My kingdom for a stage tech: At Kansas City theaters, a post-pandemic brain drain

It’s been an unpleasant couple of years for the hiring managers of America.

Bit by the twin snakes of a pandemic and The Great Resignation, even prosperous businesses are struggling to attract and retain workers. The sting is fiercer in industries that aren’t historically cash machines.

Like, say, organizations that stage local productions of Shakespeare and Sondheim. Local theatergoers might have lately noticed shorter seasons, less-grandiose scenery and smaller casts at their favorite local stages.

All across town, the people charged with staffing artistic productions are singing the same desperate refrain: They need lighting designers, sound designers, costume designers, carpenters and production managers with the experience necessary to bring it all together.

“We’ve lost significant talent,” said Angela Gieras, executive director of the Kansas City Repertory Theatre.

“It’s harder to find people, and you have to pay them more — often more than we can afford,” said Cynthia Levin, artistic director at the Unicorn Theatre.

“I wouldn’t have labeled staffing a problem, pre-COVID,” said Deborah Sandler, general director of the Lyric Opera of Kansas City. “Now it’s in the problem category. It affects anybody who produces work on stage.”

This trail of despair leads back to a disruptive virus that took root in this country sometime around March 2020. COVID-19 spread sickness and death but also empowerment for American workers. As it turns out, when you give an overworked population some time away from the conveyor belt, they become a little more choosy about when and how they elect to hop back on it.

Live theater, which puts large groups of people in small rooms, was among the first to shut down due to the pandemic, and the last to reopen. A lot happened in that space of time.

In the before era, Kyle Dyck worked for several years building sets as the technical director for The Living Room and the Kansas City Actors Theatre. He was also a union actor, and through IATSE Local 31, the Kansas City stagehands’ union, Dyck would take occasional odd jobs doing load-ins for large touring shows at venues like the T-Mobile Center and Starlight Theatre. All that work dried up in the spring of 2020.

“I lost my entire income in a matter of weeks,” Dyck said.

He eventually found work with a local contractor, renovating and building additions onto houses. In 2021, as local theaters crept back toward production, he chose not to return to his old job at Kansas City Actors Theatre.

“There were so many different flare-ups and scares with variants that I was concerned I could lose my job all over again,” Dyck said.

Dyck still does some part-time work in his free time for the Black Box, where The Living Room now stages its performances. But after experiencing the higher wages and abundance of consistent work the construction industry has to offer, his expectations have changed.

“If a theater offered me what I’m currently being paid to come work for them, yeah, I’d be interested,” Dyck said. “But there aren’t any theaters in this city that offer enough steady jobs with the wages I’d be asking for.”

The jobs available to people like Dyck vary from theater to theater. They are a mix of full-time positions with annual salaries, season-long contracts and short-term freelance work for individual shows.

“And those freelance people just aren’t there anymore,” said John Rensenhouse, artistic chair of the Kansas City Actors Theatre. “Increasingly, we’re hearing, ‘I need this to be a full-time job and I need this amount of money.’ And I respect that. But there’s also the question of whether the theater can afford a full-time position.”

Theater budgets tend to rely on a mix of philanthropy — individual donors, grants — and ticket sales. And a lot fewer people are buying tickets these days than before the pandemic.

“In 2019, we’d have 5,000 people see a show over four weeks,” said Tim Scott, artistic director of Music Theater Heritage. “And we’ll be lucky to get 2,500 coming to see ‘Titanic’ this summer.”

“Buying habits have changed,” Levin at the Unicorn said. “People are buying the day of, instead of season tickets. I’ve been doing this 43 years, and over all those decades I’ve learned how to sell tickets, how to cast, how to pick shows. And all of that has changed.”

It’s a correction that was long overdue, said Mark Exline, a scenic designer and production manager with recent stints at Music Theater Heritage and KCAT.

“Some of these theaters came back after the pandemic without any understanding of what producing theater is like now,” said Exline, who has lately gravitated away from theater and toward pop-up installations for parties, fundraisers and other events. “Costs are through the roof. Inflation is running rampant. People want to be on staff instead of coming in for a week or a month. And a bunch of others have just left the industry entirely. It’s not 2019 anymore, and a lot of theaters and artistic directors don’t seem to have gotten the memo about that.”

And when carpenters and painters aren’t available for freelance gigs, the burden of the work falls on the staff.

“We’re getting paid $15 an hour, handed some draftings and being told go build scenery from scratch,” Exline said. “I’m running around with power tools in my hands, scrambling to paint scenery myself because there’s no labor. And when the artistic leadership doesn’t get the quality of work they’re expecting, they lash out. But after COVID, nobody’s willing to put up with that kind of behavior from management anymore.”

Some local theaters have taken worker-friendly steps of late. In addition to increasing its minimum hourly wage for production workers by $2-3 per hour, KC Rep has done away with “10 out of 12s” — marathon rehearsal schedules that call for techs and actors to work 10-hour days with a two-hour break in the middle. The daily max is now eight hours, with a two-hour break, and rehearsals go only five days a week, when before they were six.

“It’s been positive for the staff, positive for the audience, and positive for the quality of work, actually,” said Stuart Carden, the Rep’s artistic director.

The Rep has also been investing resources in community outreach, trying to “develop new pathways for people to learn about these opportunities, particularly in communities that haven’t historically had much exposure to what we do,” Carden added.

Still, the Rep currently has seven open positions for seasonal and full-time production staff. And wages can only rise so high. “We’re a nonprofit,” Carden said. “There are financial governors on what we can do.”

The Unicorn has tried to rejigger its budget by producing six shows a year, rather than seven, while giving its workers a “10 to 15% bump across the board,” Levin said.

“For a long time, there was a mindset of, ‘These are artists doing what they love, and so they don’t need fair and equitable compensation,’” Levin said. “And that is all out the window. It is obvious we have to do things differently than before, or else we’ll get run over and left behind. At the same time, it is not obvious how a mid-size organization like ours can make that work. But we are scurrying to try to figure it out.”

Ideas, Levin said, include redirecting more of the budget from materials to people, hoping that happier, better-paid workers might brainstorm “amazing sounds and light and scenery that don’t cost as much to make as we’re used to spending.” They could pass the buck onto audiences. “But we don’t want to be charging $75 per ticket. We don’t want an elite group of people to be the only ones who can come to our shows.”

Whatever the solution is, Kansas City theater audiences should expect to see more plays and musicals assembled by greener stage techs. “The field is going to get younger,” Carden said. “We’re prioritizing potential now more than established experience.”

And ultimately, local audiences will decide the fate of local theaters. Are Kansas Citians ready to get in their cars, drive to the theater and pay what’ll likely be a higher ticket price to sit in a dark room full of strangers? Or has the pandemic taught them that TikTok and true-crime docs are enough to scratch that old entertainment itch?

“Even with everything that has changed, the math works for us if the crowds would return to 2019 levels,” said Scott at Music Theater Heritage. “And I think that’s true for just about everybody in town.”