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By Gabriela Geselowitz
This was not Reynaldo Piniella’s typical gig. It was 2018, and he was on a stage in front an audience of doormen, security officers, window cleaners – members of the SEIU-32BJ union, some of whom had never been to the theatre. The play was serving as live sexual harassment training – Piniella and his castmates depicting a scenario in which a woman was catcalled on the job. The audience was riled up, and some of them started heckling the harasser. After the show, the audience passionately debated how the characters should have handled the situation.
“So often as an actor, we perform the play and we don’t get to see the ripple effects,” recalled Piniella. “In real time, we were seeing these audience members grapple with the material and argue amongst themselves.”
That was Piniella’s first of many contracts at Working Theater, an Off-Broadway company unlike any other. Their offerings include onstage workplace trainings, and many of their audience members might be experiencing live theatre for the first time. Their mission is to create “accessible and affordable theater, which is relevant to the diverse experiences of working people throughout New York City and beyond.”
“New York is such a labor town that Working Theater is really at the intersection of the labor movement and the theatre scene in New York,” said Working Theater Managing Director Kylee Brinkman. “Our theatre has an audience and a community that is a true reflection of New York City.”
This means ever-evolving offerings that support the mission in a variety of ways. Working Theater has produced at traditional theater spaces as well as union halls and conventions, mounted plays by world-renowned playwrights and transport workers alike, put on both readings and fully staged shows. What remains constant is the commitment to reaching new audiences, to telling stories about working people and to include workers – and labor unions – every step of the way.
Working Theater hires union artists, but also comprises the majority of their board of directors with union members – not just from theatrical unions, but nursing and teaching ones as well. They also offer creative outlets to working people in other industries, including with their free TheaterWorks! playwriting and acting class that culminates in a performance with Equity members. To reach broader audiences, Working Theater offers sliding scale tickets – and they believe they were the first theatre in New York City to do so.
“We have to create theatre with working people, not just for working people,” said Brinkman.
A group of actors in a Meisner class formed Working Theater in 1985 along the lines of that current mission: theatre created by working people that tells their stories. However, in their early days they looked much different than they do now, beginning with a series of original one-act plays. Over the next several years, they honed their focus, garnered attention and grew their budget, and became an Equity theatre in 1992.
Working Theater has no single home space, partly by design; many of their offerings are site-specific or designed to travel. The Five Boroughs/One City Initiative, as the name suggests, tours all across New York. And the Pathways to Apprenticeship program that introduced Piniella to the company might play at a union hall or auditorium.
In jobs like these, Equity members are thrilled to connect with workers from outside of the theatre: the divide that sometimes exists between perceived “blue collar” unions and artistic ones fades away.
“They really look at us like we’re part of the labor community,” Equity member Bob Arcaro said of members of other unions that participate in programs with Working Theater.
Other Equity members feel this, too. For Pathways to Apprenticeship, for example, Equity members need to emulate the workplaces of their audiences, to reflect at them what they might experience on the job, including difficult topics like racism and sexual harassment.
“There was this connection that you belong to a union, and we belong to a union,” said Equity member Cynthia Bastidas, who has performed in the program about a dozen times. “There’s the recognition that we’re having a shared struggle… there’s synergy, camaraderie, solidarity. We all deal with the same issues – a little differently, but they’re the same.”
“There was no judgment that here are actors playing electricians,” said Equity member Bob Jaffe, who found that audiences who seldom, if ever, attend theatre, were engaged in a way he had never encountered before. “They were much more attuned to the situations than to the fact that we were impersonating them, which was surprising and wonderful.”
Equity members also feel this immediacy of impact with TheaterWorks!, where workers in other industries spend weeks crafting theatre with professional artists.
“It’s really awesome because the community comes out, meaning loved ones, family, friends,” said Piniella. “And you get to see people who maybe never got to express themselves fully use art to give themselves voice and power.”
He noted how important it is that the theatre offers sliding scale tickets.
“It sucks as an Equity actor that sometimes I do a play, and my friends can’t afford to see it,” he said. By making tickets affordable, Working Theater “is doing work by the community, and it’s actually for the community.”
Although budgets can be tight, Working Theater does not play a zero-sum game with making their work affordable for audiences and compensating their workers fairly. For the theatre’s offerings that fall outside the scope of the Off-Broadway Agreement, like their staged readings, they pay Equity artists comparable to what they’d make on the LOA-NYC Agreement. Equity members noted that they are often paid above minimum, as well.
“Thinking about benefits and salaries is always top of mind,” said Brinkman.
While Working Theater is clear about their mission of honoring workers, Equity members say the company more than talks the talk – they walk the walk. Working Theatre leadership doesn’t make speeches about the social importance of the company, but actors and stage managers feel it. They feel it when they engage with their audiences, but more than that, they feel their employers respect and care for them as workers.
“We’ve got to put our money where our mouth is,” said Arcaro, who, in the same Meisner class a year behind Working Theater’s founders, first performed with the company in their second season. In addition to being on the board of directors since 1987, he was Working Theater’s artistic director from 1996 to 2004.
Equity members talk about how Working Theater respect them not only as artists, but as workers who need to support themselves in a safe environment.
“It feels very egalitarian. It’s just a really lovely place to work,” said Bastidas. “I love when they call me because I know there’s not going to be any BS; I know I’m going to be respected. Everybody has the best intentions. There’s never any drama (aside from the work that we’re putting together.)
“I get paid on time and that’s huge,” she added. “I hate to even say that… Because so many of us [at other theatres] don’t get paid on time or don’t get paid properly.”
Part of what makes this workplace feel safe is having employers who are prepared to deal with the reality of hiring actors and stage managers with needs after they get offstage. When Arcaro hurt his hand working there, for example, management was proactive in getting him workers’ compensation. And when Piniella received a television guest star offer, he knew that his Equity contract allowed him to miss a performance at Working Theater to take the higher-paying job. Normally, he would hesitate to take the opportunity.
“We’re scared to death of using the clause, despite that it’s in the contract,” he explained, not wanting a theatre employer to be upset and consider not rehiring him in the future. But he trusted then-employer Mark Plesent, and he asked for the day off.
“‘I’m so happy for you,’” Piniello recalled Plesent giving his blessing. “‘This is why you negotiated this clause, so you can do this gig. I wish I could pay you enough money that you didn’t have to seek outside work, but we’ll be fine. I’m glad that you can get this opportunity for more people to see what you can do as an artist.’”
Multiple Equity members also noted that Working Theater will invite them to shows after their employment ends, and they said that when they have projects at other theatres, Working Theater will promote their work on the company’s social media.
Now, the theatre is in a period of transition. Like every other theatre, COVID was deeply disruptive, but on top of that, Plesent, its longstanding and influential producing artistic director, died in 2021. The new artistic director, Colm Summers, is just coming up on a year at the helm, but Equity members say he has brought new energy to Working Theater. One exciting new piece is the latest Five Boroughs/One City: Los Deliveristas Project. The one-man bilingual piece is a partnership with Los Deliveristas Unidos, exploring a day in the lives of delivery cyclists.
“Man, why can’t every theatre experience be like this,” wondered Piniella, who recalled delivery workers in the audience coming up to thank him when he performed in a recent developmental reading of the play. “Getting to be the actor inside of that, embody all of these characters these voices and then perform that show in a reading for members of that actual community.”
Equity members can come away from jobs at Working Theater feeling more than creatively fulfilled – feeling empowered.
“I’ve never really thought about me being a unionized artist, what that actually means and the power that we possess, until I started being involved with Working Theater,” said Bastidas. “We are workers. We provide labor, we have specialized skills. This whole romanticizing of the starving artist, that whole narrative needs to go away. That serves nobody. It certainly doesn’t serve us. It’s not even serving the industry.
“When you have a theatre, a small theatre like Working Theater, reminding in its own way that these are struggles that we all have together, we’re not just highfalutin artists, that we also provide a very needed service, whether it be entertainment, education catharsis, whatever.
“It’s good that it’s there to remind us that the struggle is real for all of us.”