofit that is addressing the full organization and all of the different ways in which it can become a more anti-racist organization, how we can be more diverse. And this is one aspect of that retrofit. It has eight pillars that it stands on, the things that need to be changed within the union. And so the first thing that was done was to begin ongoing training for our staff side. This was another aspect of that. We started meetings for open access back in January, and we started those meetings with the idea of a small working group that came together asking, how do we open access?

[12:02] Bear Bellinger: Do we need to open access? Why do we need to open access? And we worked over the course of nine meetings and over 20 hours of meeting time to work through all of the individual ways that we might want to open access. We started with the question of, well, why don't we just throw the doors open? And the group was like, okay, that's maybe a little extreme. And we went, okay, well, let's break down all of the small ways that we could open access. And we went systematically through, okay. What if we open access by lowering the amount of EMC points? What if we open access by getting schools involved and allowing people in through a school program? What if we open access by allowing folks who have worked an equity theater before access?

And at the end of working through all of these different systems, we looked at what we had compiled and said, well, this kind of looks like we're basically opening the access. And so we said, okay, here's what we want to do. We want to open access these couple different ways, which is, you know, we want to open access fairly, we want to open access immediately, and then we want to open access permanently. Those recommendations were put in front of our council right before convention. We went to convention, a couple different convention resolutions came forward that supported or were directly in line with this policy. Those convention resolutions passed, and then coming out of convention, we had another council meeting, and we ended up passing the recommendations from the working group. It feels like for other people, this was all done very quickly and in response to convention. But this has been in motion for almost a year at this point.

[14:04] Lauren Van Hemert: So are the EMC points gone and now anybody can join if they've worked in a theater and gotten paid in the last year?

[14:16] Bear Bellinger: There is no look back period. It is open to if you have ever worked professionally. It just means you have received payment for your work as an actor or stage manager.

[14:30] Lauren Van Hemert: Is there a scale for payment? I mean, there's a lot of theaters around here, for example, that give a stipend and not necessarily any type of what would be considered a living wage. So is there any threshold on the payment?

[14:46] Bear Bellinger: Nope, no threshold on the payment. I mean, we have the same thing here in Chicago. We have a very large non-union theater scene in Chicago that's vibrant, and the storefront scene in Chicago is kind of the bread and butter of what Chicago theater practitioners think of as Chicago theater, you know. And I have been a part of productions in Florida and Chicago. I came out of that where, you know, I did I got a hundred and fifty dollar stipend, and that is absolutely applicable. It seems like when the policy was announced in July, the theater community, as with many things, as with many communities, was divided on this. On the one hand, it is like you said, Bear, one of the pillars of the diversity and inclusion efforts.

It opens access. And then on the other hand, the membership dues could be cost prohibitive to a lot of marginalized actors, a lot of stage managers who may have worked professionally, but they're not—I mean, there's a whole other conversation to be had about making a living wage as an artist, as a stage manager. That's another conversation for another day. But Bear, you're an advocate for this. You have been an advocate for this. You've come out and made statements about this. So how does this move the needle towards making equity a more inclusive organization?

[16:29] Bear Bellinger: I am an advocate for this. I obviously have been, like I said, involved for pretty much the full run of it from inception to implementation. So I've seen the whole thing happen and I've seen the way it was shaped, the body that shaped it, how it was in that at every step. It was a diverse body of folks working to make this happen and shape the policy in a way that was inclusive and was pointed towards getting the ability of our to join the union put into the hands of a member. And I think that is the important thing to focus on here. Any single effort in the history of the United States that benefits marginalized groups is also going to benefit folks who are in the majority, folks who are in power.

That's just kind of the way it works. You know, if you look at this history of things that we've thought of as benefiting marginalized groups like welfare or affirmative action, they have widely actually benefited white folks more than necessarily marginalized groups, but they have also benefited those groups. In the case of open access, historically, like Matt said earlier, the path to membership went through producers. Our producers, as we know, are generally on a large percentage, white men. They bring their own set of biases forward whenever they decide to put someone on a contract who's who deserves it, who they might have gone to school with, who they might socialize with. When you're casting a show, as much as we like to think that the industry is, or as much as folks want to think that the industry is based solely on how good of a performer you are, how good of a stage manager you are, often it's based on who you know.

Those circles that we live in are influenced by all of the different social structures that we've grown up in. And so that means that racism is at the core of all of these structures. And by opening access, by what we did now, we take that power out of the hands of the producers and put it into the hands of the individuals. So if you, as a stage manager or actor, think that you deserve union protection, you get to make that decision for yourself. It doesn't open up the job pool; it doesn't immediately make you know that there are more union jobs. But it does say that when a producer comes to you to offer you a contract, especially if you're outside of New York, where New York there's more closed houses that are solely Actors Equity Association contracts.

Outside of New York, there's a lot of ratios of what we call ratios where some of the performance union and some of the performers are non-union, and the producer decides which people they want to offer which contract. But if you're outside of New York, you're on a ratio of contractors or working to either to audition or interview as a stage manager for a ratio contract, you get to decide beforehand, I'm an Actors Equity Association member, you have to provide me with a union contract, which comes with union protections, which comes with union salary. And so that power has now been given to the individual rather than to the producer. That in itself allows folks who were previously marginalized to claim more ownership over their future.

[20:49] Matt DaSilva: I'll just jump in and say personally, I think fundamentally what excites me about this is in the broader context of like workers in the United States or workers in the world, if you want to take it to that level, really. I think if you work for a living, you deserve protections of a union. You deserve the right to join the union. And that should be up to the worker, not up to the boss if you want to just take it into like super simple terms. Which I think this is a step toward accomplishing, which is really exciting. Bear, you mentioned Chicago being this robust theater community with a lot of non-equity houses. We're in the same spot here in North Carolina. We have a handful of professional theaters or what would be categorized as professional theaters, and a majority of our theaters are not. Does this hurt the local theaters, community theaters that are not equity houses that haven't been equity houses?

[22:09] Bear Bellinger: I don't believe so. You know, the thing that I have maintained and said over and over again is that this isn't going to immediately dry up the pool of non-union talent. There are folks who have, you know, been able to join who have been at their points under the old EMC system, who had been at their points for years and hadn't joined. I know folks that used to be members and decided they didn't want to be members, that that wasn't what they wanted their professional path to go. There's always going to be folks who come out of school or come into the industry without going to school who want to work a little bit before they join or before they make that decision and join for themselves. There's always going to be a non-union talent pool.

What this does is just allow folks to claim their own agency. I know a lot of the conversation, the social media conversation around the convention was that equity didn't create a safe space for SPYPO members. So there, as we invite more members into equity, how can theaters create that safe space as we move forward?

[23:39] Bear Bellinger: You know, the very first step is letting marginalized bodies, marginalized voices, have power. When we look at the landscape of the American theater, we look at a landscape that is primarily white, that is overwhelmingly white.

[23:59] Bear Bellinger: Especially if we look at our directors, especially if we look at our artistic directors, especially if we look at our tasking directors, our executive directors, they it is overwhelmingly white. If the voices making all of the decisions that shape the direction of your theater are all homogeneous, then you're never going to be able to work towards change. No matter how many trainings that you do, no matter how much you put up your black square, no matter how much you call your senators, you can internalize my struggle. I have been working on this both from an academic perspective and a personal perspective for my entire life. I come from this from both focusing on African American studies in my college as I was going through college and getting pulled over by the cops all the time.

This is my life; it's not just something that I came to because of George Floyd. It's not just something that I came through to from knowing other people who had struggled; it is an everyday occurrence. I wake up every day, I walk out into these streets as a black man. That's what you need more of; our theater has historically kept out voices like mine. And when they have allowed a few marginalized voices in, they have curated which marginalized voices they allow through the door. That is not to say that those voices are not powerful and beautiful and incredible artists and incredible administrators, but again, when the voice that's shaping who gets let through has a perspective, we need to always acknowledge that perspective.

That perspective is put on every single decision that includes the decision of who deserves to be able to come forward and run our theaters or direct the show or write a show. When a historically empowered group, generally we'll say white men in the theater landscape, decide which marginalized voices come forward, they tend to avoid the voices that scare them the most. We don't even know how many incredible voices have been left behind because the system was never set up to accept them. That's the fundamental change that needs to happen in our industry, and the idea of relinquishing power I think is a tough hurdle for a lot of predominantly white theaters, predominantly white institutions to wrap their heads around.

[28:02] Matt DaSilva: Absolutely. When you're in a customer privilege, quality looks like oppression. You know, like that's the idiom; it is that way for a reason. We are working against the programming that has been instilled in all of us since we were born. I mean, the amount of well-intentioned friends, good people who I know who are like, "Man, I just feel like with all the, you know, there's more diversity in casting and being white right now is tough," and I'm like, "What? What are we?" That is not the move. And, you know, I feel like that was the conversation like three years ago amongst my friends, well, my white friends.

[28:02] Matt DaSilva: Um, there's less of that. But I'll say there are still talent agents and managers, and it's at every part of the industry where there's just like this undercurrent of like, "Well, I'm not racist, but like, you know, gosh, if you were Latino right now, I'd really be able to submit you for like, you know, so many different projects." And it's like, are you watching the same stuff? Like, what theater are you watching? I see a lot of me on TV; like, I don't know. Like, that's just a lazy excuse that people are kind of, you know, in their worst moments turning to. The other thing I wanted to just add in terms of promoting diversity, inclusion, and justice into our theater spaces, I think part of that is about equity as a union sort of prioritizing it as we head into all of our various contract negotiations, right?

And sort of trying to make sure that, like, hey, these are important things that we want to have happen. And I think that ties into a potential benefit down the line of this open access type policy, which is hopefully gonna bring more members aboard, hopefully, to change the demographic breakdown of the union, which just will make us more equipped to have those conversations in a more productive fashion.

[29:37] Bear Bellinger: If I can, I'm gonna go even one step farther than that on that. The union is never going to stop any employer from instituting policies that are safer than what is negotiated in their contract. I wanna say that again: the union's never going to stop any employer from instituting policies that are safer than what has been negotiated in our contract. So at any given point, all of our producers can choose to make steps that are more safe for our members, that are more inclusive for our members. They can make those decisions on their own. What we right now have to do is go into the negotiating room when we negotiate new rounds of contracts and say, okay, this is a priority for us. Diversity, equity, inclusion is a priority for us.

Anti-racism is a priority for us. Having spaces be safer for marginalized communities is a priority for us. So we're going to pay attention to that in this give and take of a contract negotiation. Everything in terms of diversity, inclusion, anti-racism should be something that we are working on at all times together with our producers, outside of the actual negotiating part of the contract. Yes, it's inside of contract negotiations because it has to be written into the contract, but it shouldn't be something that's negotiated; it should be something that is what's the safest thing that we could do for stage managers and actors for the American theater. And right now, that's a battle that's not necessarily as even as it should be.

[31:30] Matt DaSilva: To protect us, and myth at times that the power to create more inclusive, safer policy is 24/7, 365 in the hands of our producers. Active Equity is continuing to work to do better, but when we have to do it at the negotiating table, we're in the middle of a give and take rather than a let's do this together to the best of our ability. Yeah, it's a really good point, and it's something that I've had conversations with many of my friends as well. I think there's a misconception sometimes amongst some of our members even that equity makes all the rules, and part of this is I think like a decades-long attack on labor unions in general in the country. Some of it is from, you know, previous equity; I don't want to throw shade on people from, you know, decades ago; it's not really productive.

But I think there's like this sort of all stemming from this country club mentality of what equity was, right? That like it's sort of you do this so that you can be on Broadway and whatever, and less of it as like a labor union. Anyway, all that's to say, I feel like we need to constantly be reminding ourselves that equity is not unilaterally determining what the rules of American theater are. My concern for theater is that the way seasons are looking now, there's definitely a shift in who's telling the stories, what works are being produced. My concern is two seasons from now, three seasons from now. How do we keep our theaters accountable? There's been a groundswell of energy around changing the stage for years.

That groundswell of energy has been mainly relegated to marginalized communities speeding up and putting their own careers at jeopardy as they speak out on good treatment or their mistreatment and their lack of access. What we saw in the last year is we saw folks with a higher level of privilege get into that conversation, often for the first time. So much of what we need to move forward and to continue this energy is for folks to remember to constantly check their privilege, constantly look at what they're saying versus what they're doing, and listening to voices that maybe scare them. Progress never feels safe; it always feels scary.

[35:09] Lauren Van Hemert: I'll put links to those resources in the episode notes. I'll also be curious to hear your thoughts about Actors Equity's open access policy. Feel free to reach out to me through our website at www.beltline2broadway.org or message me on social media on Facebook or Instagram at Beltline to Broadway or Twitter at Beltline2BWay. Until next time, I'll see you at the theater.