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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Working Backstage: A Cultural History and Ethnography of Technical Theatre Labor by Christin Essin David Bisaha Working Backstage: A Cultural History and Ethnography of Technical Theatre Labor. By Christin Essin. University of Michigan Press, 2021. Hardcover $80.00, Paper $34.95, eBook $34.95. 286 pages. 13 illustrations. Christin Essin's Working Backstage is a major contribution to US theatre labor studies. Since 2013, Essin has been interviewing backstage theatre workers and observing their work in situ; here, she combines that ethnographic work with cultural history, textual analysis, and archival research, all to "make visible the social, political, and economic practices of this professional community" (9). The main subject is the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and three of its New York City locals, chiefly the main stagehands union, IATSE Local One. She maps interviewees' careers and general union history, and she prioritizes the histories of those workforce members who have been hidden or excluded historically – women, people of color, and those who do not come from backstage worker families (Essin uses the casual union term "orphans"). Similarly, Essin discusses newly unionized groups, most notably child guardians but also wardrobe workers, alongside more familiar stagehand roles. The book does not culminate in a single critical argument, but rather documents and amplifies these workers' "continued struggles for industry recognition" (17), and models multiple ways that theatre historians might engage with backstage labor more seriously. By far, Essin's work is the most temporally and methodologically wideranging in US theatre labor studies. Part 1, "Backstage Narratives," introduces the project and lays out its main characters. The introduction is compact, informative, and engagingly written. Essin lays out a good case for the need for backstage ethnography—which does not yet exist in theatre studies—and draws inspiration from earlier theatre labor studies, particularly works by Timothy White, Tracy Davis, and Natasha Korda. To their primarily historical and archival approaches, Essin adds ethnography and oral history, derived from eleven in-theatre observations and over one hundred interviews. Essin's interviewees explain the careers of Local One "legacy" workers, the challenges of starting a career as an "orphan," the career paths of women and Black men in Local One, and the work of child guardians, hair and makeup artists, and dressers. In each section, Essin balances union history with her subjects' personal experiences. It is important to know, for instance, that dressers, guardians, and hair and makeup artists are affiliated with IATSE but organized under two separate IATSE Locals, not Local One; at the same time, Essin's vivid observations and lively writing voice make the workers and their labor shine through the historical context. In Part 2, "Backstage Histories," two chapters narrate Local One's history. In chapter 2, Essin discusses a history compiled by union historian Jene Youtt to value the work of the "laborer historian, [who] writes with limited resources during hours outside the daily work responsibilities of their professional trade," but also to note that the official, commemorative purpose for which Youtt began his work [End Page 107] ultimately led to flattened history (69). Then, Essin considers Local One's 1986 centennial celebration dinner, captured on video for a never-released documentary. In Essin's words, the tapes belie a union "jovial," with a "desire for privacy" and "intense pride in their work skills," possessing "astute political savvy and dignified practicality" (96). More than this, though, the scrutiny placed on relatively few sources illustrates the paucity of backstage labor documentation. Essin makes much of scant material, but this chapter is less engaging than the ethnographies. Similarly, in chapter 3, Essin offers a mostly periodical-driven history of media bias against Local One in New York City press. Acknowledgment of the negative images of theatre unions as "overpaid, underworked, and ineffectual" is necessary, even if the overall conclusion feels familiar (101). It is unfortunate that the scope and archival basis is so narrow—limited, mostly, to the New York Public Library's press clippings file—and that the bright style of Essin's earlier writing dims somewhat. The third, and most widely applicable chapter in Part 2 (chapter 4) combines the book's signature concept, "backstage choreographies...