Speak Your Piece: The Extractive Arts

Like clear-cutting a forest or blasting the top off of a mountain in order to send wood and coal to urban dwellers, the American arts system extracts artistic resources in the form of talented young people and tells them that the only place they can make a living in the arts is New York City. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is a major lie. Let me use a statistic from my area of expertise, the theater, to make my point.

According to the annual report of Actors Equity Association, the union for American stage actors, last year their members’ median annual income from theater sources was zero, because 58% of Equity actors were never employed in the theater at all. Think about that for a second: 58% didn’t make a dime. Knowing this, how can young performers take seriously the advice they receive to head to New York, even though many of them don’t want to? But the mythology is strong.