Bowery Prepares for the Big Leap Into Equity

The Bowery Theatre will become San Diego’s sixth Equity theater--and, according to an Equity representative, the country’s smallest--when it unveils “What the Butler Saw” on Sept. 15 at the 76-seat Kingston Playhouse.

It’s a big leap for a little theater whose very future was in doubt a scant three months ago.

The theater had been dark for seven months, readying its first play for the Kingston Playhouse after having been evicted last year from its former home at 480 Elm St. to make way for a renovation project. At the June 16 opening of John Patrick Shanley’s “Italian-American Reconciliation,” the tension on the face of artistic director Ralph Elias seemed as palpable as the tension on stage.

The bittersweet love story proved a success that was extended until Aug. 26. That was vital in making the move to professional status, said Elias.

“After being dark, we had to reestablish our identity in a new venue. If the show had been mediocre, I don’t know what would have happened. If the first thing out of the gate hadn’t been successful, all this would have been a long, long way off.”

For a theater as tiny as the Bowery to sign a contract with the Actors Equity union is a sign of the growing and increasingly competitive San Diego scene. The Equity label--a commitment to hiring professional actors--is becoming increasingly important as a sign of quality to audiences who now have four other professional theaters to choose from in the same downtown/Gaslamp area, where the Bowery is situated.

The Old Globe Theatre, the San Diego Repertory Theatre, Starlight Musical Theatre and the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre, all in the vicinity of the Bowery, have professional contracts, as does the La Jolla Playhouse.

The Bowery’s contract also increases the theater’s accessibility to the pool of Equity actors in Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego, which numbers about 10,000, according to Robert Sarison, Equity business representative for developing theater in Los Angeles. It gives the Bowery a shot at acquiring rights to newer plays that might have previously been offered to professional theaters first. And it may help with funding from sources such as the National Endowment of the Arts, which studies the amount of money an institution pays its artists when it considers funding requests.

Most significantly, it is an investment. Elias and Sarison, who helped the theater iron out its Equity contract--to be renegotiated from show to show--agree that, if the Bowery wasn’t contemplating a move to the larger Onyx Building, a potential 120-odd seat house being built at 860 Fifth Ave., in early 1990, this contract wouldn’t have been under consideration.

“This is a symbolic fruit of our efforts,” said Elias, who took over the leadership of the Bowery Theatre last spring after directing another successful Shanley play there, “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea.”

“We’ve wanted to professionalize the theater from the beginning,” said Elias. “If you are professional, and you feel professional, and you are non-Equity, you have to hem and haw. Now we don’t have to hem and haw. This is a milepost. It’s concrete evidence of professionalization.”

The Small Professional Theatre Contract, which is just four years old, has made it affordable for several hundred theaters in small houses, such as the Bowery and the Gaslamp, to sign with Equity.

“It’s wonderful that this contract exists because it allows us to go Equity without going broke,” said Elias. “It puts more money in artists’ hands and allows us to develop an ongoing relation with Equity that can continue when we develop a larger house.”

One of the elements that made the timing seem essential to Elias was his casting of two Equity actors--himself and his wife, Allison Brennan--in “What the Butler Saw.” To hire two actors under a Guest Equity Artist contract would cost $390 apiece for a total of $780 a week. Minimum rates for the Bowery under its small-theater agreement are $110 a week for the actors and $120 for an Equity stage manager--another requirement of the contract--for a total of $360, or less than the cost of one Guest Equity Artist.

(The Bowery is now paying one Guest Equity Artist, Ken Myles, for his work in “Italian-American Reconciliation.”)

Paying two Equity actors for “What the Butler Saw” will prove more economical for the Bowery as an Equity theater than if it had hired both under Guest Equity contracts.

“If we didn’t think we could work this contract out, we wouldn’t have done this play,” Elias said.

The Bowery’s move to professional status underlines the San Diego theater scene as “one of the more rapidly developing” ones in the country, according to Sarison. The average large city has one or two large theaters, like San Diego, and only two or three “developing theaters”--those in other Equity categories--he said.

The Bowery was founded in 1982, the same year that San Diego’s oldest theater, the Old Globe--which since 1959 had only offered professional theater during the summer season--became San Diego’s first year-round professional theater.

Both the Old Globe and the La Jolla Playhouse, which reopened as an Equity theater in 1983 after a 19-year hiatus, are members of the League of Resident Theatres, an organization that requires its members to hire the greatest percentage of Equity actors at the highest minimum wage for nonprofit theaters.

The San Diego Repertory Theatre, which has a letter of agreement with Equity in which it adheres to many tenets of the LORT contract without having to hire the same percentage of Equity actors, became professional in anticipation of its move to the Lyceum, where it has been since 1986. Next on the financial rung is the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company, a subscriber to a more costly version of the Small Professional Theatre Contract that the Bowery now has. The Gaslamp made its move to professional status in 1987 when it opened its new house, now called the Hahn Cosmopolitan.

Starlight Musical Theatre has been offering summer theater under an Equity contract for 11 years. Sarison has also had talks with North Coast Repertory Theatre about its continued interest in going Equity, a move that North Coast’s artistic director, Olive Blakistone, said she cannot yet afford.

“The whole situation is changing so rapidly,” said Elias. “The growth of the San Diego Rep, the Gaslamp and us. . . . We are part of that change, and we are happy about it. This means we are a professional theater even if we are the smallest of the small.”