while you were partying's creative team on putting people before things
How a small team built a hit show that drastically cut the materials budget to pay a living wage.
When New York City theater shut down in the spring of 2020, Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey’s while you were partying was among the dozens of shows canceled or postponed. Faced with an unknown stretch of unemployment ahead of them, Peter and Julia, collaborated with their producers Aaron Profumo and Ann Marie Dorr to make a radical budgeting decision; if while you were partying ever returns, cut the materials budget to the bone and pay everyone involved as much as possible. Despite bucking the trend of ever more elaborate Off-Broadway productions, while you were partying opened to sold out houses and near universal critical acclaim in the fall of 2021. What follows is an interview with Peter, Julia, Aaron, and Ann Marie, along with scenic designer Kimie Nishikawa and technical director Steven Brennan.
This interview has been edited for clarity in collaboration with the subjects (who are dear friends). I designed the lighting for while you were partying, I am not a journalist and this is not journalism. I am an artist engaged in a collective writing process with the theater workers already building the future of our field.
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Kate McGee: Ann Marie and Aaron, I'm curious how you interfaced with Soho Rep to create the producing arrangement for while you were partying …
Aaron Profumo: I believe that we were technically touring from Brooklyn to Manhattan.
PMW: I think that that's a joke that I made.
Ann Marie Dorr: It was a presenting agreement.
PMW: But it wasn't a typical presenting agreement because it was still a Soho Rep production. It was just that they paid the production budget directly to our LLC, and we had control from there.
Kate McGee: So Aaron and Ann Marie, how do you remember the conversation shaping up in terms of artist fees?
Aaron Profumo: Pre Pandemic Ann Marie was going to be the production manager and I was gonna be producing. But then, COVID happened and we realized that Ann Marie wasn't gonna be able to stay on as the production manager, and I just remember us being like, “when everything comes back what if we pay everybody way more money than they usually make and we keep it small and fast and furious.”
Kate McGee: So what did you end up paying everyone?
Aaron Profumo: 10k for the central design and organizational group. And then 5k for supporting positions.
Kate McGee: Stephen and Kimie, I'm curious how that compares to what one normally makes Off-Broadway.
Kimie Nishikawa: What one normally makes on off Broadway is abysmal. Especially considering how much time commitment we are asked for. Usually I get the script, there's a director and there’s, I would say, 2, 3 months of conceptualization. But then usually there's a whole other month of back and forth because no one can afford anything anymore. So the ideal design gets slimed down or edited or even rethought, that’s more time. And then rehearsals, tech, shop visits add up to like 6 months of pretty constant work. LCT 3 paid 3,100 in 2020 and we had 10 days of tech, right, Peter?
PMW: Oh my god, yeah. $3,100 and I had to kick in money to my assistant.
Kate McGee: Atlantic main stage paid $4,800 last fall.
Kimie Nishikawa: They went up to $5,300 this year.
Ann Marie Dorr: When you have a $5,300 fee, what's the materials budget you're talking about?
Kimie Nishikawa: For Atlantic the discrepancy wasn't that bad. The materials budget was like 40k to 50k, and then my fee was $5,000 ish. I always think 10% of the budget is kind of fair. I can internalize that. But when I was at Roundabout, which they actually do pay $8,000, the set in the end became like the 120, 130k.
Aaron Profumo: Our total materials budget for all the departments was $31,335 inclusive of rentals.
PMW: L O L
Steven Brenman: I think we spent more on the seating risers than the set proper.
Kimie Nishikawa: What I loved about while you were partying was that of course we talked about the design. We went to the space together and we said, what if it's really shiny? We know there wants to be no set, but still what does that mean? That still has to be considered. And I really appreciated that everything was very in scope. We knew that whatever we are going to make will still be special. I didn't feel like we were stretching.
Kate McGee: I felt that because we were paid so well, we had the time build trust with each other, so it was easy for me to make decisions independently as a designer. For example, I specced a bunch of dimmable fluorescent lights for the piece not realizing that the manufacture had changed the way they build the lights. And then during load in, Desi our head electrician was like, "hey, these can't dim, unless you want to spend another 5 grand” and it was very easy to say “they don’t need need to dim, we'll figure it out.”
PMW: I’m very focused on the show itself needing to have a great deal of integrity. We should be able to do it in a shoebox. I think maybe Kate and I had one argument, Kimmie, I don't think we had a single argument. Oh, the only push back with Kimie was one time. We liked the shitty table better.
*laughter*
Kate McGee: But then we ended up having to buy multiples of the shitty table we found in the theater because Brian would break it.
Julia Mounsey: But they sounded better when they got pounded on.
Peter Mills Weiss: Something I really do believe is that, if you're hiring a designer to work on something you're hiring someone to think about the show and do their thing. And if you want to micro manage someone's mind, okay I guess. That's not what I want to do.
Julia Mounsey: I just had a good conversation with with Brian Fiddyment about the show and and he mentioned that it's really nice to know that everyone who has a major position on the show is getting paid the same. It just eliminates a certain amount of tension around money, which can really have a more powerful psychological effect on a working environment than maybe you would even think.
Kate McGee: Peter and Julia, can you talk a little bit more about how you work?
Julia Mounsey: It can be quite nebulous in rehearsal because the show is being built on its feet and the script is evolving at the same time as the design and everything else.
PMW: Also the performers often write a great deal of the script. So there's like a whole thing about long-standing trust and vibe with the person that we're working with. Julia and I don't really build shows that require a great deal of stuff. Maybe one day we will. I doubt it.
Julia Mounsey: We like to have things very Sparse and focused and not a lot of tinsel. But I think it's fair to say that approach evolved alongside a certain necessity and economic need to pare things down because we just didn't have any money.
PMW: For people who don't inhabit the non-profit Theater system, the only way for institutions to take notice of your work is to do your own productions. So your productions have to seem good when you have nothing, because unlike a playwright who sends out their play to a million different places and then someone's like, “you're the one today, let’s build a giant glass cube” we had many, many shows under our belts before we made while you were partying. Our aesthetic, was a bit of a reaction to what was going on when I was coming up. I did feel like even in the experimental space there was a lot of excess, a lot of tech, a lot of video, a lot of things that felt like distractions to me. Things that didn't seem functional, that felt illustrative.
Julia Mounsey: And sometimes it just felt a little bit incongruous with the spirit of a piece or what an artist was trying to say. You know, like, like there, could just be so much waste and, you order everything from Amazon and and then throw it away.
Aaron Profumo: We did order everything from Amazon.
Julia Mounsey: True.
PMW: Jeff controls everyone.
Aaron Profumo: Everything that we ordered we were like, “can we use it later? Can Life World use it? Does soho rep want this? and we would ask Merropi [Soho Rep’s Co-Director at the time] which of these 2 things would be more helpful for the theater? which one would you use afterwards?”
PMW: I don’t think I know what happened to the TVs.
Aaron Profumo: We gave them to the crew.
PMW: Oh really?
Aaron Profumo: Yeah, we were gonna sell them and then we were like, “wait, do you guys want these TVs?” and a bunch of people said absolutely and we were like “okay they're gonna be in the lobby for 2 days, and then we're gonna sell them.” and then they were gone.
PMW: We still use all the fluorescents pretty often, except for the ones that are broken.
Ann Marie Dorr: We didn't have to check a box of like spending $30,000 on a set for a grant report. That is some of the freedom that's offered by Soho Rep being like, “Here’s the budget, spend it the way that you need to spend it.”
Aaron Profumo: When we came back with this reasonable on its face but demented plan, Cynthia immediately was like, “That's insane, but we’d love to support you, do you want to sidebar with me and I can send you any information I have around what our unemployment insurance rate is right now, what previous shows have paid for liability insurance, and what taxes we pay on payroll” and they were very transparent and that allowed us to feel comfortable moving forward in this experiment.
Kate McGee: What I love about what you're saying, Aaron and Ann Marie, is that it speaks to the ways institutions can empower artists to build the financial structures that allow us to make the work we want. I also feel like the money allowed people to feel flexible in their roles and not feel exploited. I know Aaron did so much work with Brian. He not only fight choreographed Brian’s temper tantrum to make sure that Brian didn't hurt himself, but also did vocal training with Brian to make sure he didn’t damage his voice.
Aaron Profumo: I think everybody on this production wore a lot of hats. And I think that was what was really wonderful about it. You did Kate, Ann Marie did as well. I know Ann Marie was like, therapist, we would just call her up screaming.
PMW: But I also think that the amount of money allowed people to learn new skills, which is often not allowed on these kinds of productions. Brian for one, working with Aaron, he had never done anything like that.
Kimie Nishikawa: That's interesting that you say people wore a lot of hats because I actually felt the opposite. I felt very much, oh I'm here to do my job in a very focused way. I was grateful for that. I felt my job is to have an opinion and to help facilitate that, and I felt very supported. Some other productions I feel very much exploited like, wow, I guess I'm the production manager, or I’m the technical director. Oh, now I'm the scenic charge.
Aaron Profumo: Maybe you've isolated something more important, which is that the financial support allowed people to define their roles for themselves.
Kimie Nishikawa: At some point when you know you're getting paid enough, you don't care about the money anymore. You think about money all the time when you're only getting $3,000 and it's like oh my god how much time am I spending on this and at some point, it’s like the 8 to 10k range for me, I'm like okay, I’m just gonna do this and not have to think about the money.
Kate McGee: One of my favorite meetings I've ever had was the day we painted swatches of 3 gloss black treatments on the theater wall and just like let them dry.
Julia Mounsey: That was a great day.
Kimie Nishikawa: It had to be the shiniest one.
Julia Mounsey: Yeah, that did feel kind of emblematic of our style.
Aaron Profumo: Literally watching paint dry.
Kate McGee: Steven, I'm curious to know how you decide to take a show or not and what information upfront could like help make that decision easier for you.
Steven Brenman: I mean honestly I look at my calendar and see if it fits or almost fits. And then probably say yes. There really isn’t a lot of rhyme or reason to it in terms of the amount of work and the amount of pay. I am noticing a recent trend in the last year of companies wanting to pay me hourly as a TD rather than a flat fee. Sometimes with a floor, sometimes not with a floor. I think that is being done in the name of pay equity, so people don't get screwed when things go off the rails, but I find it the exact opposite of what my job is.
Aaron Profumo: Yeah, then it encourages you to be less efficient to get the paycheck that you want as supposed to do your job well.
Steven Brenman: Right? Right, if load in goes perfectly and there's no notes then I get paid less and that makes no sense.
Kate McGee: If you have the chance to do while you were partying over again, what would you change?
PMW: I would have asked for more money, so we could pay people even more.
Julia Mounsey: I do feel a modicum of embarrassment that it took a pandemic for us to realize how important this was. You know, we're not heroes. We didn't start really thinking about this critically until after the pandemic.
Kate McGee: What would you say to someone who reads this article and says, “but we love our gigantic sets”?
PMW: Get fucked.
Julia. You scandalized Steven. Steven clutched their Pearls.
PMW: What I mean is I want shows to be big. You can do something that is maximal, but isn't wasteful or annoying.
Kimie Nishikawa: I don't think any design should be done for the sake of upholding some aesthetic Culture. It's always the piece comes first, the piece and the people in it. But it does annoy me when I suddenly see, this play is about a drunk, so let's put a thousand empty whiskey bottles on the wall. You know, that shit really makes me mad. It's just so bad and lazy.
PMW: Spectacles are always achievable. If you just stay quiet for a long time and then you yell real loud, that's kind of spectacular. That show that was at The Brick about the movie Titanic, Never Let Go, that's a maximal show. I'm sure Michael Kinnan made that for 64 cents. It is so full of thing, but it is obviously very cheap.
Julia Mounsey: Cutting your materials, does not mean that you have to make a minimal show that looks like our shows. There are ways to have a maximal and spectacular set where you can still prioritize paying people over your materials budget.
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Kimie (Kimi-ye) Nishikawa is a Japanese scenic designer based in NYC. Since October 2020, Kimie now works as a design collective called dots with Andrew Moerdyk and Santiago Orjuela-Laverde ; Selected Credits as dots; Broadway: The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window(James Earl Jones Theater), Off-Broadway and Regional: Madame Butterfly(Cincinnati Opera), Dark Disabled Stories (The Public Theater), Infinite Life (Atlantic Theater and The National Theatre (UK)), Public Obscenities (Soho Rep, NAATCO, Drama Desk nomination), Kate Berlant is KATE (Connelly Theater), You Will Get Sick (Roundabout Theater, Lucille Lortel nomination).
Upcoming credits; Broadway: Appropriate (Second Stage Theater) Enemy of the People (Circle in the Square)
Off-Broadway: (pray) (Ars Nova), Three Houses (Signature Theater)
five suggestions to fix the American Non Profit theater
Disclaimer: this is the point of view from a designer.
-Create space for experimentation. How else will the American theater survive without a space to fail boldly.
-Less can be more. Reallocate materials budget to fees. A higher fee will enable designers to be more present, hands on and focused.
- Designers and directors also need to make an effort to follow budgets and deadlines. Designers need to collaborate with the production staff and pursue, creative, in-scope productions. Reply to emails (this goes both ways, production staff and designers)
- We need more flexible schedules for techs and previews. Each show is different and has different needs. Discuss with the creative team what their needs are.
- Share resources with other theaters. Spend money on labor for reusing and storing materials instead of building brand new sets.
Ann Marie Dorr is a theater maker who often works on big-little shows with adventurous and ambitious ideas in downtown and Brooklyn spaces. Most recent projects include DARK DISABLED STORIES by Ryan J. Haddad, dir. Jordan Fein (The Bushwick Starr) and while you were partying by Julia Mounsey and Peter Mills Weiss (Soho Rep). Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab 17/19 with Paul Ketchum on an ever evolving piece, Good and Noble Beings. Associated Artist of Target Margin Theater. Currently they are in the Brooklyn College MFA Playwriting program.
One thing I care about and want to see change is including the crew in the community of a show! Make sure the overhire carp, lx, sound, video, stitcher, the studio assistant etc who were involved along the way have access to come see the show they worked on! make sure they meet the team and people know their names.
Aaron Profumo: producer (50/50 old school animation, while you were partying, Protec/Attac, The Working Group; see www.peterjulia.com), consultant (Bag of Worms w/Matt Romein, Girl Mode w/Kate McGee), acting/voice coach, lackluster day-trader, former semi-professional poker player, but mostly a Dad. MSW @Columbia (25'), MFA Yale.
Peter and Julia: We are Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey. We collaborate together. Our work wrestles with questions of cruelty, authenticity, deception, entertainment, and power. We value simple language, functional design, autobiography, and vulnerability. Our work has been presented at Under the Radar at the Public Theater, La MaMa, JACK, Soho Rep, the Deutches Schauspielhaus, and the Radikal Jung festival at the München Volkstheater. We were both members of the 2017-2019 Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, the 2017-2018 Devised Theater Working Group at the Public Theater, and were Baryshnikov Arts Center Resident Artists in 2019. Julia has worked with New York City Players, Soho Rep, The National Theater of Hungary, and was an Assistant Director on Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men. Peter has performed for or collaborated with artists such as 600 Highwaymen, The Wooster Group, Richard Foreman, and the Wallace Shawn-André Gregory Project.