Emma Janssen
Benjamin Jenkins performs as a member of Drunk Shakespeare’s Chicago cast, October 24, 2024.
On Thursday, October 24, I sat on a wooden bench in a small, dark Chicago theater and watched an actor down three shots of mezcal back to back to back before breaking out into a monologue from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Little did most of the other theatergoers know, this intrepid performer was a newly minted union member, along with everyone else at the Chicago branch of Drunk Shakespeare, from Lady Macbeth to the server who brought me a cocktail.
Drunk Shakespeare, if you aren’t lucky enough to have been to a performance, is a multicity theater troupe that operates exactly as advertised: One performer downs five shots before jumping into a performance of one of Shakespeare’s plays. The other actors try to keep the performance on track while chaos ensues in the form of beer-chugging, burpees, and monologues.
“I would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety,” says a boy in Shakespeare’s Henry V. Now, Drunk Shakespeare actors can have all three: fame, ale, and safety. After a year and a half of union organizing and negotiations, the actors, servers, and bartenders in four cities—Phoenix, Chicago, New York, and D.C.—have ratified a new contract. The agreement will bring wage increases for the majority of front-of-house staff, health insurance benefits, sick leave and vacation time accrual, and more scheduling consistency, including a minimum weekly income for some workers.
The agreement was struck between the Actors’ Equity Association, which now represents the actors, and Brass Jar Productions, the company that owns Drunk Shakespeare. The Actors’ Equity Association is widely known for their role in representing Broadway performers, but they’ve expanded their scope to include performers on a wide range of stages, from the cast of the Chippendales in Las Vegas to strippers in Los Angeles and Portland to planetarium lecturers at the Griffith Observatory.
According to Kit Krull, an actor with the D.C. troupe of Drunk Shakespeare who’s been with the group for over two years, the unionization and new agreement were long overdue. Krull told me that the unionization effort began with the Chicago troupe, and the D.C. workers learned about it after a particularly rough weekend.
“We had just had a big COVID outbreak that took out half of our company, and we had a weekend where there [were] not enough people working and not enough support,” he said. That weekend, as well as during more normal times, “there was an expectation that you would just kind of take on roles that weren’t your job for the sake of the show and the ‘show must go on’ mentality,” Krull told me.
“One actor had to swing in to stage-manage, even though she had never done that before. Actors were taking drink orders while doing the show … and we had a TaskRabbit front-of-house staff that didn’t really know how the show worked, so actors were swinging in to that too,” Krull said. Just two weeks later, the Chicago troupe reached out to tell the D.C. workers about the unionization effort, and they eagerly joined in.
“Because it’s an acting job, you can forget that it’s a real job.”
Now, Krull told me, the collective-bargaining agreement’s mandates for clearly defined roles and predetermined shifts should prevent situations where workers feel like they need to overextend themselves or jump into jobs they’re unprepared for.
Ella Fent, a server and bartender with the Chicago show, echoed Krull’s concerns about consistent scheduling and stable roles.
“One of the biggest things that I have been fighting for from day one has been guaranteed shift amounts per week for servers, guaranteed minimum five shows a week. And we got it,” Fent said.
She was instrumental in organizing her fellow workers, connecting with a group called the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee to help them navigate the unionization process. Because of the nature of entertainment and service work, Fent explained, some weeks Drunk Shakespeare will need all hands on deck, and other weeks they might need just one server per night. Under the collective-bargaining agreement, front-of-house workers will have more clarity and consistency on how many shifts they can expect any given week, helping them navigate the ups and downs of the industry.
To be fair, Brass Jar Productions has had health and safety protections for their drinking actors since the beginning of the production in early 2014, but the new contract will make the job even safer.
“Most actors should never have to drink more than once or twice in a week,” explained Christopher Trindade, an actor with the group in New York and a member of the negotiation team. Alcohol, after all, is notoriously unhealthy. Trindade said that actors shouldn’t have to drink in back-to-back performances either, nor should they have to pretend to be sober if they were still drunk from an earlier performance. “To Brass Jar’s credit, I wouldn’t say that there was necessarily a pattern of those instances, but there was risk for those instances, and we wanted to make sure that there would be no risk for those instances ever again,” he said.
Most of the actors, servers, and bartenders I spoke to described the negotiation process as amicable and good-faith. The sentiment was echoed by David Hudson, the co-creator of Drunk Shakespeare and producer with Brass Jar.
“The most tense moments were just around where we can allocate the limited resources that we have, because at the end of the day we’re still a very small company,” Hudson told me. On the whole, though, he described the negotiations as collaborative and respectful. Brass Jar voluntarily recognized the union after it was formed, and was sitting at the negotiating table with Actors’ Equity just five months later.
Lawrence Karl, a bartender at the New York show, said that the negotiation process restored his faith in his employer, which was damaged after months of what he described as misunderstandings and miscommunications.
“When you work for an employer that just keeps not changing, not willing to change, as they were previously, it is super beneficial to see them come to the table the way they did to negotiate,” he said. “I just think having this bargaining agreement, having this CBA, will help them realize that, and help us realize that we’re more of a community than we think.”
The negotiations at Drunk Shakespeare highlight an issue that’s relevant within the entertainment industry as a whole: the balance between treating actors like artists and treating them like employees.
“Because it’s an acting job, you can forget that it’s a real job,” said Ksjusha Povod, a performer with Drunk Shakespeare in Phoenix. “Because of the uniqueness of the job, you can end up getting taken advantage of, or lines can get blurred, or things aren’t taken care of.”
The hope is that the CBA will help Drunk Shakespeare strike that balance between art and business, allowing for many more shots of mezcal and cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon in the years to come.
As Cassio says in Othello: “O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil … O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! That we should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!”
Starting November 4, when the CBA goes into effect, Drunk Shakespeare workers will be transforming themselves into beasts and stealing away their brains under the full protection of a union, allowing them to reap all the benefits of the performance’s “joy, pleasance, revel, and applause.”
