In 2023, a friend took me to a night of off-Broadway theater in downtown Manhattan. A small audience gathered in a black box performance space to watch a series of tenderly performed short plays — about high school gun violence, empty nesting, heartbreak. It was much like any other night of Manhattan theater — except the tickets were sliding scale and all the playwrights and some of the actors were members of 32BJ, a large Service Employees International Union (SEIU) union local for building-maintenance workers like janitors and window cleaners.
The organization that transformed these workers into playwrights was Working Theater, a theater company that partners with labor unions and looks to recreate working-class theater for the twenty-first century. The playwrights were students in a playwriting course called THEATERWORKS! As part of their final project, professional actors performed their plays in front of a live audience at an off-Broadway venue. 32BJ was financially supporting the program through its worker training fund, and the workers discovered the course through their union.
In its work with unions and its commitment to creating working-class theater for all, Working Theater has no rivals. In New York City, Broadway theaters can now charge more for a single ticket than most working Americans make in a week. Theatrical training is also far from affordable for working-class people. As a result, performing artists overwhelmingly come from a narrow swathe of the upper and upper-middle classes. Working Theater looks to change that by bringing working-class people into the performing arts.
Working Theater was founded in 1985 in New York City by a company of actors as a working-class theater company to tell working-class stories. Under the leadership of their first artistic directors, Bill Mitchellson and later Mark Plesent, they evolved into a company that presented theater available to all. Where first they were a theater company that told stories about…
Auteur: Annie Levin
