Topics

1

The Hardline / "7 out of 9" vs. "8 out of 10"

« on: Aug 03, 2015, 03:32 am »

I have a question about a particular rule from the LORT agreement, Rule (51)(C)(1): "At the Theatre’s option, on non-performance days, rehearsal shall not exceed “7 out of 9” or “8 out of 10” consecutive hours."

My question is this: Why not just say that rehearsal shall not exceed "8 out of 10" consecutive hours?

It seems simple to determine what exceeds an 8 out of 10. You just can't rehearse more than 8 hours that day, and you have to make sure the entire work day is less than 10 hours inclusive of the meal break.

But what exceeds a 7 out of 9 that wouldn't just automatically become an 8 out of 10?

Are we saying that if you want to rehearse an actor more than 7 hours in the rehearsal day, the actor's span of day must then count as 10 hours (since it exceeds a 7 out of 9, you must call it an 8 out of 10). And how does that affect things? Does it affect 12-hour turnaround, so that if an actor rehearses 12n-5p & 6p-9p (an 8 out of 9), you really have to call it either a 11a-9p span of day or a 12n-10p span of day, and make sure they get the proper 12 hour turnaround based on one of those spans.

Or is scheduling an 8 out of 9 rehearsal day fine, because it does not "exceed" an 8 our of 10? And if so, again, why include the "7 out of 9" option in the rule?

Is the rule just saying you can't schedule 7 hours of rehearsal spread across a 10 hour span of day (that is, without officially crediting the actor for 8 hours worked for the day, even if one hour was part of an unusually long meal break.) And does that mean as soon as an actor's span of day is longer than 9 hours, they must be credited as having worked 8 hours that day?

The more I think about the rule, the more my head spins about what the spirit of it is, and what it's trying to say we shouldn't be doing.

Does anyone have a simple explanation?

2

The Hardline / Union Membership not required under AEA Contract?

« on: Jun 30, 2011, 01:57 pm »

I was recently in a situation where I was hired as a non-union Production Assistant for a show that was going to be staffed by one Equity SM and one PA. However, Equity then ruled that the show needed to have an Equity ASM as well. The theatre asked me if I would like to be the ASM.

Previously I assumed that accepting an equity contract as ASM meant that I would be required to join the union (and would thus prevent me from working as a PA at many theatres in the future), but apparently this is not the case.

After sifting through some rumors, I called Equity and they told me that you may sign an Equity contract and include a letter stating your intent NOT to become a member, and you may do this as many times as you like.

Am I the only one who assumed membership was required? Maybe this situation just doesn't come up very often because theatres see union membership as a sign of experience. I personally have never worked with anyone who was on an Equity Contract who was not a member before.

Does anyone have any experience with this kind of arrangement? I just always thought it couldn't be done and was very surprised to learn otherwise!

3

Employment / Updating a Production mid-run

« on: May 25, 2007, 01:39 am »

Hi everyone! I'm new to this forum. I'm a relatively new stage manager in my third year out of college, and I just started working in Chicago as a freelance SM.

So here's the question: I am the SM of a musical revue/sketch comedy show in an open-ended run at a non equity repertory theatre. We've been going for about 2 months. As part of my job it was understood that I would SM a separate version of the show to travel to a festival in another country for one week in May, after which we would return and continue running the show for about a month until my contract ran out and a new SM would take over. The festival version of the show has a lot of the same material, but it is in a different order with some segments cut and about 6 new songs/scenes.

We had a lighting designer during tech that did all our electrics work and design, and I have been making small repairs to the lights since then. For the festival version of the show we didn't really know what we'd be dealing with, so I ended up hanging a light plot and designing the lights from scratch for that week of shows - that was not something I expected to be doing but we were in another country performing in a theatre none of us had seen before so it just had to be done. Thankfully it worked wonderfully, but that was my first time doing an entire electrics job on my own.

We have now returned home and the director mentioned to me that he would like to perform the festival version of the show one time here in order to make an archival video tape - he wanted to know if that would be technically possible. I told him that it would take some work on my end to deal with the lighting problems. I took an afternoon to write new light cues in for the new segments of the show and I stored them on our light board at the end of the cue list (we run in rep and the old lightboard has a bit of a shady disk drive so we keep all the shows stored together in separate cue ranges). I know it's not the best way, but I was looking to make it work for one night. It requires me to jump around the cue list a lot, back and forth between scenes in order to patch it all together in the right order.

The director has just told me that he would like to permanently change the show to run the festival version from now on.

My question is - I feel like I've gone far beyond my job description dealing with lighting needs already. I don't want to have to jump around the cue list every night, and I definitely don't want my replacement to have to deal with it. I feel it is not my job to add new lighting into the show, and I don't particularly know how to reorganize our cues in the lightboard to run the new version of the show without jumping around.

Would it be too much to suggest they hire a lighting designer to handle these issues? Would it be too extreme if I refuse to keep running the show if they do not hire a lighting designer to streamline the cues?

I've just never really had to deal with a production revamp this late into the run. If only our director was not IN the show, I could escape his constant changes!!

-Jeremiah