By Jesse Roth and Annie Liu
Obviously, there’s no way to fully quantify a theatre fulfilling its mission. But there are some cold hard numbers we can share to show what we’re doing. Thus, this winter, we’re going to be publishing a series of reports on ways we’re fulfilling our mission and values. We did a preview of this when we announced our rebrand as The Feast, publishing our pay rates in comparison with other local theatres. We’re going to go even deeper into where our money goes and where it comes from.
This report-out is mostly field-facing, so it may make more sense to people within the arts industry. Why are we doing this? First, we believe that we owe you clear information about how we’re using the resources you offer us. Second, having more information allows artists and workers to better advocate for themselves (both with us and with other theatre companies). Finally, we hope that by sharing this information, we can better collaborate and share notes with other theatres seeking to live out these same values (What have you tried that has pushed the needle on these metrics for you? Are there practices we’re doing you’d like to try out as well? Let’s chat).
Over the next couple of weeks, this will include a few report-outs:
- Living Wage: How much do we pay people? We’ll be breaking out our pay rates by position and sharing the total amounts we pay artists, staff, and contractors.
- Pay-what-you-can ticketing: What are people paying for tickets?
- Anti-Racism: Inspired by the #WeSeeYouWhiteAmericanTheatre demands, we’re reporting out where our money is going by race, gender, and ability/disability (and we’re also going to be sharing some data about class and access to wealth).
- Budget: Another demand from #WSYWAT was to publicly share our full budget. We’ve had that on our website since our rebrand last year, and we’ve updated it to reflect 2024’s actuals. For those of you who want to get all the way into the weeds, feel free to check it out.
Looking forward to talking more with you about these numbers and what they mean.
Living Wage
We’re doing this report-out for a couple of reasons:
- Transparency helps arts workers organize and advocate for themselves. We hope you’ll take this information and use it to negotiate for fair wages both with us and with other theatres.
- We want to show you how we’re living out our mission.
- We want other theatres to join this effort. Share your numbers! And for theatres that are not paying well, we want to demonstrate that it is possible, even on a very small budget.
The Feast’s tagline is “Bigger plays, bigger paychecks”—which we mean literally. When we announced our new brand, we published pay data showing that we paid more than theatres 50 times our size, and we pay five times as much as theatres our size.
We are committed to continuing to pay artists and arts workers well, and for a theatre of our (small) size, we really are. AND, there’s still a long way to go (Seattle is really expensive and getting more so by the day).
So here are our pay rates by the numbers.
Totals paid to arts workers*
Each of the last two years, we’ve paid around $90k/year to arts workers* (this doesn’t include staff salaries, see why below). This means we’re paying 23% percent of our total budget to arts workers. We’d love to see the numbers, but we suspect this is a way higher percentage than most larger theatres.
Actors and Stage Managers
In 2023, we paid actors $715/week, and in 2024, we paid actors $850/week. In 2023, this met the union requirement for our contract, and it 2024, we went above the union minimum. As we reported last year, these rates are higher than theatres 50 times our size and 5 times higher than theatres our same size.
In 2024, stage managers (who are part of the same union as actors) made $956/week and assistant stage managers made $856/week. In 2023, ASMs made $832/week.
We pay union and non-union actors and stage managers the same wage*. Non-union actors have almost no labor protections and often are paid significantly less than union actors. This discrepancy creates a dangerous incentive for theatre producers: Economically, you are sometimes pushed to choose a cheaper actor over a better actor. It also creates an uncomfortable power differential within the cast—some artists are being paid much more and receiving stronger labor protections. Our commitment to paying all actors union rates guarantees our artistic integrity and cultivates solidarity within the ensemble.
Production Team
This category includes all independent contractor production positions. It includes designers and production managers. It does not include board ops, carpenters, electricians, etc (those positions are paid hourly and we’ve categorized under “production labor” below). This category is the most difficult to publish numbers for because different disciplines have very different industry norms for payment. Our basic attempt is to match design fees from larger theatres, but our work here is not as robust or thorough as it is for other labor categories. This is a thing we’re working on!
- 2024: $2000-$6000
- 2023: $600-$6000
Production Labor: Paid (not volunteer) labor
Production labor includes all hourly workers who support production. This includes crew, carpenters, electricians, box office, etc. From 2023-2024, we paid $20-$25 per hour for all production labor.
At most theatres our size, these roles are volunteers or stipend workers (who make perhaps a few hundred dollars for dozens of hours of labor). We treat these roles as employees who are paid a living wage.
Student Apprentices: We paid them a living wage
In 2024, for the very first time, we hired student apprentices for our production. These students worked as assistant designers, directors, and stage managers. We paid the design and directing assistants $1500 each. The stage management assistant received the union rate of $856/week. Design assistants also received an additional $750 each for light and sound board operator stipends.
Paid internships are incredibly rare in the American theatre—even at theatres 10+ times our size.
Marketing Contractors
We hire graphic designers, photographers, videographers, and web designers on a project-by-project basis. Here are the pay rates for 2024:
- $2,000 for graphic design for The Adding Machine, $3762.50 for the rebrand
- $600 for photography for The Adding Machine
- $2,000 for web design for the rebrand
- $1000 for videography for The Adding Machine, $1500 for video for our rebrand.
Staff
Our small staff operates with 100% pay equality: All three of us make $30/hour and work 20 hours/week. In 2023, we had four employees with one only working 10 hours per week. In 2024, for the first half of the year we only had two employees, before a third joined us.
Methodology and Notes
We are using the category of “arts workers” as opposed to “artists” to give a clearer sense of who is being paid to work on the actual productions. We also wanted to avoid deciding whether production workers like stage managers or box office managers are “artists.” This includes actors, designers, stage managers, production managers, carpenters, electricians, box office staff, graphic designers, and videographers. We decided to not include staff in this number—even though all of us are artists (some of whom received artists stipends for work on productions separately from our staff salaries). We did this because often in the arts, the amount paid to staff is way more than what is paid to artists. We believe both staff and artists deserve to be paid well, and we want to communicate where this money is going.
*The only difference is that we pay into AEA’s health and pension fund for Equity actors/SMs. We always have an Equity SM, though sometimes have a non-equity ASM who is paid Equity wages.