ATLANTA -- A few summers ago, actor John Benzinger played the macho surfer bum Kanaka to Daniel May's pink-cheeked, pigtailed, falsetto-voiced Chicklet Forrest in a wildly successful staging of Psycho Beach Party at Dad's Garage Theatre Company in Atlanta. Today, Benzinger continues to be a part-time actor with a full-time day job selling computer servers. He gets good roles at respected playhouses, most recently in Dad's Garage's annual short play festival, 8 1/2 x 11: The Birds & the Bees, but they don't pay a lot. May makes his living mainly on stage: He just ended a run in the world premiere of Itamar Moses' Celebrity Row at Portland Center Stage in Oregon.
The biggest difference between these actors is their union status. May is a member of Actors' Equity Association, the union of professional theatre actors and stage managers; Benzinger is not. In other cities -- New York, Los Angeles, Chicago -- Equity membership connotes "professional actor." In Atlanta it can, but it doesn't have to.
"Atlanta is sort of a specific town in that there are many good non-Equity actors," says Rachel May, one of the co-producing artistic directors of Synchronicity Performance Group (and Daniel May's wife). "Equity usually means people have more experience, but in Atlanta we have people who have had long and varied careers being non-Equity."
Here's one big reason: Georgia is a right-to-work state, one of 22 in the country, and Atlanta is Georgia's biggest theatre center. Local actors can find regular stage work of high quality without having to join the union. And under special contracts, they can even be hired at Equity theatres and make union wages. This is also true in Florida, where the theatres are much more spread out, and to a lesser extent in Arizona, says Equity spokesperson Maria Somma.
But it doesn't work the other way around. An Equity member cannot take work in a non-Equity show even in a right-to-work state, says Somma, although the union will partner with a theatre to find a contract that's acceptable to Equity -- Guest Artist, Small Professional Theatre (SPT), or League of Resident Theatres, for example. This is simply a fact of life for about 200 union actors in greater Atlanta, who compete for jobs at 25 theatres that are Equity or occasionally hire Equity performers. It's also a fact of life for hundreds of other actors who have chosen not to join the union. They have about 50 theatres -- a mix of community, small, and midsize professional companies as well as the Alliance Theatre, the region's flagship venue -- at which to seek work, although many of the smallest companies are here one moment and gone the next.
So it's a Catch-22: Join Equity, make more money, enjoy fringe benefits, but risk finding less work -- meaning, in effect, no wages and few fringe benefits. Or stay out of the union, leaving yourself open for more opportunities, most of which pay a lot less and sometimes pay nothing. For many actors, it's all a quality-of-life issue.
"I just couldn't financially support myself [doing theatre], even if I was in shows 50 weeks out of the year," says Benzinger, 34. "There's the pragmatic side that says I need to earn money to do the things I want to do, to pay my mortgage, to pay off my car, to travel, to save for retirement. Then there's the art side of me, too." Benzinger, who is single, owns a home in a fairly pricey Atlanta neighborhood and supports one dog, Moses.
Equity's Somma puts it this way: "The individual has to make a decision about what their career path is going to be. It's very much a personal decision."
Ironically, Benzinger's first acting job in Atlanta was at an Equity theatre: He played Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest at suburban Marietta's Theatre in the Square in 1997. "I thought getting jobs in this town was going to come easy," he says, laughing. "But after that there was a bit of a dry spell, and I realized there was a vibrant theatre market and I had to get to work and I had to take jobs that didn't pay to prove myself. In that process I kind of fell in love with theatre in the trenches -- taking on the stuff that a Theatre in the Square wouldn't do, that an Alliance wouldn't do. It wouldn't necessarily put people in the audience, but it was theatre that smaller companies thought needed to be done. And I love that. I love the challenge."
He's particularly proud of his work as Guildenstern in an urban update of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead for a local upstart, VisionQuest Theater, which now produces sporadically, and in "Swallow" by Atlanta playwright Steve Yockey, a 10-minute play produced by Dad's Garage about a gay man who cannot perform sexually unless his partner chokes him. Such work earns him, he says, about $150 a week.
Daniel May was a Dad's Garage regular, too, until late 2002, when Chicago Shakespeare Theater told him he had to join Equity to audition for its production of The Taming of the Shrew. It was one of the toughest professional decisions he's had to make.
"I was honestly really nervous about it," says May, 31. "I wanted to do the role in Chicago, but I wasn't sure what it would mean when I got back home." Among other things, it meant goodbye to Dad's Garage, but hello to other opportunities. He's found regular work at the Alliance and at Georgia Shakespeare, where he'll soon start his fifth repertory season. Last summer there, he played Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire; this year he'll take the title role in Hamlet. He and his wife own their home and support two dogs, Moxie and Marvel, and two cats, Coco and Basil. While his wife's work with Synchronicity makes them a two-income family, they struggle to live within their means even when May does shows back-to-back all year long, as he did in 2005.
As a union actor, he earns the Equity minimum of $536 to $816 per week. If he appears as an Equity guest artist or under an SPT contract, as he does regularly at Atlanta's Actor's Express, his salary is negotiated by the union, according to Somma, and he'll earn anywhere from $290 to $490 per week. May says he has done at least five productions, sometimes six, in each of the past five years; in 2005, it was seven.
Yet not every Equity actor is so fortunate. And that's why Jody Feldman, who has been the casting director at the Alliance since 1992, often advises younger actors to delay joining the union: because doing so leaves them open to more opportunities. She equates Atlanta's community and smaller professional theatres to workshops in New York -- places to learn and be seen. But that doesn't mean they can't get hired at an Equity theatre. The Alliance, for example, uses non-Equity actors as understudies in its Family Series shows and occasionally in its centerpiece plays. Its recent production of Jelly's Last Jam used three non-Equity actors, she says, and the upcoming production of Kenneth Lin's play ..., " said Said will use one.
In fact, Dad's Garage artistic director Kate Warner calls Benzinger her "main man" in the company's staged work (it also has a separate improv program). She belongs to the stage directors union, the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, and fully supports actors who want to join Equity. She just can't hire them. Yet Dad's Garage is lucky, Warner says, that Atlanta has so many strong actors who are just as committed and just as talented as Equity performers but who have made different career choices.
Joining Equity
There are three ways for actors to become members of Equity, says Somma:
1) Audition for and be offered a contract at an Equity theatre.
2) Be a member of one of Equity's sister unions, such as the Screen Actors Guild.
3) Qualify through the Equity Membership Candidate Program, aimed at actors and stage managers "in training," through which they can accrue weeks of work at Equity theatres, then apply to join the union.