In the two years since the secret Not in Our House Facebook group was formed, a number of things have changed. Chief among them is that Profiles Theatre no longer exists. Profiles was the group’s initial inspiration to organize and support people who have been harassed and abused at non-Equity theaters; it closed last June following an investigation by the Reader into more than 20 years of verbal abuse and physical attacks on actors and crew members. The investigation helped spark a conversation about how to prevent such abuse, and seemingly lowered the theater community’s collective tolerance for it—most recently, Dead Writers Collective shut its doors after one of its members posted abusive comments from the company’s artistic director on Facebook.
More significantly though, Not in Our House has nearly finalized its code of conduct for non-Equity theaters, now known as the Chicago Theatre Standards. An early draft of the standards was unveiled at a community meeting last April, and 20 theaters in the city volunteered to be part of a pilot program to test them out. Many smaller theaters aren’t part of Actors’ Equity, the actors’ union, which has its own extensive codes of conduct and, crucially, a governing body to which actors who claim to have been mistreated can bring their complaints. The standards are an attempt to provide the same sort of clear, written documentation of the rights and responsibilities of non-Equity theaters and actors—that is, theaters and actors that aren’t part of the union. Some Equity theaters have also joined the pilot program because they feel the code provides extra reinforcement or fills gaps in the official Equity policy.
Steep Theatre in Edgewater has been working with the standards for its five productions over the past year. During that time there were two instances of unauthorized changes in choreography, says its executive director, Kate Piatt-Eckert. In both cases, the standards made it clear that, should problems crop up, the cast members should talk to the NED, who would take the complaint to the stage manager, whose job it is to keep track of the choreography. Both problems were resolved this way, before they escalated to the point where Piatt-Eckert had to handle them. “In both cases, everyone was glad to have the documentation in place,” she says. “People felt like they knew what to do. Things got addressed more quickly. People knew who to talk to, and the complaints were taken seriously.”
“If it’s fight choreography, companies don’t talk about gray areas,” she says. “But if you take out the ‘fight’ and put in ‘sex,’ it’s different. When there’s closing-night tongue [in a kiss], there are no consequences. Behavior thrives when there’s a presumption that nobody’s going to do anything.”
The incident, say Myers and Fisher, taught NIOH that there needed to be practical instructions on how to introduce the code—possibly a bullet-point script or, if it can raise some money in the future, instructional videos.
“Will everyone say, ‘That was cool, but now we’re done?'” she asks. “I can’t predict that. I’m not sure if it’s up to me to do decide. But no one elected me, and I find strength in that.”
