How I Got My Equity Card

I received my Equity Card (I believe) in the summer of 1963 at the [now closed] Corning Summer Theatre playing Cassio to James Earl Jones’ Othello. Later that year, I had my first New York production, Next Time I’ll Sing to You, at the Old Phoenix Theatre, again with Jones. A few years later, I had my first movie End of the Road, once again with Jones. We later did A Lesson from Aloes at Yale and in New York and we have worked together since.

I grew up in New York City and dreamt of making a living as an actor for as long as I can remember. When I was 14 years old, I was lucky enough to have been accepted into the famed High School of Performing Arts to study acting. It was there that I learned what it actually took to be a professional actor. Oh, how I longed to be one.

It was 1991 and I was cast in Ain’t Misbehavin’ at the Gateway Playhouse in Bellport, NY. Subsequently, I did that show at the Arizona Theatre Company and then at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta. It seems that, at that time, my focus was all about Ain’t Misbehavin’ and my Equity card.

When I had my costume fitting for Lead Bumblebee in my second-grade production of Anansi the Spider, I had found my calling to perform! But it took until the first Broadway show I ever saw, Jason Robert Brown’s Parade, to know I had to be a part of that brother/sisterhood.

In the late ’80s, I had a newly earned BFA in musical theatre and was living in San Diego, California, looking for work as an actor. Des McAnuff, who was then the artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse, cast me in a show he had penned himself – a musical called Silent Edward. The production was on a Theatre for Young Audiences contract, and that fortunate circumstance enabled me to join Actors’ Equity.

It’s like I got my card twice.

When the Billie Holiday Theatre did Golden Boy in 1984, I got my card replacing a dancer who, at the last minute, wasn’t able to do it. They asked her if she knew anyone, and she recommended me. I went and auditioned for Lewis Johnson and got it—and that’s how I got my card.

September 2015, Kansas City, MO: At this point in my career, I had spent eight years as a nonunion stage manager, worked at several Equity theaters and accrued 30 weeks toward Equity membership. Oddly enough, the one Equity theater I hadn’t worked at in some capacity, Kansas City Actors Theatre, hired me as a non-Equity ASM for its first production of the season, The Gin Game.

When I mentor young stage managers, one of the most frequently asked questions I hear is “How do I get my Equity card?” Usually I tell young people that my story isn’t much help. I was just in the right place at the right time. It’s only recently that I’ve realized that the true answer for almost all of us is “Right place, right time and hard work!”

Seventy-one years ago this summer, I was an apprentice actor at the Newport Casino Theatre in Rhode Island. It was an Equity stock company with a solid reputation, and I was thrilled to be invited to play bits, to understudy and to play the occasional supporting role—in other words, to be used as an apprentice, “as cast.” The Equity rule in those days allowed an actor to appear in three productions at no salary before he was required to join the union as a full fledged member. I was to be in residence in Newport for eight weeks that summer of 1946.