What is an Actors’ Union? Just like with any other union, these organizations can help performing arts students and actors network and find like-minded people to spend their time with.

“There’s a Screen Actors Guild for media,” says Jeff Kaplan. “There’s also a union for stage called Actors’ Equity.” The majority of Equity actors are not working, so the Equity card that comes with the Actors’ Equity union doesn’t guarantee actors work, but it does help get them access to higher-level productions and jobs.

“They set pay scales. That’s probably the one that performers are most interested in, but they do other things. They provide basic minimums for workplace safety, the number of hours you can work, what time you have to be done, how you resolve conflicts during productions. They have health insurance.”

Joining an Actors’ Union

Getting into one of these unions can be tricky. In order to join a union, you have to perform in plays that are union-only, which results in a chicken-and-egg situation: how do you get into a union-only play if you’re not yet a union member? These unions have apprenticeship programs set up that allow a handful of non-union actors to perform, but the number of actors is kept at that handful in order to keep the union’s roster exclusive.

Is there a downside to joining an actors’ union? The union will provide actors with a lot of opportunities, but it does limit their actors as well. For instance, if you are a part of an actors’ union, you have to get written permission to perform in a non-union play, which is why not everyone chooses to join a union. They like to keep their options fully open, but on the flip side, they are limited to only working non-union plays.

When seeking a performing arts education, whether it’s an online performing arts education or an in-person one, students usually have a lot of questions about unions, like how to join one or whether or not you should. It’s made more complicated by the number of unions out there. “In brief,” says Shanga Parker, “there’s AEA. That is the union for theater actors and stage managers. And then there’s SAG-AFTRA. They’re combined now. Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists-they used to be separate, now they are one. And that is for film and TV.

Each union has a different way of becoming a member. AEA, or the Actors’ Equity Association, allows actors to submit paperwork after being cast in one of their specified shows. Once an actor joins a show that counts for the union and submits the paperwork, they’re considered an Equity Membership Candidate, or EMC. As an actor works on an Equity production, they accrue points week by week. Once they’ve built up enough points, they can join AEA.

However, AEA requires an initiation fee alongside the point requirement. That initiation fee has varied over the years, but it’s usually to the sum of a couple thousand dollars.

SAG-AFTRA works similarly in that you can get cast in a union role and choose to take it or not. The difference with SAG-AFTRA is that membership is affected by something called the Taft Hartley Act, which was written for a different reason but applies to the union. Essentially, the Taft Hartley Act gives you the choice of joining the union upon taking your first union role, but declining is also an option. That said, if you take a second union role, you’re required to join the union at that point, and there’s an initiation fee of a couple thousand dollars as well. Actors need to weigh the benefits of union membership with the initiation fee and plan accordingly.

The first thing you want to think about after you figure out for whom you are making a performing arts production is the quality of articulation of the story that’s being told. If you’re dealing with a script, and it’s written in vernacular, everyday language, is it as strong as it could be? Do you believe that the writer has a singular voice and talent that is ready for and deserves to be nurtured by full production?

Sometimes producer Elizabeth Bradley thinks that some of the most promising early playwrights are lost because they’re simply produced as needed and not produced as ready. Another problem that can occur is that they’d be much better writers if they were produced more frequently, earlier on, because, like everything else, it’s a craft. You get better at it, but where a particular writer will fall on that spectrum comes down to the play, the writer, and the piece.

In performing arts education or online performing arts education, you’ll learn to explore all of these essential questions. Do you have the right match of director? Does the director actually have a sense of conviction of what the sensibility of the piece needs? Can they partner with the writer? If they’re doing a revival of a classic play and they’re completely reinventing something, is the reinventing trenchant? Is it necessary?

When Malini Singh McDonald did Black Henna, for the first show they did a reading, and then they knew they were going to do a full production. They knew the first step would be to think about how much money this was going to cost. That’s always the first step in performing arts. How much money is this going to cost?

It’s so important to think it through, and luckily there are budgets that you can find in online performing arts education to give you an idea of how much each area is going to cost, more or less. Areas to consider are your space, your rehearsal space, because those are two separate things unless you can get a package, PR, music, and licensing.

In McDonald’s experience, they kind of had a budget but then forgot some line items like insurance. They begged, borrowed, and stole before coming up with their current style of finding investors. They just reached out to people and said, “Hey, we need X amount of dollars to get us to this point.” Thankfully, people loved them, and they loved people, so a lot of people were able to just give them the money.

Having learned from this experience though, they ended up in future productions really getting clear about the budget and then thinking about how they’re going to actually fund it. Not to say they don’t beg and borrow anymore. There are times they need to ask for more money because something comes up. One thing to learn in performing arts education is to always expect the unexpected.

For example, let’s say you budgeted $2,500 for this line item, and then it turns out to be $4,000 just because stuff happens. Plan ahead, stick to your budget, but budget for the unexpected.

What was very different for me in preparing for a musical that isn’t always covered in performing arts education is something called a sitzprobe. I had never heard of it before, but it’s when you go and, for the first time, you actually sing with the orchestra. You’re in the room with them, and it’s terrifying and thrilling.

The other thing that needs to be covered more in online performing arts education is that it’s such a big group of people on such a large stage that they literally have handlers backstage. You don’t even have to know your cue. Somebody literally comes into your dressing room, takes you where you’re supposed to enter, and pushes you on at the time you’re supposed to go. I mean, there are no accidents here, and I know it wasn’t just for me. I know that’s what they do because I’m pretty good at knowing when to walk on the stage. But it was both frightening to give up that control and kind of comforting to be taken care of in that way.

One thing that’s important to think about in your online performing arts education is that there are many differences between designing costume for film and designing for the theater, the opera, or music. “I think the biggest difference is that in theater, you see the whole costume, you see the whole person, and you see actors all together,” says Durinda Wood. “Shoes are also really important because they are usually in the audience’s eye line.”

Durinda explains how background design affects designing costumes for the theater: “The background is very stationary. You know exactly what that background’s going to be. … Artistically, it’s much easier to design for theater and opera and know that your vision is going to be the way that you designed it.”

“I love theater and opera. I always thought that I would be a theater designer,” Durinda says. She notes that “one thing about the opera is that the singers are just singers. They’re not necessarily actors. And they’re much less demanding, I would say, about their costumes. I think they really just want to be able to sing. That’s their most important thing.” She adds that sometimes simple changes are called for, like loosening a collar or vest to allow an opera singer enough room to vocalize comfortably.

If you consider a career in costume design as you pursue your performing arts education, it’s nice to know that Durinda also says she’s found that both opera singers and theater actors enjoy working with costume designers and treat them with respect.

The core of theater, going back to the Greeks, was to actually see yourself represented on stage. W.E.B. Du Bois said that Black theater should be theater that is written by us, by African-Americans, to be representative for us and to be shown near us.

Now’s the time to create a new representation of Blackness, a new look, and a new authentic appearance in the performing arts.

Performing arts education can help people understand Black theater history better by explaining why some performers did the types of shows they did.

Let’s go back to this idea of seeing yourself appearing on stage. If you were to read an issue of “The Crisis,” which was a magazine that was published by W.E.B. Du Bois, you would encounter stories of authentic Black life. Those stories would be presented on stage eventually, and not just by families by the fireside.

Slowly, over time, across the 1920s to the 1950s and so on, an Americanized version of theater emerged. We tend to imagine and pretend that Black theater came along in the 1960s, and that’s not true. Online performing arts education will hopefully start to dispel this false idea.

We had people in the 19th century like Bert Williams, who began as a blackface performer. He partnered with his friend, George Walker, and they went on stage with one in blackface and one not. They traveled across the vaudeville circuit and performed this way.

George Walker was the straight man to Bert Williams’ more comedic, stereotypical character. With the pairing of those two, they began to strip away the artifice and the mask that was blackface.

By the 20th century, the most heavily laden aspects of the blackface stereotype had gone away. You could begin to see the kind of comedy that was beneath it. That’s what Bert Williams did. He was the most popular performer in all of US theater, certainly in the first decade of the 1900s.

We had other actors who emerged, as well, like Charles Gilpin. Gilpin’s claim to fame was “The Emperor Jones,” which was a play by Eugene O’Neill. Charles Gilpin played the proud, confident character of Brutus Jones, a Chicago-born Pullman porter.

In the play, Jones moves to Haiti and becomes an emperor under somewhat corrupt circumstances. Later, he finds himself haunted and possessed by the spirits of the island.

That play was a Broadway hit for Gilpin, making him a star. George Walker also became a tremendously successful and well-known figure until he was replaced by a young up-and-coming actor by the name of Paul Robeson.

Paul Robeson started performing a national tour of the “The Emperor Jones.” Because of that, it seemed like his career catapulted. He did the film version of “The Emperor Jones” and went on to star in a number of other films. He went back and forth between the concert hall as a singer and Broadway as a performer. And he was there when the LA entertainment culture emerged.