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Being an Actor in a Town Full of Them
The Unique Challenges of Pursuing an Acting Career in Los Angeles
By Wendy Worthington
I left Philadelphia for Los Angeles more than 20 years ago to become a working actor. I had spent my last six years in Philadelphia on staff at People’s Light & Theatre, a LORT-D regional theater in Malvern, and I used to know the theater community back there. Talking with a Philadelphia-based candidate who recently ran for a seat on AEA’s council made me realize how long I’d been away. I was trying to explain to him why I was so opposed to AEA’s efforts to end the 99-Seat Plan out here in Los Angeles. It quickly became clear that I didn’t understand Philadelphia anymore, but also that he didn’t know L.A., either. And understanding of this place is vitally important, both to having a career here and to really comprehending why the 99-Seat Plan matters so deeply to LA actors.
The Los Angeles market is a unique place in which to pursue an acting career. This town is full of actors, maybe more so than anywhere else in the world, but most of them did not come here to make a living in theater — which is good, because the theater landscape here is its own thing. There is a lot of theater here, and a lot of it is rather amazing. But the audience for theater is mostly the kind you’d find in any decent-sized American city in the heartland. It’s enough to support a couple of big, mainstream theatres and some mid-sized houses that mix newer works with the tried and true. It’s an important stop for national tours of Broadway shows. It does have a fair number of people who think of themselves as theatergoers and who buy subscriptions. But they make up a smaller percentage of the population than in places like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, and they absolutely do not match up to the number of NYC residents who keep Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway houses afloat most of the time.
The challenge of our geography
Add to that the fact that the vast majority of major AEA contracts in L.A. go to stars and/or are often cast in NYC. There are occasional chances for an L.A.-based working actor with an IMDb Starmeter rating above 30,000 to appear onstage at the Taper or the Geffen or the Wallis, but those chances are rare indeed.
So what is an LA actor who wants to perform on stage to do?
The answer was the 99-Seat Plan, and it arose because of the very specific, very individual qualities of Los Angeles: Geography (L.A. is really spread out, our traffic is infamous for a reason, and getting anywhere by curtain time, for actors and for audience members, is sometimes literally impossible), “the Industry” (which is not theatre), a very broad economy (not a lot of which supports any of the arts), an interesting attitude about what “culture” means (that’s a national problem, actually, but it has particular resonance here), plus the question of who exactly is producing theater in these little spaces (hint: producers are often the actors themselves) — all this combines to make doing theater here and drawing audiences to see it really challenging. The 99-Seat Plan was never designed to make money (hence the restrictions on house size), but it often makes very interesting art. Yet it’s difficult to explain to outsiders.
And the latest attempts by AEA leaders to get rid of the Plan were made, primarily, by outsiders.
The 99-Seat Plan provides an ingenious and locally-specific solution. It lets us work with each other, try out new plays, take on roles that we wouldn’t get to play if there was real money riding on the show, keep up our chops during the long lulls so we’re ready for work that does pay, and do it all on shoestring budgets that give a little bit of money back to the participants. It’s a better solution for most of us than taking classes, because the 99-Seat theater actually pays us, even if it’s “just” gas money, while allowing us to move around and take bigger risks and audition for challenging roles and to mix things up. Many of us formed membership companies as a way of pooling resources and working more regularly with like-minded artists, but most of those membership rolls are fluid. The majority of us are involved with several groups, not wanting to be too locked in to any one place and any one aesthetic.
AEA’s leaders who do not live and work here are trying to change something they do not understand. That’s why their recent efforts here were met with such vociferous opposition: Despite the union’s concerted efforts to get a “yes” vote on their proposed changes to the system, the historic turnout led to an overwhelming “no.” Two-thirds of the LA voters said, “Yes, we would like some changes in the present system, but no, we do not want the whole thing tossed out and something brand-new imposed on us from the outside.” But AEA ignored that, and so we are now faced with a battle to have our voice be heard in a democratic way. We were able to vote in a few new leaders in another historic exercise of our right to vote, but we still have a long way to go.
One of the most interesting things about being an actor in Los Angeles is that it is not necessary to be a member of AEA in order to make a living out here, not even if you do work on stage fairly regularly. I’ve done some of those bigger shows, but I only signed up in 2013. Being an Equity actor is mostly a luxury, a personal declaration of a commitment to theater. That’s why I finally joined, frankly. And I am proud to carry my shiny new card.
But being a professional actor in Los Angeles is its own unique challenge, and AEA’s leaders can do a much better job than they have been doing to try to understand where Equity fits in our complicated equation. We sincerely hope that the newly-formed council will take another look at their proposals for intimate theater here and find better solutions to meeting the needs of their members out here. Equity is not irrelevant in the Los Angeles market, but neither do its current proposals offer the same solutions and opportunities that they do anywhere else in the country.
Wendy Worthington is an actor, writer, and director whose credits include recurring roles on Bones and Ally McBeal, featured appearances in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling and Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can, and appearances on stage with A Noise Within, Reprise, Wicked Lit, and many others. She is a company member of Neo Ensemble Theatre, Sacred Fools, and Circle X. She has had numerous short stories published in anthologies, including the recent Death and a Cup of Tea (Elm Books) and the soon-to-be-released Immanence (Story Spring Publishing).
