A life in the theater, on- or offstage, is so notoriously difficult that it’s become romanticized. Young, aspiring actors and crew members expect long hours, late nights, and hard physical labor, all for little or no pay. It’s the price of joining a profession that many in the industry say is still not well regulated, despite recent efforts.
Jack Hickey, the theater’s artistic director, says he and his colleagues “were genuinely surprised” by the complaints and resignations and were unaware of any problems until Grow announced her resignation. “We have a clear way to let anyone who is unhappy express their unhappiness,” he says. “We had heard no complaints up the path of complaint.” But the administration took immediate measures to improve the situation after Grow, Luzzo, and Crow spoke out about their concerns, say interns who have remained in the program.
OPFT is one of more than a dozen theaters testing out the Chicago Code of Conduct, a work in progress created by Not in Our House, an activist group that works to prevent abuse in the theater community (and whose work was also highlighted in the Reader‘s previous investigation). The code is intended to provide guidelines for safety and general welfare and outline a complaint path within a theater if those guidelines are violated. On their first day of work, the interns received an information packet that contained portions of the code. “They showed us the parts about diversity, harassment, and the complaint path,” says Grow. But, says Luzzo, “they violated the things they didn’t share—health and safety” by making the interns work long hours without basic safety equipment. OPFT management says it provided interns with a link to the full code, which is available online.
“There was one builder—the technical director,” Luzzo says. The technical director was also a hired worker and not a member of the company. “He was given 12 interns to teach and work with to build the set in three weeks. So mostly it was him telling us what to do. They couldn’t afford to get the set built without 12 unpaid workers.”
“People have been there a long time,” Grow says. “They have big, strong roots, and we didn’t want to tick them off. We didn’t want to burn bridges.”
The night before Pygmalion was set to open, Grow told the show’s director, and then Hickey and Jhenai Mootz, the company’s managing director, that she was leaving.
