Who Gets to Design in LORT Theatres: A Conversation of Sherrice Mojgani and Porsche McGovern
Since 2015 many in the theater design community have yearly looked forward and toward the Who Designs and Directs in LORT Theatres survey study to get a better sense of the theater design hiring and work landscape by pronoun. The study encompasses data over eight seasons: from the 2012–2013 season up through the 2019–2020 season. On the occasion of the release of the final, ‘at least for the foresee able future,’ of the multi-year study, Lighting Designer Sherrice Mojgani spoke with the survey study author, and Lighting Designer Porsche McGovern. Here is an excerpt from that HowlRound Theatre Commons conversation essay between Mojgani and McGovern.
Sherrice Mojgani: What do you hope LORT theatres and other theatre leaders will do with this information that 30-40 percent of freelance artists they hire might only work in any LORT theatre once?
Porsche McGovern: I hope they ask themselves, “Who do we hire?” I think the study gives theatre leaders a starting point and data to compare their own hiring statistics to. I hope that the study sparks conversations that are not only about gender equity but also other demographics like race and disability. I want them to ask themselves: who have I supported in the past? Which designers feel like they have an artistic home at our theatre? Then they should examine who those people are. Are they all people that share the same or similar identities? Theatres should be looking at that—and not just overall but by discipline, also.
I hope theatre leaders use this study to talk about which artists they cultivate. Who doesn’t just show up for one show of the season? Who are theatres making a commitment to and saying, “We’re going to try to hire this person three times in the next five years”? Does your theatre have systems advancing artists from your D—lower minimum rate—space to your B—higher minimum rate—space? Is there a system so that artists can be making closer to a living wage? I hope theatre leaders are hiring people for the right reasons. When hiring somebody with a traditionally excluded identity, is your theatre making a commitment to them and their trajectory as an artist or just hiring them to say to the board or diversity committee that the institution has met its “diversity goals” for the year?
Sherrice: What would you say if a theatre leader asked you how they could better cultivate and support artists?
Porsche: I’d ask them: who do you invite into your theatre, and who gets to talk to you about real things? Maybe that freelance props person who they’ve brought in for every show for the last three years has something leaders could learn from, and leaders might want to talk to artists about it if they’re willing. Hint: maybe leaders should pay them for that conversation. Maybe leaders should pay to learn from artists. Theatres do this thing where they’re like, “What do you invest in?” And they’ll be like, “We invest in the art.” Which, okay, the art is what sells. The art is the product. That makes sense. However, when the budget for a production is four times the amount of all the salaries of the people working on it, of all the fees on it, I go, “God, I wish they invested in the artists a little bit more.”
Artists need investment, both with living wages and other forms of support. Theatre leaders: do you ask the artist what support they need? Do you ask them what things make them feel supported in a space? Or do you just assume everyone’s good?
Sherrice: And that everyone will feel supported if they have the things that—
Porsche: —that the last person had.
Sherrice: Right. I’m always telling my students that there is a huge problem in theatre where everyone thinks the way that they do things is normal, but that there is no “normal” way of doing things. We see it a lot as freelancers when we bounce from space to space, how wildly different preferences are. Just having a conversation with artists about what they need, thinking about and naming those needs even if they seem obvious, could save a lot of trouble. I know that I’ve been in a theatre before and been like, “How does this place even function? I do not understand how this place works because I didn’t ask and because nobody told me. So it’s on me now, it’s my problem to figure out and solve. It’s my fault now that I didn’t say what I needed explicitly, and nobody asked me.”
Porsche: Yeah, and there’s the power relationship in there too. Nobody wants to be a difficult designer to work with. But for me, I know when I go to a theatre, I want a space with a kitchen—not a hotel room that has a coffee maker. But at least at the beginning of my career, I was too worried about keeping my job to say, “You need to put me up somewhere with a kitchen.” I didn’t want that to be the reason I never worked there again. It’s hard to know how to ask for what you need when you could be punished for it and you’ll never know why. When someone treats me badly at a theatre, I question: are they sexist? Are they racist? Is this a toxic culture? Do they just hate lighting designers in general? I don’t know why I’m treated badly often. It could be a myriad of factors. But that’s why for freelancers, we usually don’t want anything we do to possibly be affected by one of those factors because we’d like to work again.
Sherrice: Right, especially with no clarity around how freelancers get hired or not and how the hiring process works at all.
Porsche: Freelance artists are not disposable. If a staff member is massively unhappy, organizations would likely talk to them first rather than just firing them. Whereas freelancers, it’s like, “Oh, that person was grumpy at load-in. We just won’t ever have them again.” I’m like, “You ever think maybe there’s a reason they’re grumpy? Could the work environment need some adjustment on the institution’s end?” If institutions are not going to be prepared to support people who are unlike the people they’ve always supported, they should leave them alone. Stop breaking people for one production during Black History Month with a Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) cast and then being confused why they left the industry.
Sherrice: Because as we can see people are leaving.
Porsche: Or giving up. And that’s how the study really started. After I had my daughter, I suddenly wasn’t getting offers or even inquiries—I didn’t know if I was going to have a career in lighting design anymore. I didn’t know if anyone would ever hire me again. I started the study to do something to stay connected to theatre in the United States while my child was napping for three hours a day.
Sherrice: I vividly remember seeing these charts for the first time in 2015. I opened this email from HowlRound, and I was so freaked out about it and what it said and what it meant for how difficult it was going to be for me to make my way in this profession. But I also think that there was something so affirming in the fact that somebody else cared about me as a lighting designer, woman, and person of color to bother counting at all. What has this work meant to other humans who feel seen by it?
Porsche: The reason why I continued the study is that women designers reached out and were like, “Thank you for proving I’m not crazy. Thank you for proving that my experience has been valid.” It has led me to many, many nice people. I got to do the artEquity facilitator training because of it, which has led me to a lovely community. It has led me down different paths towards more activism. I feel some responsibility to the younger generation. Thinking about students coming up now or even looking at my younger self being one of very few people of color in fellowship, internship, and training programs and being like, “How is my path different? Why is my path different?” Because people will tell me it’s just the choices I made, to which I call bullshit. It’s not always just the choices we make—especially in theatre where it’s the choices that are made for us. We’re chosen to design shows. We’re chosen to get an offer. It’s the theatre crane machine.
Sherrice: And the crane machine picked you up, brought you over, and dropped you off in LORT.
Porsche: But I had to survive its shaking along the way. Freelance artists might fall out at any time, no matter how close they get to the “promised land” of whatever a successful designer is. Obviously, that looks different for everyone.
Sherrice: Absolutely, and it changes with age. I remember being just out of graduate school and being like, “Okay, great, when I get my first LORT show, that’s going to be a goal met. Then once I get three of them, I’m going to join the union, and that’s going to be another goal met, and then I’m going to be set.” But it didn’t feel that way once I get there.
Porsche: Oh yeah.
Sherrice: So Porsche, what would you tell theatre leaders who ask when they get to be done with this work?
Porsche: Have the uncomfortable conversations. Figure out who you are hiring and how you can do better. Once you have that plan, give your institution five seasons… then do this exercise again. For as long as your organization is alive, you never get to be done. That is the work.
Porsche McGovern noted on the release of her final installment of the study that, “I’m a mom, a reader, a friend, a researcher, a lighting designer, a wife, an activist, a union leader, a bisexual Asian American woman of color, an anti-oppression facilitator, and someone who does not fit in boxes particularly well. I’m someone who asks questions, has more curiosity than is probably good for me, loves stories, and has overdeveloped senses of empathy and responsibility. I’m trained in lighting design for theatre, and I never want anyone to go through all the painful things I’ve had to endure to be, and continue to be, a lighting designer for theatre. And I write this study (see link below).
Sherrice Mojgani is a Washington D.C. based theatrical lighting designer. She has designed for Arena Stage, Pittsburgh Public Theater, Seattle Repertory Theatre, The Old Globe, and Round House Theatre. In 2019 Mrs. Mojgani’s design for Into the Woods at Barrington Stage won a Berkshire Theatre Critics Circle Award. Mrs. Mojgani is a member of United Scenic Artist 829 and is an associate professor in the School of Theatre at George Mason University. Originally from Orange County California, Mrs Mojgani holds a BA in Theatre Arts from UC Santa Cruz, and an MFA in Lighting Design from UC San Diego.
This full conversation essay can be found at https://howlround.com/more-cultivation-less-crane-machine-who-gets-design-lort-theatres . It originally appeared on the HowlRound Theatre Commons on Nov. 6, 2023.
