Shut Up and Starve
Are Chicago actors underpaid? Well, duh. But can they complain about it in print? Earlier this summer well-regarded actor Jay Whittaker leveled with Tribune reporter Sid Smith about the economic reality of a full-time thespian in Chicago–even one who has relatively steady work with the city’s best theaters. In Smith’s piece, “Chicago Theater’s Unsung Heroes,” four other actors spoke about general experiences: taking commercial jobs to supplement theater earnings, depending on spouses to be the breadwinners, watching a colleague greet the birth of a child with financial despair. But Whittaker, who’s recently divorced, got more specific, offering himself up as an example: “I’m living in a tiny box. I have no furniture and I just barely survive. Let board members and others who go to the theater realize how little we get paid. We work for theaters with $12 million budgets, and we pinch pennies.” For his part in Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s six-hour production of both parts of Henry IV, Whittaker told Smith, “I got $600 a week, which, after taxes is $500. My rent’s $600, my car payment’s $250, and after insurance and utility bills, there’s not a lot left for food. I could get rid of my car, but that’s an agonizing choice for a working actor. Do I keep it to drive to auditions in the suburbs? Or do I put food in my belly?”
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The day after the article ran, Whittaker says, he got a call from CST’s executive director, Criss Henderson, who said board members had been calling him, angry about the article. Henderson argued that CST gives more money to actors than any other theater in the city because its runs are longer, Whittaker says, but “I kept saying, the point is, even if the run is longer, we’re not making enough each week to pay our bills.” Whittaker, who’s been in nine CST productions over the last six years, says Henderson then “made it sound like he was doing us a favor by hiring us. I said, ‘That’s not true–you hire us because we’re the best, and that makes your theater look good.’ And he said, ‘If you believe those things, you should never work here again.’”
Whittaker, currently performing at at Door County’s Peninsula Players, will be at Goodman and Court this season, and is thinking about moving to New York after that. He says his intention in the interview with Smith wasn’t to attack a specific theater, but to make the point that actors–all Chicago actors–deserve a little more money, enough to survive. “I was watching this video,” he says, “and an actress was talking about doing a Broadway show in the late 40s or 50s. She was making $700 a week. I’m making $600 a week and this is 2006, more than 50 years later. It’s unbelievable how little money we make. That’s the point I’ve been trying to get across.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Liz Lauren.
