Private Mars Rocket II

Over the weekend, I attended the Buffalo Theater Ensemble's production of Andy Warhol's Tomato at College of DuPage. I have two thoughts.

Thought #1 - The Play

The Buffalo Theater Ensemble, hereinafter BTE, is the resident professional theatrical company at College of DuPage, and they run three plays a year at COD's ~180 seat theater. Andy Warhol's Tomato is set when Andy was 18 and is a story of him and the owner of a working-class bar. There are only two characters and one set, and it's a serious play with Deep Thoughts. I found it enjoyable.

Thought #2 - The Business of Theater

The performance of this play was on a Friday night with (for February in Chicago) perfect weather. The ~180 theater was maybe 30% occupied, which got me thinking about finances. (As a published author, finances are always of interest.) Specifically, I wondered how a professional theatrical company paid the bills with a 30% occupancy rate.

So, I did some Googling and found BTE's website which had a couple of annual reports on it. In short, not only is nobody getting rich working for BTE, nobody's making enough money to support themselves full-time at BTE. Details:

1) The total annual budget for BTE was around $250,000, about half of which was in-kind contributions from College of DuPage. Basically, COD covers the cost of operating their (very nice, actually) theater.
2) Total payroll was around $80,000, split out over 3 plays with between 2 to 6 actors each. Now, these actors are professionals and have professional credits, including speaking roles in Hollywood movies, but they make their living via other jobs. (The actor I linked to is also a faculty member at COD, for example.)

My point here is this - being a professional is not the same as being full-time. In the arts, such as acting and writing, having a day job is very common.