Illustration by Stephanie Rudig
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Master electrician B.H. spent three seasons as the part-time lighting supervisor at Dupont Circle’s Keegan Theatre. He made a modest salary, but he loved the job.
That is, until June 2024, when B.H., who asked to be identified by his initials out of concern for future employment, was informed via email that his position was being eliminated for the 2024–25 season in an effort to save time and money. Instead, he was offered work on a contract basis to create a single repertory plot for the entire season, with subsequent lighting design work on a show-by-show basis.
The theater offered B.H. $2,500 to design the primary lighting plot, where most of the lighting fixtures stay in the same place throughout the season—regardless of the show—limiting design options; he was offered an additional $500 per show, for five shows, which amounted to a $13,000 pay cut from the previous season. But when B.H. asked for an explanation, his questions went largely unanswered.
Instead Keegan rescinded the offer: “As a result of Keegan’s ongoing financial realities and in an effort to save time and money, the organization made a decision to create a new list of responsibilities for the Resident Electrics Supervisor position for the upcoming fiscal year and season that fits our needs and budget,” Keegan’s managing director Alexis Hartwick wrote to B.H. on June 23, 2024. “As the person in the current position, we wanted to afford you the right of first refusal for the newly outlined role. Your response makes it clear that you will not accept this position.” B.H.’s final day at the theater was July 31.
As B.H. was departing Keegan, Venus Gulbranson was coming in as the lighting designer for the theater’s 28th season opener, The Woman in Black. The Brooklyn-based designer has been creating lighting design for local stages—including the Kennedy Center, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, and Arena Stage—since 2019. Though the pay was lower than her going rate, Gulbranson was excited to design the lights for a show that she says, “has been on my bucket list for a while.”
But days before the play opened in October, Gulbranson tells City Paper, she felt she had to remove herself from the production, without pay, due to lack of communication and what she felt was disrespectful treatment to the behind-the-scenes artists like her. (According to Gulbranson, Keegan pays their designers after the show opens, “any work done prior to that was lost time,” she says.)
“The lack of professionalism and respect to other artists’ time and commitment to the project was beyond my capacity to accommodate,” Gulbranson says. “I do not assume that there was any sense of malice in the process, but the negligence was undeniable.”
The most visible workers involved in any theater production are the actors, directors, and playwrights. But perhaps less obvious, though no less essential, are the back-of-house production crew—the lighting, costumes, and AV supervisors. That behind-the-scenes work is a crucial part of the equation to producing a good show and a first-rate theater company.
But for many of the smaller local theaters, revenues are shrinking (or not keeping up with growing expenses). And, in many cases, the unseen workers are the first to disappear.
Keegan is not alone in its financial struggles. Other stages in D.C. and across the country are struggling to rebound post-pandemic. They’ve laid off staff, streamlined positions, and cut salaries; some have even paused programming and scaled back entire seasons. Others have closed for good.
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A lighting supervisor is tasked with all manner of responsibilities. They must implement a lighting designer’s plans, troubleshoot any problems, assess how the theater’s existing equipment works with the designer’s vision, and make sure that nothing breaks or blows up. The supervisor and designer typically work together during tech rehearsals, after which the supervisor is on call for the length of the production to address any issues that pop up.
In the rare moments of downtime between shows, these supervisors are also in charge of equipment maintenance, organization, and repairs.
Another back-of-house theater maker who asked not to be named describes the work as that of an engineer. They must understand the designers’ vision for the show’s look and feel and implement it. “We have to live in both worlds,” they say. “We have to hear the vision, and then we have to technically figure out how to pull that off.”
According to Keegan’s tax forms, the theater’s 2022–23 revenue was just over $1 million, but its expenses were $1.5 million—a loss of more than $440,000. In fiscal year 2023–24, the theater pulled out of the red with a net income of $72,196; the artistic director’s listed salary was $75,000 per year.
“Theatres everywhere are extolling the need for innovation and radical redefinitions of sustainability at the same time they’re devaluing the workers with the agility and creativity to design those solutions,” local dramaturg Lauren Halvorsen wrote in her newsletter, Nothing for the Group’s 2024: The Year in Review, in response to Seattle Rep laying off 12 percent of its employees, including the entirety of the artistic staff, in June 2024.
Hartwick, Keegan’s managing director, declined via email to comment on individual personnel matters but says the theater met all of its contractual obligations.
She says in response to City Paper’s questions that the theater is still recovering from the pandemic shutdown and their focus is on long-term sustainability, “which involves making many difficult decisions, and on working with artists who value collaboration and mutual respect above all else—even when artistic visions for a production change, or operational changes are made for the overall financial health of the organization.”
Hartwick says Keegan decided to move to a repertory lighting plot to lower expenses, but also “to better facilitate tighter turnaround times between productions, with the expectation that the new approach would be evaluated and adjusted throughout the season.
“We celebrate every artist’s right to seek out institutions whose financial realities and artistic values align with their own,” Hartwick says via email. “And we are deeply grateful to all those who have been a part of Keegan’s artistic journey for the past 29 years.”
Five months after B.H. and Keegan parted ways, workers at another local theater faced layoffs.
On Nov. 13, several days after the opening of a new production, the staff at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company attended their regularly scheduled meeting where they learned that some team members would be laid off. Four people, all from the production department, ended up losing their jobs.
In the months prior to November’s layoffs, Woolly leadership made it clear to staff that the company was struggling financially. Woolly’s 2023–24 tax records show that the theater brought in nearly $5 million that fiscal year, but spent more than $6 million. The 2022–23 fiscal year ended about the same for the popular local theater, with more than $1.6 million in losses. The company’s artistic director Maria Manuela Goyanes, who departs Woolly in September after seven years for a role for New York’s Lincoln Center Theater, was paid an annual salary of $164,650.
Three now-former staffers say they asked management for a forewarning if layoffs were coming. City Paper spoke with several former employees from Woolly who asked not to be named out of concern for retaliation. They say higher-ups promised that if layoffs were being considered, staff would get some kind of warning.
“There were a lot of conversations about [how] ticket sales weren’t good, therefore we were in financial straits,” says Andrew Cutler, Woolly’s former costume supervisor. “But there wasn’t any lead time. … Reflecting on it now, which I still probably think about once a week, I feel like I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t.”
Woolly Mammoth’s Managing Director Kimberly Douglas declined to comment on personnel matters and provided an email statement in response to City Paper’s questions.
“We deeply value the dedication and artistry of our staff, artists, crew, and creatives who make our work possible,” Douglas’ statement says. “Like many theaters across the country, over the last five years, we’ve had to navigate unprecedented financial challenges and have had to make difficult operational decisions to ensure Woolly’s long-term sustainability. … We’re encouraged by a strong start to our 2025–2026 season and grateful for the continued passion and support of our staff, artists, and community. Our focus remains on supporting our artists and staff, engaging audiences with bold, boundary-pushing work, and fostering an inclusive and innovative space for storytelling.”
Cutler spent the past eight years working in Woolly’s costume department. During the pandemic, when the theater was producing film performances, Cutler acted as the assistant stage manager and did other odd jobs there until the stage reopened in late 2021. Woolly’s first post-shutdown play was the pre-Broadway run of Michael R. Jackson’s 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning musical A Strange Loop. Cutler says he was the only person in the costume shop for the show.
The cast of A Strange Loop at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company.
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Less than a year later, he says Woolly created a full-time costume supervisor position—a role responsible for producing costumes, working with designers, sourcing the needed materials, and doing alterations. The job also entailed collaborating with the performers and balancing budgets with designers’ expectations. “I got that position, and I basically have been doing everything in that costume shop for that whole time since then—until November,” Cutler says.
For Woolly’s laid-off production staff, the timing felt intentional. Less than a week after the Second City’s Dance Like There’s Black People Watching opened, “we were given the slip,” Cutler says.
“They kept citing that there wasn’t the revenue coming in for ticket sales,” Cutler adds. “Because the programming wasn’t bringing in the people for the audiences … cuts were being made. And instead of cutting the people that do the programming, they cut some of the lowest paid people at the organization.”
At the time Cutler was laid off, he was making $57,000 per year. The other former staffers City Paper spoke to were making between $43,000 and $53,000 annually. The same month that Woolly’s layoffs hit, Halvorsen’s newsletter ran its recurring feature “That’s Not A Living Wage,” which compares theater job listings to the living wage for a single adult in the city where the job is located. At that point, the living wage in D.C. was $60,090.
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Whether a theater has a full-time production staff typically depends on the size of the company. The area’s biggest stages—Shakespeare Theatre Company, Studio Theatre, Arena Stage, Signature Theatre, Olney Theatre Company, and Round House Theatre—have full production departments. (Shakespeare brought in $28.7 million in revenue in 2023–24 and paid Artistic Director Simon Godwin a $354,240 salary; Studio took in $6.82 million, and Arena saw nearly $64 million in revenue, according to their respective tax forms.)
“It’s not just a supervisor,” says B.H. “It is a supervisor. It’s electricians. It is an associate. Very often it’s apprentices or interns.”
Smaller theaters, such as Synetic, or companies that produce shorter seasons, such as Folger, typically don’t retain a full production crew on staff. Instead, they bring in contractors on a show-by-show basis. According to B.H., Keegan was rare in offering part-time staff positions for production.
“I was very grateful for it,” he says. “But Keegan was definitely an anomaly.” Today, Keegan’s website lists only one production staffer: Josh Sticklin, the company’s associate producer and technical director.
Woolly Mammoth, according to staff, is among the smaller theaters to have a full production department, which, according to its website, currently includes three people plus a fellow, whose position is funded by the Miranda Family Fund.
“The theaters that I’ve seen be the most successful and [have the] happiest lives—there’s always a fully staffed production department that is prioritized as the people that are physically making the art on stage,” says Cutler, who’s worked in the industry for more than 20 years. “But I’ve also seen several theaters develop this class structure between creatives and the workers and not actually prioritizing the labor that goes into creating the art.”
Former staffers from Woolly say they felt devalued. That same feeling plagued B.H. during last summer’s negotiations with Keegan. As the part-time lighting supervisor, B.H. was paid $18,000 for the 2023–24 season. The total rate for the new “streamlined” position, which shifted the job from part-time to contract and replaced custom light work with a repertory plot, was $5,000 for the 2024–25 season.
“That’s at best misguided and, at worst, really insulting,” B.H. says. “When you break it down, that’s about a day and a half of labor at the rate that you should be paying a master electrician.”
But it wasn’t just about money; it was about the art of lighting a production. According to the several lighting designers and production crew members to speak with City Paper, repertory plots—the ones that keep lighting fixtures in the same place throughout the season—limit a designer’s ability to make artistic choices while also making it difficult to accurately light performances as each production typically requires custom lighting design. The upside for theaters on a budget is that rep plots, because they call for less work, are cheaper.
The first sign of money troubles and tensions with Keegan management arose for B.H. in June 2023, a year before his position was eliminated. B.H. received an email from Hartwick, the theater’s managing director, informing him that Keegan’s board of directors had approved a 10 percent cost-of-living raise for theater staff. “This means your salary will increase from $25,000 to $27,500 beginning August 1, 2023,” Hartwick wrote.
B.H. was thrilled and confused: The previous year he was paid $12,000, not $25,000. When he raised the discrepancy with Hartwick, she was shocked and apologetic; she promised to work with the theater’s accountant to get B.H. a taxed bonus of $12,500 by the month’s end.
B.H. says he was told that the raise to $27,500 was in the board-approved budget. But two weeks later, he says Hartwick told him she’d made an error—the $27,500 salary was for a combination of two jobs, master electrician and production manager, and that the raise had not been approved.
The theater’s artistic director, Susan Marie Rhea, emailed B.H. acknowledging responsibility for the misunderstanding. “My enthusiasm when I cosigned [the figures from the finance committee] was honest and remains true[.] I value you so much and I was delighted that we were able to give you a raise consistent with everyone else. I did not know that the base number was inaccurate. I’m responsible for my own lack of knowledge.”
B.H. says he entered into “some fairly rough negotiations” with Keegan that ended with Rhea telling him she’d understand if he needed to move on. Eventually they reached an agreement: B.H. received a 50 percent raise to $18,000, which he says was “still underpaying” for the job he was doing, in addition to a holiday bonus of $4,410. (Rhea acknowledges in her email that Keegan’s long-term goal is to raise artist fees, “but in the short term, I am aware that we are not competitive rate-wise in many areas, and I promise you that we are working on this, always.”) The 2023–24 season went on as planned.
A year later, those tensions bubbled back to the surface. By July of 2024, B.H. received an offboarding letter from Hartwick saying, to his surprise, that he declined the new position and laying out the “mutually agreed upon” responsibilities for his final days at Keegan. But B.H. says he never agreed to any terms and did not decline the new position.
He asked Hartwick to update the termination letter to reflect the circumstances of his departure—namely that Keegan rescinded the offer, he says—as proof of job loss he believed was needed to secure affordable housing through D.C.’s inclusionary zoning program. Keegan refused.
On his final day at Keegan, July 31, 2024, B.H. says he sent an all staff email saying he did not quit. His email account was deactivated shortly after he hit send.
“Yes, I am frustrated for my own stuff,” he says of why he sent the email, but he also stresses that he hoped to prevent something similar happening to other staff.
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Gulbranson spent July and August of 2024 meeting with the creative team to design a “beautifully textured two-story set,” and lighting for The Woman in Black, Keegan’s 2025–26 season opener and the theater’s first with a rep plot. But in late August, 10 days after the official set design was presented, Gulbranson says the show’s director and the theater’s artistic director decided to scrap the scenery without input from the production team. The scenic director resigned; Gulbranson stayed, but not for long.
Robert Leembruggen and Noah Mutterperl in The Woman in Black.
” data-medium-file=”https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/10/WIB-Press-3.jpg?fit=300%2C200&quality=89&ssl=1″ data-large-file=”https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/10/WIB-Press-3.jpg?fit=780%2C519&quality=89&ssl=1″ src=”https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/10/WIB-Press-3.jpg?resize=780%2C519&quality=89&ssl=1″ alt=”The Woman in Black” class=”wp-image-752083″ srcset=”https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/10/WIB-Press-3.jpg?w=1024&quality=89&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/10/WIB-Press-3.jpg?resize=300%2C200&quality=89&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/10/WIB-Press-3.jpg?resize=768%2C511&quality=89&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/10/WIB-Press-3.jpg?resize=400%2C266&quality=89&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/10/WIB-Press-3.jpg?w=370&quality=89&ssl=1 370w” sizes=”(max-width: 780px) 100vw, 780px” />
Credit: Cameron Whitman
As opening night grew closer, she still hadn’t received the new drawings needed to design the lighting for the updated set; she received no response from the theater’s leadership after she expressed concern over the time crunch, so she, too, resigned, forgoing payment.
Gulbranson first worked for Keegan in 2021 and, like B.H., loved it. “It wasn’t your standard theatre experience, but you could tell that the staff (from my experience) was very supportive and accommodating to the best of their abilities,” she says via email. But the chaos and lack of communication in The Woman in Black debacle felt disrespectful to all the artists involved, she says.
The theater’s decision to “cut corners and jeopardize the lighting department by eliminating the head lighting supervisor position and resorting to a rep plot,” Gulbranson says, is “indicative of the path Keegan was headed down.”
In her opinion, that path leads to the deterioration of production quality. “They took away artistic liberties from lighting designers and limited them to working with an insufficient pre-existing plot that’s supposed to work with an ever-evolving scenery. The same way you need a carpenter to build a set, you need electricians to install lighting.”
Woolly’s former production staffers talk in similar terms about the importance of production and creative teams.
“What it means to not have a costume supervisor at Woolly anymore is that from show to show, unless they hire somebody like on a contractor position, there’s not going to be anybody managing the upkeep or the tools, the organization for that,” Cutler says. “You lose the detail of quality. You lose the dazzle, the spectacle of the theater.”