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3/11/03 New York is a town where everybody's on the move. Where else do taxi drivers lean on the horn even at the police and yell, "Hey, get a move on, I'm trying to make a living here!" The traffic is jammed, the subways are loud. There's no place like it. That's right, everybody's "trying to make a living here." But what's interesting about the (thankfully) brief Broadway theater strike this past weekend is how many people of all types were willing to put their livings aside for a while. Frozen to the bone after picketing all day, a few of us were warming up inside a theater district restaurant. The waitress overheard our discussion and said, "Look at it in here, you guys killed us today, but we're with you. Enough is enough. Good luck!" But what, exactly, is the 'enough' that she was referring to? The truth is, there's only one natural resource in New York, and that's its people. The people who grow up here, and (nowhere as much as in the arts) the people who come here to live, learn, grow, and contribute, that's the rich resource of this city. New York is full of extraordinary people, and is always drawing more extraordinary people to come here to 'be a part of it'. Even the ordinary people are extraordinary here in New York. Actually, that's not quite accurate. Here in New York, the ordinary and the extraordinary are inseparable. And that's the point underlying the theater strike. Both sides said it wasn't about money, and for once we can believe them. In business, money talks and likes to get its way, but in the theater, it's the people putting on the show who are irreplaceable, from the high-paid stars to the chorus dancers, to the stage hands, make-up, hair, and costume people, all the way through the theater, including, of course, the musicians of the orchestras. When our waitress said, "Enough is enough", she must have meant that the devaluing of the participants has gone far enough, she must have been trying to say that if the bosses have lost sight of the contribution of individual people IN LIVE THEATER of all places, some kind of line has been crossed which is so wrong that she's willing to put aside making her living for a while as her part of hoping to set things right. She must have been thinking that if Broadway is gradually less extraordinary, fewer people will come to visit and eventually every day will be like that strike day in her restaurant, with just a few locals scattered about the room. She might have also been thinking that if the experiment the Broadway bosses are trying on Broadway fails, they'll take their money and invest elsewhere, and where will that leave her and all the ordinary-extraordinary people she knows in this great city? She put aside cynicism and said that this matters. Enough is enough. And that's why the entire theater community joined this strike, to the outrage of the League of Producers but with the support of so many real people who correctly saw a fight not for money but for cultural values. From all accounts, this was a bitter negotiation. But it didn't need to be so. The truth is that in the theater, everyone has a role to play. We need each other to play those roles. The producers are not the Wizards Of Oz, running an illusory production with fantasy technology from behind some curtain. They develop and finance the shows, the directors, choreographers and designers take it from there, and the rest of us perform them eight times a week, at the highest level anywhere in the world. And for that combination, people come from all over and eagerly pay a leg's ransom to sit and enjoy. Profits are up, quality is high, why tamper with what's not broken? But a turf battle ensued, a battle not over money but over values. Money says it can have whatever it wants, so step aside, little guy. But theater itself spoke up, and the audience joined in, and the message was clear: don't ruin our theater to save a few bucks or to make your point about unions. A cab driver won't run over his own fare, just maybe honk at the police to let him get to the curb to pick the customer up. If that lesson could be learned by the Broadway producers, the next strike, to protect Equity actors, can easily be avoided. The only natural resource in New York City is it's people. Join the message that has literally been on the street over the last week: people come to New York because of the people, and in the theater they are there to see and hear people do theater. The musicians didn't come out too well in the end, fighting with the ultimate union weapon and still giving up over a quarter of our jobs. Nobody who knows theater honestly thinks that quality will stay as high after such cuts, but the musicians (being who we are), will each do their best. And while a message doesn't pay any bills, everyone in the theaters and everyone who has supported this unusual strike can take satisfaction that the arrogance of money and the trend toward de-humanization that so outrages so many of us has been called for what it is. I am looking for that generous-hearted waitress to let her know that the line has been pushed but not totally crossed. Andrew Sterman |
