Working Backstage: A Cultural History and Ethnography of Technical Theater Labor by Christin Essin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Working Backstage: A Cultural History and Ethnography of Technical Theater Labor by Christin Essin David B. Vogel He/Him Working Backstage: A Cultural History and Ethnography of Technical Theater Labor. Christin Essin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021; pp. 273. In Working Backstage, Christin Essin writes passionately about the value and honor of the work done behind the scenes in theatrical productions. Coming from a background as a lighting technician in her college years, she brings first-hand experience to her research. She writes about the lives and careers of backstage workers who are at best ignored as superfluous and at worst maligned as underworked and overpaid union members. Working Backstage blends personal narratives from interviews with careful historical research to reveal the union stagehands, dressers, technicians, and childminders "whose labor fuels the city's live performance industry" (7), but who revel in their anonymity and invisibility to audiences. The book offers praise and encouragement to these skilled, dedicated, and hard-working technicians, while granting a deeper understanding of their work experiences. Essin structures the book so the reader can peruse what is most pertinent to their study, but I recommend reading straight through for the best experience. Part I describes the culture of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and its variety of local unions across the US and Canada, then delivers interviews of New York City stagehands from within those locals. The author's strength lies in her insistence on going right to the source by directly interviewing workers, learning their unique stories, and weaving their narratives together into a clear picture of what backstage work is truly like. Essin demonstrates, through stories both personal and public, the value backstage workers add to the theatrical experience in the shifting of scenery or lighting, the management of heavily used costumes, or the care of children in a professional world—all this despite (and perhaps because of) remaining unseen by the audience. Part II takes a deep dive into histories of the stagehand unions, as seen from within and without. IATSE being as central to the working life of the New York City stagehand as it is, an uncensored history of the union can offer significant lessons from its past—if it is known. Essin takes on the question of what is included or omitted in the writing of a commemorative history as she considers an essay researched and published by IATSE's Local One (New York City) for their own centennial gala in 1986. Originally founded in 1886 as New York's Theatrical Protective Union, decades of struggle and internal conflicts transpired before it became the integrated and equity-minded organization it is in the twenty-first century. Essin documents how many of the more difficult parts of the union's history—racial and gender segregation, connections to crime syndicates—are left out of the anniversary history, which focuses instead on celebrating its successes and values. Essin takes the opportunity here to explore and share some of this missing material, including the fight to include African Americans as full and integrated members, as well as the decision to finally welcome women in the late twentieth century. Despite these struggles, Essin doggedly endorses the union's tireless work over more than a century to ensure a better quality of life—fair pay, reasonable hours, appropriate job security—for all its members. As she considers the union's role in the backstage worker's life and career, Essin addresses head-on the notion of union as "family," seen by some as nepotistic. She writes, "For outsiders, the union's traditional father-to-son professional inheritance denotes a history of systematic exclusion, especially for women or people of color" (90). But she goes on to describe how to many union members, "it is a history that bespeaks their devotion to family—those with whom they live … as well as those with whom they work" (91). An entire chapter in Part II is devoted to union stagehands and the media, considering their decades-long difficulty in getting anything but negative press. Essin writes, "Because unions only become 'newsworthy' when a strike looms or contract negotiations become ugly, the...