New York Theater is a kind of amazing bubble. There are so many people aching and excited to work that there is nowhere near enough work to go around. Many very talented actors, directors and designers spend the better part of their time looking for work or working day jobs to pay the bills rather than actually making plays. A tiny play, with virtually no money involved and little chance of real exposure can garner some solid talent due to the market glut of theater artists in the city.
Once you step out of New York the situation changes dramatically. Often there are a number of actors, directors and designers as good as anyone in New York, but very soon the quality drops off. One long time Bay Are director I spoke with said there are about 15 actors here as good as New York. I would wager the number was kept low for effect but, none the less, I got the point. It is curious but true that so many who work in the theatre feel the need to “make it in New York” as though somehow it is better to be unemployed in that city than fully employed somewhere else.
This situation is a vicious cycle as new artists see a dearth of truly first rate artists in their various home cities. As a result, they leave for the chance in New York. This is a lot of the underlying cause of what I was speaking to the other day. Without sufficient competition, there is less of a need to maintain one’s own high standards. Good gets replaced with good enough and over time the quality of the work overall begins to fail and falter.
Once the quality of the indigenous work being produced begins to fall, it becomes increasingly interesting to producers and producing organizations to hire artists out of New York where that constant competition forces everyone to sharpen their skills against each other like steel sharpens steel.
But the interesting thing to me, having spoken with a number of directors out here, is that they are not looking to New York out of some glossy eyed idealism, but simply due to the fact that there is a higher caliber of work to choose from. This situation, often bemoaned by artists in the regions, can be used to the artist’s advantage. Talking with a set designer in San Francisco shortly after I moved here he said, “the theaters are more than happy to hire local. You just have to prove you are as good as New York.” If a producer can get the same quality work without paying for flights and housing, I am sure they would jump at the opportunity. I have yet to meet a producer whose face did not light up at the prospect of saving significant amounts of money.
In the end, it is the artists themselves who have created the current situation wherein producers often do not hire local. An actor I was speaking with a few weeks ago said, “give it six months and you will have seen every actor in the Bay Area.” That is really not that long, and by implication, not that many people. If a hundred first rate actors moved from New York to the Bay Area tomorrow the quality of the work would skyrocket. Not because of the new actors alone, but because the indigenous talent would rise to the occasion with the added competition.
The differences I am speaking to may not be noticeable to the average audience member. Certainly no one is sitting in the audience thinking “Oh, so and so is from New York and that guy worked in London, of course!” Still the experience is affected by those differences even if one can not place a finger on their precise origin. As has been said famously of lighting design, “Only ten percent of an audience notices the light, but ninety-nine percent are affected by it.”
