Backstage burnout in Toronto theatre was always a thing — post-pandemic it’s gotten worse

It’s been a pretty good year for theatre in Toronto.

Live performance came galloping back into the city last spring, bringing with it a barrage of visually arresting sets, costumes, lighting and sound design. From the concert-inspired lasers of “Rock of Ages” to the parchment-coloured sets of “Uncle Vanya,” theatre in Toronto this past year has been nice to look at, perhaps even more so after two seasons away due to the pandemic.

But that eye-catching scenography has come with a price. Toronto-area stagehands, managers and designers are burning out.

Anecdotally, a significant number of workers left the field when theatres shuttered during the pandemic. How many? It’s hard to say; there’s not one single union or organization that oversees every aspect of backstage work.

But even without hard numbers, many of the designers, technicians and stage managers who are still around agree: there are more job contracts available in the Toronto theatre market than there are people to take them, which has piled on a pre-existing burnout problem.

Helen Androlia, now a successful strategy director at Momentum Worldwide, abandoned her burgeoning costume design career years before the pandemic to pursue advertising; “the fight was out of me to keep freelancing,” she said. “It was a constant grind of trying to find opportunities and then being incredibly underpaid for the amount of work that went into them. So I left.”

“It’s increasingly difficult to find skilled, great, unionized or even non-unionized labour,” said Remington North, a Toronto freelance technical director and production manager. “There’s a shortage of trained, skilled personnel. There are new people coming into the industry, with energy and care and interest. But there are things which used to take 16 working hours and now they take 24. The industry’s taken a hit.”

For some, backstage burnout seems inevitable: the obvious consequence of hard, meticulous work that, to most audiences, goes unnoticed and uncelebrated.

Now Toronto technicians, managers and designers are pulling back the curtain on the struggles — and resources — for stagehands feeling left in the dark.

A ‘recovering workaholic’

North, a graduate of Humber College’s theatre production program and former technical director at venues like Streetcar Crowsnest and the Theatre Centre, calls himself a “recovering workaholic.” Fostering a sense of work-life balance can be tough in any field, he said, but backstage work can be uniquely all-consuming.

“You care about the organizations you work for,” he said. “I didn’t always feel I was equipped to or able to set very healthy boundaries, and I’d overwork myself in those situations. I’m still learning how to set those boundaries now.”

North is surrounded by fellow technicians and designers who work unnervingly heavy production schedules: “50, 60, 70 hours a week, week after week, until they can’t do it anymore and they’re forced to take some time off.”

Some of the pressure to work so hard comes from long-established traditions in theatre, North said. Tech week rehearsals, for instance, or the final week of practice runs before a show opens to the public, often go late into the evening with minimal breaks.

“There was a point in my life where a light week of work was a 50-hour week,” said North. “I was physically drained and kind of sick all the time. I just couldn’t muster the energy.”

Morgan Myler, vice-president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 58, agrees that mental health concerns are pervasive in the backstage industry.

“It’s a gig economy,” he said. “You don’t know where your next meal is coming from … it’s high stress, coupled with low wages, coupled with chasing cheques.”

Myler and North are far from the first stagehands to call out unsustainable working practices in the backstage field.

In the U.S., the No More 10 Out of 12s movement gained traction in 2021, seeking to abolish the enervatingly long days at the end of rehearsal processes. The phrase “10 out of 12s” refers to an American actors’ union mandate that actors can work only 10 hours of a 12-hour rehearsal schedule; technicians are expected to work 12 out of 14 hours.

Some theatres in Toronto have taken steps to change their season calendars to relax technical schedules, according to North. Companies like Buddies in Bad Times and the Theatre Centre have produced fewer shows coming back from the pandemic, allowing for more room to breathe in the downtime.

“It’s bolstering to see folks taking these radical steps toward a more relaxed calendar,” North said.

But the onus for systemic change doesn’t just lie with the theatre companies. A significant portion of designers and technicians work on a freelance basis, meaning conditions can vary vastly from venue to venue.

“If everything’s going well, I can still keep my work week at 40 to 50 hours. But if I’m working on multiple shows, and one of them starts experiencing turbulence or difficulties, that gets unsustainable really quickly,” said North.

“Unless folks are actively trying to prevent themselves from burnout, it’s an inevitability.”

Burnout can be ‘very contagious’

Cary Cherniss, a professor of applied psychology at Rutgers University and an expert on job stress and burnout, said the latter “happens when stress doesn’t go away.”

One of the early signs, he said, is emotional exhaustion.

“People don’t come home feeling good, able to go out, maybe exercise. They come home and they’re exhausted. And it’s not just physical exhaustion, it’s mental and emotional exhaustion,” he said. “And if the stress persists, they begin to really dislike their work. Their job satisfaction drops. They begin to dislike the people they work with. And there it is: that’s the burnout.”

One case of burnout can have a ripple effect on the rest of a company, he added.

Also, it’s a myth that burnout and turnover go hand in hand: oftentimes, workers who have burned themselves out don’t leave their company, which means the exhaustion can spread to others.

“Burnout can be very contagious,” he said.

‘This isn’t a new problem’

Pip Bradford is a freelance production and stage manager in Toronto with credits at theatre and dance companies across the country.

Freelancing allows workers a certain degree of control — to pick where, how much and how often they work — but there are drawbacks as well, said Bradford.

“Money. It’s always money,” she said. “Freelance production work doesn’t pay particularly well. In order to keep the lights on, you have to take a lot of work or a lot of different projects. You don’t want to disappoint clients when you’ve spent years building that relationship.”

Bradford was one of few theatre artists who didn’t lose much work during the pandemic. If anything, her workload picked up thanks to skills that proved useful for producing digital work.

“There was never a moment when I wasn’t working,” she said. “By the second year, I was working too much.” Toward the end of the second year of the pandemic, she realized her standard of work wasn’t as high as it used to be and she was overworked.

“When you’re stretched too thin, things inevitably fall through the cracks,” she said. “But I was just tired all the time. Nothing felt fun anymore.”

None of this is new, though, according to Bradford. The pandemic just diverted attention elsewhere.

“Even two or three years before the pandemic, I was getting way more offers than I could possibly take and from people who were desperate … My inbox is full of people who need the help and you have to say no, but you also want to recommend someone else. But that someone else is also busy. They can’t take it either. There’s just more jobs than there are people.”

It’s a problem ingrained in the very fabric of the theatre industry, she said. There’s little infrastructure to support those oft-forgotten but crucial backstage workers.

“Companies don’t know how to develop relationships with freelance production staff the way they do with playwrights or actors,” she said.

Bradford, along with several other production/stage managers and technicians, is working to solve that problem through an advocacy collective called Means of Production. It aims to foster community in a field that can feel isolating, as well as provide production workers with resources for professional development, mentorship and equitable pay.

“Means of Production is interested in making sure production staff know their value, and that production folks have a place where they can come and talk, or reach out if they have questions,” said Bradford.

“This is a very solitary job in a lot of ways,” she continued. “You work alone, or maybe with one other person … as a freelancer, fundamentally, you work alone to shepherd a whole show.”

Myler agreed the solitude of the work can be crushing.

“We had a record number of people accessing mental health services through (the union) during the pandemic,” he said. “People were locked in their house with zero social contact. Their social contact was their work, which was gone for those years.” Myler added that groups like Live Event Community and the various IATSE locals continue to provide mental health resources to their members.

Bradford feels training in human resources is lacking across the production/stage management field, training that might prevent, or at least lessen, burnout in individual workers.

“When your title has the word ‘manager’ in it, you’re a supervisor of humans. That’s a lot of pressure that’s not really taken into account in our training,” she said.

“But there’s interest in moving forward. Companies seem to be interested in strengthening these relationships,” she added. “I’m optimistic about the future of this … there are days when I definitely feel like we’re on the precipice of collapse, but I also look around and I see an interest in people taking these steps. And I’m excited about it.”