Arts Jobs and Families CAN Peacefully Co-exist

During a review at one of my previous jobs – very previous, if you get my drift – I got into one of my perpetual arguments with my supervisor about family life. I was agitating about work/life balance, when he said to me that it was clear that family was important to me.

“Of course it is,” I responded. My supervisor only had a tenuous grasp of the obvious, so this was a remarkable statement coming from him.

He cast his face in the softest way he could, trying to look as sympathetic as a machine could be. “Maybe production is not the right field for you.”

Like I said, a tenuous grasp of the obvious.

I’ve spent time in fields other than performing arts production, and I hated them. (For starters, I had to wear uncomfortable shoes.) As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that there is nothing more exciting to me than to be backstage, helping artists create or perform, and watching as one-time-only art is created right in front of me. I love what I do and wouldn’t do anything else.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve also realized that there is nothing more important than my family. Like the art that I pursue, my family is one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable once lost.

This is not just a factor of losing a child. One of the reasons that touring never appealed to me was because of its rootless nature. It’s right for some, but not for me. I wanted to settle down, have a wife, have children, a house, a dog. Cathleen’s sickness and death just threw everything into sharper focus. I went from making work/life balance a priority to making it THE priority. There were plenty of times that I got into actual screaming arguments with my supervisor about this, and in the process became a work/life balance zealot.

But in doing so, I ran headlong into my profession’s often unreasonable demands on my time.

I can accept – begrudgingly, I admit – that I will never become wealthy being a production manager. Money issues in the performing arts have driven a large number of very talented people out of the field, people I respect and wish I could work with again. I think that what I and my colleagues do have a much larger positive impact on the world than, say “Jersey Shore” or “The Bachelor,” so the fact that we are not compensated equivalently does smack of inequity. But my father worked for 35 or so years as a government employee simply to survive and raise a family, never getting to do what he was really interested in doing and working in places where his talents were never appreciated appropriately. The community of historians and academicians is the poorer for it, too. I swore – and still swear – that I will not let that happen to me.

However, the key phrase in there is “raise a family.” He made it clear that he was willing to do what it would take to raise his family the best he could. I also swore that I would do that, too.

Of course, it helps that I have a wife who believes in what I do and who is willing to work with me to compromise and adjust schedules as needed. True, she brings in the greater income, but she also knows that I am who I am, and so I have to do what I do. It can be tough – I have 65 or so days during the year where I’m out on a weeknight until midnight or gone all weekend for shows – but I’ve done the best that I can to make my schedule flexible at other times. I don’t always succeed, and I do get grumpy when I’m tired but have to entertain and feed and sometimes bathe Josie before my wife comes home. It’s usually time like that that Josie says or does something awesome, reminding me why it is so important for me to be there for her.

After all, as I have expressed on numerous occasions when people give me a hard time: I have lost the opportunity to see one daughter grow up. I will not lose another.

For the first time in I don’t know how long, I have a boss that understands that. She demands that the work gets done, but doesn’t begrudge when Josie has to go to the doctor or if I have to pick her up early from school. And when I interviewed for the job, I made it clear that my family came first. Kari asked me how I express that in interviews. I told her that I said, “My family comes first.”

They hired me anyway. If they hadn’t, I wouldn’t have minded, because it wouldn’t have been a place I wanted to work.

For the vast majority of us, the arts are never going to make anyone rich. (How does the line go about Broadway producers? “You can’t make a living, but you can make a killing.”) So the resistance of some bosses – including my former boss and my wife’s current one – to allow for the compromise of getting the work done as long as families are given primacy of place is baffling to me. We don’t make enough money to hire nannies, and that’s not how we choose to raise our kids anyway. As important as I consider what we do, we aren’t curing cancer. We are, to some extent, willing to make some economic sacrifices to pursue and, if possible, make a living at doing something that has rewards that transcend the monetary. Besides, having kids gives us a built-in audience, thereby expanding the audience in the future. We make the compromises and sacrifices we have to – monetarily, during tech weeks, or other times where the pressure is greatest – but we should not be asked, lock, stock, and barrel, to sacrifice family.

And yet, repeatedly, managers ask us to do this. This puts people like me on edge, and makes people like my former boss complacent. Not coincidentally, he didn’t have a family.

When I attended USITT a few years ago, I sat in on the Human Issues Caucus, which began as an outlet for gay and lesbian people in the production field. It then expanded to include women. While discrimination in the arts production field does impact these groups, it also impacts anyone – gays, lesbians, women, AND men – who wish to balance their work lives with their family responsibilities. I was surprised that no one in this little caucus would consider family life as a human issue. To me, it’s one of the most important ones.

Pursuing what we love vocationally should not preclude our having a family. The hours are already hard and long enough, and the pay already low enough, without having it be an expectation that work in the arts excludes a life outside the theater. Anyone who wants to keep that balance has an obligation to fight for it until the culture shifts. And until that time, I will be a zealot and piss off whoever needs to be pissed off. After all, I've lost jobs and replaced them. I can't replace family that is lost.