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The Sounds of Silence

By Kevin Delin

The other day, I came upon this tweet from Actors’ Equity Association President Kate Shindle:

A lovely sentiment. What is more empowering than being heard?

So imagine my surprise when, a mere two days later, Shindle released this tweet (since deleted):

I don’t know what else William Salyers said to Shindle (besides this and this – which really aren’t that provocative) before his getting this response from her. But it’s clear she meant what she tweeted: her personal twitter account went so far as to “favorite” her AEA President’s twitter account tweet (that’s her personal icon to the far right).

The juxtaposition of the two tweets makes an obvious point: it’s easier to criticize a mess in someone else’s backyard than deal with the mess in your own.

And what a mess it is. The problem to which President Shindle refers is the Union’s insisted-upon change in the way the Los Angeles theater system currently works. Equity’s old “99-Seat Theater Plan” – allowing actors to volunteer in theaters so small that no profit to the producers was possible – had a tremendously positive effect on the creation of stage art in LA. But the future of this city-wide culture vibe came to a screeching halt on February 6, 2015 when Equity announced a new plan that would dramatically upset the stable, but delicate, economics created by its 99-Seat Theater Plan; effectively ending the intimate theater scene in Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles Equity membership was not too happy with this unilateral decision by their Union and organized under a “Pro99” banner. They intended to fight the Equity plan before its formal adoption. Pro99 made a lot of noise about what Equity’s new plan would do to theater in LA. A lot of noise. Enough noise to get attention on the front page of the New York Times.

Meanwhile, the Union itself stayed nearly silent.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Kate Shindle. She wrote

“…the Union itself stays nearly silent.”

Shindle wrote this because she was challenging then-Equity President Nick Wyman for his office. In addition to running a campaign about the future of LA theater, Equity was also running a national leadership election.

The two sets of politics were influencing one another.

Candidate Shindle made written overtures to Los Angeles during the noisy debate over the new Equity plan. She promised better messaging. She promised more transparency. She flew out to LA to listen to the actors in Pro99. Was it a campaign trip or a fact-finding trip? Likely both. And by listening to the actors for several hours, informally, face-to-face, over pints of beer, Candidate Shindle experienced first-hand the deep and justified frustration of fellow union members whose voices weren’t yet heard in New York City. She left the City of Angels with lots of goodwill – simply from listening.

In fact, Los Angeles actors had so hungered just to be heard, they were willing to overlook Shindle’s comments on the new Equity plan itself. In fact, she posted on her campaign site that

“I do think that a test drive [of Equity’s new plan] is in order. And that our biggest priority going forward, as a community, should be whether this actually works for our L.A. members. If not, it can and should be adjusted.”

Shindle’s proposal was not a “test drive.” It’s a real commitment to implement something and puts the present intimate theater ecosystem at risk. This is no “test.” For if the new Equity plan doesn’t work, you now have two problems where once you only had one: First you have to fix anything that was broken by the “test drive” (assuming you can even fix it at all) and, second, you must still find a solution to the original problem.

Contrast Shindle’s statement to what then-President Nick Wyman publicly posted on his Facebook page on April 23, 2015, only two days after Equity adopted its new intimate theater plan over LA actors’ clearly stated objections:

“We will all see how things work in the coming months. Nothing is set in stone. Equity now has the ability to meet with individual producers, individual theatres or producer associations to negotiate changes, revisions, improvements, etc. Equity will be scheduling sit-down meetings with groups of members to get their ideas and suggestions. Equity is committed to the future of the bright, vibrant community of LA Theater. Equity Works.”

At the time of this post, the only person in Los Angeles less popular in the theater community than Equity President Wyman – who inexplicably did little to campaign for re-election – was the guy who said “Macbeth” inside a theater during a performance of same. So it wasn’t surprising when Shindle received 305 more votes than Wyman in the national union election and assumed the mantle of President. (Her campaign message about better listening didn’t hurt. Neither did Equity’s official adoption of its new plan only 4 days after LA delivered a 66% to 34% landslide advisory vote against adoption.)

Shindle’s election was the only reshuffling of Equity’s eight top officer positions. Five days after the election, Equity dropped the planned meetings to which Wyman referred. The official announcement stated:

“Attention Los Angeles Members: The small group meetings about the new internal membership rules and agreements originally announced for June are postponed to the fall. The schedule for the Production Contract negotiations has been pushed up and those negotiations will now begin immediately after the July 4th holiday. Because of this change, the final preparations for the negotiations will now be condensed into the month of June.”

Rebecca Metz, then the de facto face of the Pro99 movement, wrote at the time of the cancellations that she encouraged this decision with any individual member of Equity leadership who would listen. In Metz’s view, the meeting cancellations were a “VERY GOOD THING.”[sic] So ended any near-term possibility of Equity leadership meeting with the rank-and-file Angeleno members. So much for hearing the Angeleno voices in the aftermath of the new policy adoption and election of a new union president.

Only three weeks later, rather than engage the membership at large, Shindle, Equity Executive Director Mary McColl, and Western Regional Director Gail Gabler met with Metz and a single group of six of Metz’s choosing in Los Angeles. Apparently, if canceling meetings of small groups of actors was a “VERY GOOD THING,” then not cancelling just one of these meetings was an even better thing.

It was in this meeting Metz found out Equity was, indeed, single-mindedly going through with Shindle’s “test drive” of the new plan as is, completely consistent with Shindle’s public campaign statements. Any unforeseen consequences of the test drive be damned. Metz also discovered Equity was “not interested at all in talking about the process that got us here, whether or not is was fair or smart or productive.” In other words, Shindle and her two executives would decide what they would be willing to hear.

And certain topics simply weren’t going to be heard at all.

Could this be from the same empathetic @AEAPresident who had tweeted about “helping Indian and Pakistani women find their voices?”

Institutions love silence. Silence accelerates forgetting.

After Shindle’s election, Equity, as an organization, fell really silent. It was in its interest to do so. The Equity officers don’t even have to run down the clock all the way to the final plan implementation date of June 1, 2016. The actual fail-safe deadline for LA theater is much closer than that.

Like shooting skeet, setting up a theater season requires leading the target. One can’t hold off plans while challenging your union in court. New fundraising strategies must be put in place. New visions of the theaters must be developed for the donors. At some point, even if Equity were to lose a legal challenge, the damage to the local theater ecosystem will have already been done. It’s so much easier to destroy than create. Once the field has been cleared, Equity can have things, in Shindle’s words, “adjusted.” To its liking, of course.

And that’s in the best case scenario where Equity loses a legal challenge.

So Equity’s lack of community engagement in Los Angeles – its silence – continues.

Veteran Broadway actor Dakin Matthews has felt the silence. He’s tried to directly engage Shindle on a Facebook comment thread where she had previously been posting. He asked her a simple question: “If I think my union has acted illegally, but I do not want to sue, what are my options according to my union’s procedures and labor law in general?” No answer came. In fact, Matthews has not been able to get an answer from any union representative.

Noted LA theater critic (and Editor-in-Chief of Stage Raw, the publisher of this article), Steven Leigh Morris has made repeated requests to Equity, including Equity Press Representative Maria Somma, for on-the-record comments. These have been met with more silence.

It’s frustrating to be met with institutional silence. Institutions can engage in a form of “Mother-May-I?” deciding how they may be approached to give the appearance that they be approached at all. The “tone” of the approach becomes very important. And the institution can arbitrarily – and capriciously – decide what is an appropriate tone.

So we enter a cycle: The more Equity is silent, the more frustrated LA actors become. The more frustrated LA actors become, the more the tone of the conversation rises. The more the tone of the conversation rises, the more justification Equity will claim to be silent until things calm down. That is the context of President Shindle’s previously mentioned tweet regarding William Salyers.

And Equity’s silence hasn’t been limited to Los Angeles. The Union has been conveniently silent to its membership on the East Coast. For example, when someone noticed that the Antaeus Theatre Company in LA had a huge reported bank account, Equity did nothing to curb that conversation – despite knowing that the bank account was for a new theater complex. Equity has also been silent on the known serious flaws in the interpretation of their survey results – an interpretation which was used to justify changing the 99-Seat Theater Plan. These are but a few of the issues on which Equity has been silent.

The silences Equity made in New York City have been even more damaging than the lack of communication to Los Angeles. The New York silences have kept members in the dark. Little wonder the Equity Councillors – much less the rank-and-file union members – lack an understanding of the present LA theater scene and misinterpret comments out of Los Angeles, particularly the meaning of the landslide referendum vote against the Union.

Shindle has been in office now for 12 weeks. That’s the same period Equity took to go from announcing its new intimate theater plan to formally adopting it over LA’s landslide objections. The LA theater world changed dramatically in the 12 weeks prior to Shindle’s election. Not much has happened since.

Those familiar with Union processes continually state it takes time for Equity to get anything done. The counter-example of Equity’s warp-speed adoption of its new plan notwithstanding, it does seem like getting 83 actors on the Council to agree on anything will be a long uphill battle. Especially when they’ve been misinformed. Working from a set of common facts is therefore an important first step in making good decisions.

This is where the new union president can make a crucial contribution to her organization.

For though she’s neither an Indian nor a Pakistani woman, I sure wish Kate Shindle could find her voice. She’s in the unique position to walk the union back from the bad information that has tainted and tarnished the discussion for the past six months. President Shindle hasn’t yet coupled herself irrevocably to the provably wrong statements made on the Union’s behalf prior to her election. Ex-President Nick Wyman is no longer around. And Executive Director Mary McColl is supposed to be merely a hired gun – after all, she used to work for the Broadway producers – and therefore only executes Council policy and does not form it.

Kate Shindle can set the factual record straight to the rank-and-file membership. This does not require the involvement – or approval – of Equity’s 83 councillors. Therefore, it can be done immediately. There is no good reason for dragging the bad information Equity previously promulgated into the present. But Shindle’s first presidential message shows a woman still in search of her voice. She describes her meeting with Metz:

“…I met with some of the most passionate Pro99 members to discuss what comes next. I want to help Los Angeles theatre succeed, and we had what I felt was a very productive conversation.”

That’s not quite how Metz depicted that same meeting. Then again, it’s possible that Shindle thought making it clear to Los Angeles actors that Equity’s misleading statements and kangaroo procedures weren’t going to be discussed or corrected – ever – as a productive conversation.

Because she traveled to LA prior to her election, Kate Shindle is in a singular position to understand the disconnect between what was imagined by the New York Equity members and what was actually happening in Los Angeles over the past six months. She can begin to correct the record – not just to the Equity Council but to all Equity members – immediately. It’s an action that requires no special permissions, only the will to act. And the new President needs to break Equity’s silence of omissions quickly before they become fodder for more damage to the Union’s reputation.

Candidate Shindle gave Los Angeles a promise to listen. Now Los Angeles needs from President Shindle a promise to speak.

Read Kevin Delin’s “The Greek Referendum Through the Eyes of AEA”

Read Kevin Delin’s “Matter; Doesn’t Matter” analysis of the AEA national election.

Kevin’s other writings can be found at Script Magazine, Footlights, and on Twitter @kdelin.

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It’s Not Easy, Bein’ Seen

Hundreds of theaters, unknown even in their own back yards

By Kevin Delin

Pull up a digital easy chair and I’ll tell you two digital stories:

Story #1: I ran into a professional colleague at the Colony Theater where he and his wife are season ticket holders. Highly educated, late 50s. Works in high-tech and loves theater. Often eats in North Hollywood. He asked if I had seen any great theater recently. I told him about a production at the Antaeus Theater Company. In North Hollywood, where he often eats. He had never heard of it.

And by “it” I mean the Antaeus Theater Company.

Story #2: I met a woman at a party. Attorney. Highly educated, late 30s. Works in the Industry and loves theater. Lives in Pasadena. Enjoys going to the Pasadena Playhouse. I asked if she had ever been to The Theatre @ Boston Court. In Pasadena, where she lives. She had never heard of it.

 And by “it” I mean The Theatre @Boston Court.

 I think these stories are typical. And, worse, I believe both Antaeus and @Boston Court are ahead of the curve in promoting themselves. In fact, I’ve said so in the past.

It’s not easy, bein’ seen.

I know from experience. The nation’s center for interplanetary travel is located in Los Angeles. Yet surprisingly few people know it is here. And by “it” I mean the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I know this because I used to work there:

“So where do you work?”

“The Jet Propulsion Laboratory.”

“The what?”

“The Jet Propulsion Lab. JPL? The NASA place where all those Mars rovers come from.”

“NASA? Here in Los Angeles? Cool! When did that happen?”

(Over 50 years ago. JPL built the first US spacecraft to make it into space.)

More people probably think SpaceX than JPL when talking SoCal space travel. For, despite having Open Houses that draw tens of thousands of visitors, JPL is still invisible compared to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk – oh, you’ve heard of him? – who is interviewed on hip late-night talk shows that draw millions of viewers. JPL has sent probes into interstellar space. SpaceX has made it into Earth orbit.

It’s not about accomplishments. It’s about marketing.

Stage actors like to say that intimate theaters struggle for audiences because L.A. is not a theater town. Their union, Actors’ Equity Association, likes to state that the myriad of L.A. intimate theaters prevent the mid-size and large theaters from gaining an audience. Both statements are wrong.

The truth is, most people in Los Angeles don’t know that intimate theater even exists.

You’d think in an age where “Google” has become a verb, no information could remain hidden. But simply searching the Internet isn’t much help here. Go ahead. Take your favorite search engine and insert “L.A. theater” into it.

Seriously. Try it.

Besides pulling up the website for the actual Los Angeles Theatre (a physical building not an artistic community), you likely got websites that (endlessly) list plays. How does one know what play to go to? How does one know what theater group is prestigious? Which group puts up quality productions and which group works in a black box with uneven paint? Good questions. Because the Internet has no website for “meta-L.A. theater.”

So the average Angeleno theater-goer will stick to the safe bets; the theater names they recognize. The ones they’ll hear on NPR. Or see often in the L.A. Times. South Coast Repertory. The Geffen. Mark Taper Forum, &c.

This is the reason for intimate theaters being invisible on the cultural plain.

How to change this? Promotion, of course. And theater makers instinctively excel at promotion.

Of themselves.

Here’s a social media staple: “Support L.A. Theater! Come see me in [show title here]!” Is that statement really about L.A. theater?

All too often, people take to social media to promote a show where they are part of the cast or are part of the producing membership company or know people in the cast. Their message is therefore simply sent back to circulate in an echo chamber of Facebook friends and Twitter followers who likely have already heard of the show. Multiple times.

It’s not surprising, then, that many of the people in the intimate theaters audiences are either intimate theater creators or know intimate theater creators. That’s a pretty small group of people. No wonder there’s not a lot of dollars flowing into these theaters. And yet Los Angeles is the second largest city in the United States with a population of 4,000,000. And Los Angeles County has a population of nearly 10,000,000. That’s ten million people.

The size of the potential market is so much greater than the size of the current market it’s clear this is not a zero-sum game. One theater that gains patrons will not cause another theater to lose an equivalent number. In fact, the more people in L.A. attend intimate theater shows, the more people in L.A. will become aware of the broader intimate theater ecosystem.

So promoting any quality intimate theater, especially to one’s non-theater friends, turns out to be self-promotion after all.

Rather than the L.A. theater community fighting among themselves for the same tiny amount of theater dollars from the same tiny set of theater patrons, it’s more effective to grow the total market. Imagine if theater makers actively used social media to get the word out about shows with which they have no connection? Or, if official theater company Twitter accounts live-tweeted about other theater companies during awards ceremonies? No formal campaign. Just informally letting people know about all the intimate, staged art in the City of Angels. Steadily and consistently.

Exposure from cooperation rather than competition. It’s a mindset. Likely found on some Facebook meme card.

Annnnnnd . . . SEEN!

Read Kevin Delin’s “The Greek Referendum Through the Eyes of AEA”

Read Kevin Delin’s “Matter; Doesn’t Matter” analysis of the AEA national election.

Kevin’s other writings can be found at Script Magazine, Footlights, and on Twitter @kdelin.

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Actors’ Equity Response: “Doesn’t Matter”

By Kevin Delin

Four score and seven years ago, physicist Paul Dirac combined the “wave mechanics” that Erwin Schrödinger developed while on a weekend romp with his mistress in the Swiss Alps with the “time-is-money principle” developed by Albert Einstein when a Fig Newton dropped on his head. The result? Dirac discovered that substance came in two forms: “Matter” and “Doesn’t Matter.” It turns out when “Matter” is exposed to “Doesn’t Matter,” the two will annihilate each other and release a tremendous amount of energy, usually in the form of political heat.

Actors’ Equity, the stage actors’ union, has been skilled in employing this exotic physics to eliminate Los Angeles actors’ issues over the recent months:

A “Matter”: Equity interpreted their commissioned survey incorrectly. It then used these mathematically erroneous interpretations as the foundational justification for its entire campaign to do away with the 99 seat plan.

Equity’s response: “Doesn’t Matter.” Equity still hasn’t dealt with this error in any statement. It won’t even admit the factual error.

A “Matter”: Los Angeles actors asserted artists are not laborers and therefore the universal minimum wage pay proposed was wrong-headed and hurtful to the LA theater community. In fact, even Los Angeles labor leaders are trying to get an exemption from the minimum wage law if union workers are involved.

Equity’s response: “Doesn’t Matter.” According to Equity’s Big Brother organization, AFL-CIO, uber-progressive Tim Robbins is against the working man because he is against the new plan.

A “Matter”: Los Angeles actors clearly let Equity know what it thought of the new plan, providing a stunning defeat of it in a referendum by a 2-to-1 margin.

Equity’s response: “Doesn’t Matter.” Equity decided instead to bring up the number of participants in the vote as an important metric.

A “Matter”: The preeminent LA stage company, Antaeus, just broke ground on a new cultural arts center – and theater home. It is obvious that such a major undertaking takes years of deliberate planning. Planning of which Equity was aware.

Equity’s response: “Doesn’t Matter.” Despite already knowing that Antaeus was about to move into a new facility, Equity justified scrapping the old 99 seat plan, in part, by complaining that LA theaters were not growing into new venues.

A “Matter”: Equity classifies actor-producers as employers and therefore maintains these individuals cannot participate in leading the discussion under an edict of conflict-of-interest or interference of labor union business.

On the other hand, Equity says “Doesn’t Matter” when First Vice President, Paige Price, is also the Artistic Director of Theatre Aspen and has even produced theater at the Lincoln Center.

And yet another “Matter”: Los Angeles actors had considerable influence on the recent national Equity election. Although Equity doesn’t track votes by division, based on candidate positions we might assume most of the 1,754 votes for LA candidate for Western Regional VP, Donal Thoms-Cappello, came from the same people voting against the new union plan while most of the 769 votes for LA candidate for Western Principal, Kyle Nudo, came from those previously voting for the new union plan. The 2523 total votes represent 80% of the 3121 votes cast in the referendum election, a plausible 20% drop in turnout. In addition, the ratio of Thoms-Cappello to Nudo votes is 69.5% to 30.5% – quite close to the original ratio of 66% to 34% in the referendum vote. Since the voting estimates fall into several plausible patterns, it is reasonable to conclude that the total Los Angeles vote is about 2500.

So, 2500 votes cast in LA out of 6182 cast nationally. In other words, Los Angeles – by itself – provided a stunning 40% of the total vote. And perhaps more impressive: More than 1 in 4 votes in the national election came from people who were against the new union plan.

That’s enough to have a significant impact on the election results.

For example, there is no doubt that Sid Solomon, who barely became an Eastern Principal with a slim margin of 42 votes, owes his entire victory to his engaging Los Angeles members on their Pro99 Facebook page.

Newly-elected union president Kate Shindle similarly engaged the LA community on Facebook as well as appearing at a Pro99 gathering in Los Angeles. She beat incumbent president, Nick Wyman by 305 votes. Was this a result of the LA voter block? Possibly but Larry Cahn was a third-party spoiler and received more than twice that difference in votes. Shindle’s victory was some mixture of the two elements.

Naturally, Equity has reacted with a strong “Doesn’t Matter” to the general outcome of the election. It realizes that the votes cast represent only 14% of the 43,000 total membership. (Equity needs to stop inflating their total membership to 50,000 in press releases when they report only 43,000 to the government.) In other words, the Great State of Apathy is really the strongest voting block within Equity. In fact, 6 of the 8 officer positions were uncontested (the President and Western Regional VP elections represent the exceptions).

Furthermore, incumbent Nick Wyman essentially ran a non-campaign without issuing any statements at all. And yet Wyman still came within 305 votes of winning the election.

That substantial LA voting block? Doesn’t Matter. When 7 out of 8 officer positions (Western Region VP Doug Carfrae was re-elected) are identical as pre-election and the eighth, newly elected President Kate Shindle, says that the new plan – though thoroughly rejected by Los Angeles – should be pushed through as “a test drive,” the election didn’t matter. Most of the 80-ish Equity council seats weren’t even up for election. And most of the open seats were retained by the incumbents.

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

In fact, the bar is so lowered on expectations of Equity “leadership” that key candidate platform issues amounted to election transparency and listening to members. And why not? Equity can report results and send email responses without changing course. Matters brought up will be met, and neutralized, by “Doesn’t Matter.”

And now Equity has an additional physics option to negate LA Matter: Time. When the Equity council approved of the final plan on April 21, they set a clock in motion. All new rules won’t begin until June 1, 2016. While this schedule rightly gives producers time to plan for the change, it also gives a false sense of reprieve for Los Angeles. The future date therefore diffuses the urgency that LA feels in fighting the union plan.

Little wonder, then, that on May 26, Equity decided to postpone a planned series of face-to-face meetings with the LA membership about the new plan implementation. With the general conversation firmly under Equity control since the national election, these meetings now serve no purpose for Equity and only remind LA what the union is about to do to local theater culture while simultaneously giving the LA actors a rallying event at which to speak.

The postponement is the clearest sign that Equity is attempting to run out the clock. The new plan takes place in a year’s time but Equity knows that long before that year is up, grant cycles will need to be met and donors will need to be engaged. Every day that ticks by makes it surer that the LA theater community will be acting “as if” the new Equity plan is in place – at least if it wants to avoid a potential dramaticus interruptus. It’s another reason why Equity classifies the LA voting block as “Doesn’t Matter.” Since the internal union politics can’t be changed within the year, by the time non-New-York cities assert themselves within the council, the union plan will be an operational fact.

So what does matter to Equity?

Public opinion. Institutions can only function under a glow of respectability. That is why they guard their reputation so jealously. And why public critiques always will get institutional attention. It’s why Equity leadership trivialized its own celebrity members who came out against the new union plan. It’s why Equity leadership tried to shame members for a single image in an advertisement of a massive public gathering in front of Equity’s LA building.

Equity wants to keep this fight away from the public eye particularly at a time when unions are trying to reestablish themselves nationally. Having a continued public rebellion within the ranks would not make Equity leadership very happy. The Los Angeles theater community knows this.

Will it matter?

Follow Kevin Delin at @Kdelin

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9 + 1 Questions that AEA has Yet to Answer

By Kevin Delin

The upheaval in the Los Angeles theater community caused by the Actors’ Equity Association (AEA) rejiggering of the decades-old 99-Seat Plan has been a complex story. It’s easy to get lost in a myriad of details and false starts. Here, then, is a short list of straightforward questions and issues that the AEA has not yet addressed in any significant way. The list is pocket-sized (assuming your tablet or smartphone fits in your pocket) for easy access. Background hyperlinks are also given for further information and issue clarification.

These questions and issues note where Executive Director Mary McColl or Union President Nick Wyman or their AEA Council have been inconsistent or sloppy or both. The questions are basic and often based on statements made by Mary McColl and other AEA officials.

In fact, the questions and issues are so easy to address, perhaps it’s surprising they haven’t yet been. Maybe they should be asked over and over again until they are:

1) What happened to the requirement, stipulated in the 1989 court settlement, that the Council had to present any changes to the 99-Seat Plan to both the Review Committee and the Membership 45-days before voting? The new proposal that came out of the Council on April 21, 2015 was not presented to anyone beforehand. (Dakin Matthews thoroughly discusses this in a two-part column: Part 1 and Part 2.)

2) Why has the AEA not addressed the fact that the Member Survey, sent out in October 2014 and used by Mary McColl as key evidence on the mood of the LA membership, is fundamentally flawed? These flaws are not associated with push-polling or response bias (though these are also possible issues with the survey). The flaws are mathematical not philosophical and associated with the fundamental methodology used in the survey.

3a) The Union included a complaint about minimal pay for a director in their “vote for the referendum” materials. Why? While the complaining person is a member of AEA, her prominent remarks were not about actor-pay but director-pay.

3b) And doesn’t this complaint therefore disprove the AEA claim that only actors go without pay in 99-seat theaters? (See point #2.)

4) Mary McColl often talked of a “silent majority” of actors who were for the new AEA plan. The historic landslide defeat of the AEA proposal, 66% to 34%, shows no such group existed. And this referendum defeat came after extensive and pervasive phonebanking and email campaigning by the Union. McColl has never explained what real evidence she had that this “silent majority” group existed. (See last subsection.)

5a) Why did Mary McColl imply that the number of members who voted in the referendum would be taken into consideration as a negative thing? The Union kept touting that “only” 45% of the LA membership voted in the referendum while neglecting to point out that national AEA elections had less than 10% turnout – yet that number didn’t figure into those elections. (See point #4.)

5b) And why did the Union get a very odd “correction” for the New York Times’ front page coverage of this debate? The “correction” reads:

Correction: April 21, 2015 An article on Monday about a debate in Los Angeles over whether members of the Actors’ Equity union should be paid a mandatory minimum wage for their work in small theaters referred incorrectly to the number of Equity members who voted against the proposal in a nonbinding referendum. Some 66 percent of Equity members in Los Angeles who returned ballots voted against it; 66 percent of all Equity members in Los Angeles did not do so. (About 45 percent of the 6,990 ballots sent out were returned.)

The Union obviously wanted the non sequitur number of non-returned ballots + “yes votes” to be counted as “not no votes.” Why did they ask for this nonsense to be included with the article?

6) Why do Union officials respond with “Equity is a national union” to lessen the impact of complaints from Los Angeles? According to AEA’s own numbers, LA actors comprise 74% of the Western Region and 20% of the national membership (second only to New York). By sheer numbers, LA’s issues are national issues.

7) The new AEA plan keeps less-than-minimum wage compensation intact for a year. Previously, Union official Gail Gabler and others (including a labor attorney) implied that these levels were illegal. Why the inconsistency between the Union’s old rhetoric and their new proposal? (See point #2 and point #6.) Los Angeles theater critic of note, Steven Leigh Morris, pointed out the first AEA proposal released in February 2015 itself might have been illegal. One wonders if the new membership rules voted in on April 21 were in response to this fact.

8) Why did AEA limit the LA Showcase Code to a maximum number of 50 seats when the NY Showcase Code has a maximum number of 99 seats? Los Angeles, after all, is full of 99-seat theaters.

9) Now that the Council vote is completed, President Nick Wyman has made a comprehensive statement about where the Union is headed on this issue. It includes this bit:

“We will all see how things work in the coming months. Nothing is set in stone… Equity will be scheduling sit-down meetings with groups of members to get their ideas and suggestions.”

Why was there a rush to a Council vote if the President, mere days after launching the new plan, admits the need to sit down with membership to modify the newly minted plan? Wasn’t this the reason the 1989 court settlement had a 45-day period for presenting to the membership any plan on which the Council was to vote? Besides, the full effects of the newly voted-in AEA plan won’t be known in the coming months since there is a year period where something extremely close to the old 99-Seat Plan is in effect. So, again, why the rush for the Council to vote something in?

+1) Why is the Union exerting so much effort on a few pennies of increased wages in Los Angeles when there’s a real crisis with non-Equity national tours representing a going-backwards, hundreds of weekly-dollars loss of actor compensation?

Follow Kevin Delin on twitter @kdelin

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Deceit by Statistics

Why the actors’ union’s survey results of L.A. members don’t add up

By Kevin Delin

Art by Jon Mullich

The reason the bulk of the Los Angeles theater community galvanized in true solidarity over the past two months is the fear that the new small-theater plan proposed by Actors’ Equity Association (AEA), the stage actors’ union, will up-end, and possibly decimate, the entire stage scene in Los Angeles. The current 99-Seat Plan has spawned a theater art form unique in the country where professionals can voluntarily get together to create world-class and cutting-edge art. The shows in LA’s intimate theaters needn’t first be audience-tested as television or film productions. The professionals in the 99-seat theaters can take real artistic risks.

And that, at its core, is what the professional actors and stage managers in Los Angeles are fighting to maintain: the freedom to take artistic risk while maintaining the basic work environment protections by the Union.

The Union’s plan, in contrast, is focused on changing the financial structure of LA intimate theater by enforcing universal minimum wages for rehearsals and performances, regardless of a theater’s size or its production budget.

And Union Executive Director Mary McColl bases that argument on a membership survey and two small focus groups from last October. According to McColl, “AEA members have spoken loud and clear and told their leadership that they deserve compensation for their training, their contributions to productions, and their talent.” And for several months now, McColl and her Council have justified the implementation of their new plan by endlessly repeating the mantra that, according to their 2014 survey, the top concern of their membership is “more pay.”

Except their survey does not show that. In fact: The AEA’s interpretations of the published survey results are not supported by mathematics. While the actors’ top concern may be a desire for more money, you cannot use this survey to prove that’s the case.

That’s a serious charge because the entire AEA case and new plan is based on their survey as evidence. The charge, however, is completely consistent with the actors’ overwhelming rejection (66% voted NO to 34% YES) of the AEA plan in a recent non-binding referendum. So let’s examine how there’s a disconnect between Mary McColl’s claims and the actors’ reaction with a better mathematical analysis of the survey’s results. I promise it won’t hurt.

Much.

Before we sharpen our #2 pencils and don our green eyeware, however, let’s get a few basic observations out of the way.

First, AEA hired Hart Research Associates to conduct the polling. Hart Research is well known and an established outfit from inside the Washington DC Beltway. They do significant polling for the type of clients (politicians) where getting things wrong means you don’t get a second chance.

Second, the raw survey is often released as part of a complete results package. AEA has not done so. Morever, there are no copies of the survey because polling was done online. For now, we’ll assume that (a) all questions in the poll are represented in the summary and (b) the order of the questions in the poll are the same as in the summary. There is a minor problem with the “pick from a list” questions in that we don’t know what order the list was presented to those surveyed but we will assume for now it won’t affect any major conclusions.

Polling 101

The most basic issue in polling is sample size. Accurate national polls can be done with as few as 1000 or so respondents. As long as you choose your survey recipients carefully, without introducing sample bias, you don’t have to poll a large number of people.

The sample size is stated as 608 individuals. This is a legitimate sampling size for a population of 6990 AEA actors living in LA County (based on the number of ballots sent out for a recent referendum).

But is there any sampling bias? An example of sampling bias in the national media would be polling only people you call on landlines – this biases towards older individuals (younger people are more likely to have cell phones only). Here, an email account needed to be available to take the AEA survey. It is uncertain if this introduced any intrinsic bias into the sampling. Other biases include the possibility of oversampling people who lived in LA less than one year (and may not understand the LA theater community yet) and how the email addresses for the sample were chosen. While the survey claims that the sample is representative, it would be nice for the sampling method to be made public.

Of more significant concern is the unreported margin of error. It’s highly unusual to not report this number and it should be released.

For analysis purposes, it is estimated, assuming a typical 95% confidence level with a sample size of 608, that the margin of error is +/-4%. (Calculated as 0.98/square root of 608.) What does this mean in English? It means that if AEA gives out the survey 100 times, 95 of those times (the confidence level) will have the results reported to within +/- 4.0% of the percentages given in the summary. For example, if a response is given 60% of the time, then 95 times out of 100, we’d expect the survey response to this question be within the range 56% to 64%. Using this calculated margin of 4%, most of the key survey results will not be affected (in other words, the differences between answer responses are usually much greater than 4.0%). A slight correction to our estimated margin of error accounts for the 608 sample size being a relatively large percentage of the 6690 population size. If we use a population correction factor, our adjusted margin is a slightly tighter +/-3.8%.

Are you going to worry about this difference? Didn’t think so. We’ll use 4%.

99-Seat Acting

The survey states that 63% of the membership participated in the 99-seat plan in the last 5 years. Using the 6,990 population size, this means that 4,215 AEA actors participated in intimate theater in the last 5 years. We can get an idea of this scale is by comparing it to the sizes of union membership communities in other cities. As reported in the AEA 2013-2014 annual report, the New York City area, unsurprisingly has the largest community with 18,795 members. This size is followed by the Los Angeles area with 8,481. The next four largest AEA communities in the United States are Chicago (1,829), San Francisco (1,143), Philadelphia (1,057), and Washington DC/Baltimore (1,055). That means that the AEA 99-seat theater acting community in Los Angeles is multiple times larger than the total membership in other cities.

So while the acting may take place in a small theater, the acting community supporting it is anything but small. When comparing Philadelphia with the LA intimate theater community, for example, the LA intimate theater community is the giant in the room, not the City of Brotherly Love. Little wonder that LA intimate theater is having an impact on the national theater culture. By its sheer size, this is an expected, and not surprising, result.

Of these 63% of actors, 60% are satisfied with their 99-seat theater experience. To put that 60% in context: If we look at the last 112 years of presidential elections, historians identify four landslides:

• 1932: Franklin Roosevelt (57.4%) over Herbert Hoover (39.7%)
• 1964: Lyndon Johnson (61.1%) over Barry Goldwater (38.5%)
• 1972: Richard Nixon (60.7%) over George McGovern (37.5%)
• 1984: Ronald Reagan (58.8%) over Walter Mondale (40.6%)

By looking at the popular vote in these landslides, it’s clear that 60% to 40% is a hugely significant margin. There’s a mathematical reason for this: 68% represents everything within 1 standard of deviation on a Bell Curve (or Gaussian Curve if you are wandering around MIT). The things outside that region are considered “on the fringes.”

The same exact statistics tell us that a 60%/40% response means that actors are satisfied with their 99-seat theater experience on a landslide scale. In this context, the AEA survey predicts quite accurately the recent complete rejection by LA union members, by 66% to 34%, of the new AEA plan. Given the efforts made by the Union to campaign for the proposal, the thorough rejection is further confirmation that Los Angeles actors are passionate about tweaking, rather than up-ending, the present intimate theater culture.

Response Bias

There are two basic ways that a survey can go bad. The first, sample bias, we’ve already discussed. The second is response bias, or using bad questions. Response bias comes in many forms and the AEA survey is replete with them. First, of course, is the “pick two from a list” style question which is clearly limited to a pre-chosen set of responses.

Of the following areas, what are the two most important considerations for you personally when participating in theatre under an Equity contract, agreement, or code?

1. Wage rates, pay levels, per diems: 61%
2. Ability to hone my skills, craft: 40%
3. Opportunities for exposure that may lead to Equity contract: 33%
4. Opportunities for exposure that may lead to TV/film work: 28%
5. Health payments: 20%
6. Pension, 401(k) payments: 11%
7. Other: (Other volunteered considerations include cast/production members, love of the art, artistic value, quality of production, role, story.): 7%

Next is the issue of question ambiguity. Consider: “Of the following areas, what are the two most important considerations for you personally when participating in theatre[sic] under an Equity contract, agreement, or code?” This question lumps contract (paid) work with code (stipend) work. Presumably, an actor has different reasons for deciding to go in either direction and yet this question blends them all together. For example, should we interpret the question as “why choose to participate under Equity contract” and answer “wages”? Or should we interpret it as “why choose to participate under the 99-seat plan” and answer “honing skills”? The question immediately conflates the two issues preventing any specific, and logically sound, interpretation by AEA.

Ranking Priorities

There are two survey questions which involve choosing from a list of items. The first, cited above, involves the top concern of the actor.

The second involves the top concern for the Union. Instead of simply choosing a single item, however, respondents are asked to “pick two.”

Increasing work opportunities under Equity contracts and ensuring safe working conditions are LA area members’ top priorities.

Selected Two Most Important Activities for Actor’s Equity:

1. Increasing contracts available to members: 57%
2. Setting/maintaining standards for working conditions: 37%
3. Negotiating contracts and agreements: 31%
4. Increasing flexible opportunities, including codes: 29%
5. Enforcing contracts and agreements: 27%
6. Helping members with problems, service needs, grievances: 7%
7. Communicating about activities/issues facing theatre prof.: 7%

This form of selection is a bit similar to alternative voting. Alternative voting is known to be more a more accurate representation of the group’s desires compared to “pick one.” However, unlike alternative voting, in “pick two” the order of the choices are never tabulated. Therefore, once you throw out the information about the preference between the two items selected, you cannot reintroduce the idea that one of the most selected items is more popular than the other.

Hypothetically, we can demonstrate by example that the most-chosen item from a “Pick-Two” scenario is not necessarily the most-popular item. Suppose we give 10 respondents an alternative voting choice out of the following list: A, B, C, D, E, F. Here are the responses, including the order of the picks:

1. B, C
2. A, C
3. A, E
4. D, B
5. E, A
6. C, B
7. C, F
8. A, C
9. A, C
10. B, C

What’s the most popular choice? Alternative voting tells us to rank all the top choices, and then add in the secondary votes of those not making a top choice in Round 1:

Round 1 Votes:

A = 4

B = 2

C = 2

D = 1

E = 1

F = 0

D and E are the low votes at 1 apiece so use their second choice to determine the top choice:

Round 2Votes:

A = 4 + 1 = 5 = 50%

B = 2 + 1 = 3 = 30%

C = 2 + 0 = 2 = 20%

Obviously A is the most popular (50%) B is 2nd most popular (30%), and C is in third place (20%).

However, suppose we instead count the same response under a “Pick-Two” method where order of choice isn’t accounted. In this case we have:

A = 5 = 50%

B = 4 = 40%

C = 7 = 70%

D = 1 = 10%

E = 2 = 20%

F = 1 = 10%

(Note that the percentages indicate the percentage of respondents picking that item, not the percentage of times the item was chosen. Since each person picks two items, the sum total of percentages is “200%” – which is identical to the sum of percentages in the AEA survey results.)

Under the “Pick-Two” scenario, it may look like C has the top ranking (70% of the respondents choosing it), with A (the true most-popular choice) coming in 2nd (50% of the people choosing it). However, since we threw out information (the order of the choices), we can’t now include that lost information in a ranking. We can only say that A and C were the two most chosen items. We know, of course, that in a true popular ranking (alternative voting) C would be in third place.

From this example, it’s much easier to interpret the AEA survey results. In the case of what concerns the actors most, the top two selected items are “wages” and the “ability to hone my skills.” Since we don’t know which item was chosen first or second, one cannot say that “wages” is the top choice just because 61% of the people chose it. In fact, subsequent discussions, including an AEA Town Hall meeting in January, have focused on the actors’ desire to maintain 99-seat theater to “practice their craft.” And when given the choice between getting in front of an audience and getting paid, most actors state that getting paid is a lesser concern. (Again, this speaks to the idea of tweaking the current 99-seat plan rather than overturning it.)

Just like in our example, then, perhaps “hone my skills” was the true most-popular choice and “wages” was actually in third place (behind the oft-mentioned “exposure opportunities.”) At least this idea is consistent with comments made since the survey. Of course, no one can prove “hone my skills” is the most-popular choice because since AEA didn’t collect the selection ordering data, they can’t re-run the experiment. Nevertheless, we have just demonstrated that AEA cannot claim that this survey shows the top actor concern is wages.

Similarly, the most-popular choice for the second question, the top concern for the Union, is also unclear. Again, subsequent discussions have revealed that the actors in 99-seat theaters are more interested in Union workplace protections rather than Union pay requirements. Again, the loss of selection ordering prevents a definitive interpretation.

To summarize: it is an error to claim that the most-chosen item is representative of the top choice of a group. One cannot use “Pick Two” as an alternative to alternative voting. If one is looking for the top choice to represent a group’s desires, alternative voting must be used. A sleight of hand occurs when asking about the “two most important considerations” becomes identifying a “top consideration.”

Final Thoughts

It’s a shame that the Mary McColl and her Council spent good time and money to create such a poorly vetted survey. While there is no obvious sampling bias associated with the survey, there is clearly an embedded response bias. And compounding those issues are mathematically unjustifiable assertions AEA makes based on a faulty conception of ranked data.

In short, this survey does nothing to prove the AEA claim that a majority of actors are primarily concerned with increasing wages to the exclusion of all else. In fact, despite the response bias, a careful analysis of the survey is surprisingly consistent with the subsequent reactions of the actors. By landslide margins, actors and stage managers in 99-seat theaters are satisfied with their experience and so, not surprisingly, by landslide margins, LA actors and stage managers rejected an AEA plan which threatened those same theaters. In addition, both the value of practicing craft and union workplace protection finished in the most-chosen group in the “Pick-Two” questions and most actors have talked about these issues being more important than monetary compensation.

So, it turns out there is some connection between reality and this survey after all.

Just not in the way that AEA claimed.