Frank Stachyra has been a Lyric Opera supernumerary for 24 years. The supers are cast members who neither sing nor speak, and they don’t get paid either, except for a stipend so small it barely covers parking. It’s volunteer work, and Stachyra, who figures he’s been in as many as 80 productions, loves it. Three years ago, after retiring from his law practice, he also began to work at Lyric as an actor. Actors at Lyric don’t usually talk or sing, but their roles–which might involve hoisting a diva or swordplay–are more demanding and require more of a time commitment. Last season, while working one of those gigs, Stachyra and some other actors fell into a conversation about their wages. At Lyric, where luxe is the byword and the operating budget runs more than $50 million a year, an actor’s gross pay is $422 per week. Take-home, after taxes and union dues, is maybe $100 less.
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Stachyra, who started out as a prosecutor and spent a good part of his career litigating on behalf of workers with lung disease caused by asbestos or silica dust, knows an inequity when he sees one. In Chicago, he says, where the cost of everything is high, “$422 per week is not a decent living wage.” Actors contract for one opera at a time, usually for a total of ten weeks, and spend the first six weeks or so in rehearsal. Their base weekly pay covers 35 hours, but during rehearsals, when schedules change frequently, they’re on call 12 hours a day. Stachyra says you can’t really work another job during that time or plan your life more than about 24 hours in advance.
One of the arguments lobbed at Stachyra’s proposal is that Lyric is already paying actors more than most Chicago theaters do, especially for nonspeaking parts. “My answer to that is it’s not a response to the question of whether it’s a living wage,” he says. “Does the fact that someone else is making less than a decent salary justify it? I don’t think it’s right that a union that has the power to get a living wage [for its members] isn’t doing that.” And, Stachyra notes, we’re not talking about a struggling little storefront. “Lyric is a world-class institution; it’s disappointing to think that it would be paying anyone in its employ less than an amount that would allow that person to have a reasonably decent standard of living.” As for the strain it might put on Lyric’s budget, Stachyra calculates that there are so few actor roles that his proposal would increase the company budget this year, when there are only nine actor parts, by one-fifteenth of one percent. Even in a boom season for actors–at most about 40 roles, he says–it would add significantly less than one percent.
