Of Mechanics and Ferraris

This post is dedicated to the mechanics of theatre (as is this little ditty, in a way).

What you think of your mechanic depends almost entirely on what you think of your car. If you are a regular commuter, you probably think of your car as an instrument, essentially, a commodity, something completely fungible and interchangeable. You also probably don't know your mechanic. In all likelihood, you don't have a regular guy or gal at all. Jiffy Lube, or Mr. Tire, or whoever suits you fine for the regular stuff and for the other stuff? Whatever AAA or the insurance company (yours or theirs) recommends is fine. The fact that your car has to be repaired at times is annoying. The machine is just a machine, you are reluctant to spend any real money at all, and when you do spend any serious amount of money, it is with much grumbling and great regret.

But if you own a Ferrari (you're welcome), things are quite different. For one thing, you can't take it to just anybody anymore. There aren't millions of Ferraris in the world. Very few third party manufacturers make parts for such a high end automobile. The number of mechanics qualified to maintain a high performance vehicle in peak condition is way smaller than the number who can replace any old fifteen dollar oil filter (it sinks from thousands to tens). You also understand that a Ferrari is a fine piece of kit, expensive to purchase and to operate. You don't begrudge the running cost, because it is simply part of being a member of an exclusive club, the kind of club where you don't bother listing the prices of accessories. That means you know your mechanic, you probably know them by name, you visit them regularly, and you pay them extremely well for their specialized knowledge and ability. You acknowledge the importance of their work in making it possible for you to do ridiculous things (again, you're welcome) with your car.

But that is not the top end of what mechanics can do. For that, you have to look at pit crews, or well, you know, real pit crews. Drivers routinely thank their pit crews. They also routinely throw them under the bus, but that comes with the high stakes territory. The constructors and engineers involved with Formula 1, in particular, are extremely important. But they work with the best mechanics and crew members in the world. You could be the best engineer in the world, but if there isn't a machine shop in the world capable of doing what you want, it will not matter at all. Those crews are paid well, they are part of a world famous team. They didn't design the car. They don't race the car. But they sure do make it run.

"Yes, but when are you going to talk about theatre?" asks the impatient reader (but not too impatient, thanks for making it this far). I would love to be able to drop the mic right here. "I've been talking about theatre all along: technicians are mechanics!" Unfortunately, I can't and to see why, we have to take step back for a moment.

Theatre is experiencing the same wrenching transition from a hard-fought past into an unknown future that all creative content companies are right now. The business model of regional theatre is collapsing because there are fewer theatregoers and because of generational shift away from the culture of subscription toward a single-ticket world. As an added bonus, the rising cohort has now been scarred by years of economic hardship. All of this difficulty spawns a lot of discussion, some of it more practical than others. I read quite a lot of it. Almost none of it mentions technicians at all. The discourse of theatre and the arts is dominated by people who work in the artistic department, a group that is very often housed in a building entirely separate from the theatre. Whenever anyone talks about the future of theatre, it is always cast in terms of enabling the artists or changing our relationship with the artist. That is a problem.

Take HowlRound's CULTURE Coin proposal. It is a radical proposal to change the way that sweat equity is rewarded and recognized. They start with the presumption that theatre artists are underpaid and are therefore trying to create a community where the sweat equity of the artists is valued and becomes a medium of exchange (which is only slightly harder than re-inventing the wheel; it's just democratically inventing a currency from nothing, with no central bank - that should sound alarms). At certain levels of theatre, particularly small professional theatres, this makes sense. The lighting designer will, in fact, turn a wrench, the sound designer will install the speaker cluster, the scenic designer will take up a screw gun and get to work. The reason that happens is that the theatre company cannot afford to pay the designer a living wage (or a wage at all), let alone hire a crew to do the work the designer lays out. There must be a way to reward them for that sweat, right?

I invite you to think about what that proposal presumes about technicians. Thought about it? The answer is that it presumes those people don't exist. Nowhere in that proposal will you see mention of anything other than artists: no technicians, no administrators, just artists. In order for CULTURE Coin to work, you have to assume that the people who are doing the work want to be paid in a way that lets them transform sweat into cultural participation. There is no place in that model for somehow who paints sets, gets paid, and then goes home. In this model, it is presumed that the people putting in the sweat equity want to be regarded as artists. Some designers have to do that sweat work, but not all of the people doing that sweat work are designers, directors, actors, or any other type of artist. The worldview of so much of the thinkers of theatre is hermetically sealed - it contains only art and artists. Despite the generous assumption that the people putting in the sweat equity are artists, it doesn't quite cut both ways. It is nigh on impossible to cross the boundary between technician and artist. It is possible to conceive of an artist who has to do mechanic things, but a mechanic who wants to do artistic things? That's literally unthinkable within the current discourse.

We have now come full circle. The technicians who make theatre run are treated like commuter mechanics. We are considered interchangeable, utterly fungible, possibly unnecessary, and only begrudgingly considered part of the theatre landscape. Theatres across the country want to we could let that Check Engine light ride, just for awhile. It's not really important, right? They have no input into how the car is driven. But the reality is that technicians perform a highly specialized task that few people can do well: they are the Ferrari mechanics, not Mr. Tire wrench monkeys. Conceptually, this leaves us with two possible paths. One path leads to a future business model where theatre companies will stay resolutely focused on the artist and not-for-profit theatre companies will not own or operate their own theatre spaces. That money pit be dealt with by companies that are totally focused on that goal alone. There are a number of theatres who would benefit tremendously from divesting themselves of property and all the expensive problems that come with it. The other possible path is that the future of theatre will include the people who actually turn wrenches, mix sound, rig flying scenery, hot glue candlesticks from nothing, whipstitch hems (apologies to the costumes and wardrobe) in a new way. Philosophical decisions will be made in a way that respects them as artisans. Concentrated efforts will be made to cultivate them as a resource to be drawn on, not just in the moment when something needs to be done in tech RIGHT NOW. The barriers between production and artistic will come down making it easier for technicians to become artists and administrators. That would be revolutionary.