Sacramento’s Capital Stage Company sent a mass email last month inviting applications to its apprenticeship program. The commitment: six months to one year, with full-time hours “encouraged.” The pay: $250 per month.

Cap Stage is hardly alone in offering poorly paid internships. The San Francisco Mime Troupe pays its full-time summer interns $100 a week, with the added indignity of requiring a $25 fee just to apply.

Gather any group of theater professionals, and there’s a good chance many got started this way, as part of some notion of “paying their dues” to enter achronically underfunded industry.

In many other fields, working full time for free or for less than minimum wage for up to a year would be crazy on its own. But theater’s promised reward for all that sacrifice — that other companies might hire you as a result — is flimsy too.Few San Francisco theater jobs paythe Economic Policy Institute’s estimate of a living wage for the city, or $64,666(using2020 dollars).While top brass at the Bay Area’s largest theaters routinely make six figures, Cap Stage’s two leaders, by contrast, make more modest salaries of $62,400 and $68,718.

People outside the industry might well wonder how this classification is legal. The California Department of Industrial Relations’ rules about unpaid internships, drawing on federal guidelines, state that interns must not replace employees and that internships must be part of an educational or vocational program.

然而,如果这种现象是合法的和长期的,我t looks worse now. In 2020, the “We See You, White American Theatre” movement demanded an end to unpaid internships as part of a racial justice reckoning. And more recently, employers across the Bay Areastarted sayingthat they can’t hire enough workers to fillopen positionsthat pay actual wages and salaries.

Evidently, even these current events couldn’t shake the theater industry of labor practices that many regard as exploitative. But I feel conflicted even writing the word “exploitative,” because my own career benefited from two internships — one at the Undermain Theatre in Dallas that gave me a $500 stipend, and an unpaid one at the Bay Area’s Marin Theatre Company — both in 2009.

我可以直接跟踪每一个海湾地区剧院工作我ve had, including my Chronicle position, to my time at MTC. Yet my gratitude for that leg up has long been mixed with shame that I profited from an unjust system.

I graduated college in the thick of the Great Recession, when I couldn’t land an entry-level full-time position in my chosen field of theater. But because I could live with my parents or house-sit, and because no one else relied on me for income, I could save up money and intern long hours for little or no pay for multiple months.

Such a scenario is hardly financially feasible for everyone, which is why “We See You” and other groups of theater activists want to eliminate unpaid internships — as dothose in many other professions.But in theater, how can we hope to tell humanity’s stories if only a tiny segment of the population can afford to enter it?

Theater internships’ austere terms don’t always deter the less-advantaged from applying.

Olga Koloyev of San Francisco has worked as both a Cap Stage apprentice and an American Conservatory Theater fellow for a modest stipend (she doesn’t recall the exact amount) despite havingstudent loans of $32,000 at the time and despite being an immigrant from Latvia and first-generation college student without generational wealth to fall back on. She is grateful for all the opportunities both gigs afforded to observe professionals and attend talks.

“I did live very frugally,” she recalled of her time at ACT, during its 2017-18 season. To get around, “I walked as much as I could.”

She also worked the box office at another theater, worked in retail and taught music classes on top of her full-time internships to pay the low rent she got through a family friend.

San Francisco’s Miranda Erin Campbell, another 2017-18 ACT fellow, said she grew up “in a poverty background.” During her stage management fellowship, which paid $1,200 per month, she budgeted her groceries very carefully, subsisting on pasta- and rice-based dishes and the occasional grilled cheese. Working an additional gig next door as a production assistant on “Head Over Heels” at the Curran helped too.

Campbell went on to work full time at ACT until the pandemic hit; she is currently between stage management gigs.

Ken Savage of Napa, who now works at Oregon Shakespeare Festival after interning at a range of theaters, including ACT, said the internship model was “scary” for him and his family.He’s a first-generation American, with a Filipina mother and a Taiwanese father.

“Being the eldest, I was really the trailblazer for my family,” he said, adding that he also frequently seeks medical treatment for a chronic condition. “We were worried: Am I going to be able to sustain myself in the theater if I’m only being paid $500 a month?”

Champagne Hughes, an Oakland educator, storyteller, board chair, nonprofit leader and pleasure activist, worked as a fellow at Berkeley Repertory Theatre during the 2010-11 season. While she loved planning events and helping take care of casts, especially the actors in “Ruined,” she recalled getting offered a permanent position elsewhere, and her Berkeley Rep supervisor, who is no longer with the company, discouraging her from taking it, since it would curtail her fellowship.

“There was a lot of shame and guilt,” Hughes recalled.

Hughes gave in, and the other opportunity couldn’t wait for her. She is happy with where she is now, pursuing a master’s degree in sex and drama therapy at California Institute of Integral Studies and acting in plays, but she feels lingering distrust: “Who can I listen to who’s not going to waver me off my path, who’s actually supportive?”

Of the fellowship, she asked, “Who is it really for?”

Berkeley Rep spokesperson Tim Etheridge didn’t overlap at the company with Hughes and could not speak to her specific situation but added that he finds it “hard to imagine why her supervisor discouraged her from taking the job. We do everything we can to help people find future employment.”

Many large theater companies have paused their internship programs during the pandemic, including American Conservatory Theater, Magic Theatre, TheatreWorks and Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which suggests the phenomenon might be poised for large-scale change.

“As ACT emerges from the impacts of COVID, they are making long-range plans, which includes envisioning the future of training and education and how they should evolve,” spokesperson Kevin Kopjak told The Chronicle.

Even before the COVID era, California Shakespeare Theater directed prospective interns to apply for paid entry-level positions in front of house or the box office. Berkeley Rep’s fellowship program is still happening, but it is perhaps the most plum such gig in the Bay Area, supplying both housing and a $1,000 monthly stipend. Cap Stage Marketing Director Misty McDowell said her company has an equity, diversity and inclusion committee on its board that is working through the “We See You” demands and is considering doubling the apprentices’ stipends.

Other solutions hold promise. The city of San Francisco’sDream Keeper Initiative,which redirects $120 million in funding over two years from law enforcement to the city’s Black residents, has an earmark for job training in the arts. One beneficiary is African-American Shakespeare Company, which is using its grant both to train new teaching artists and help Black artists develop the business side of their craft; they get paid $20 an hour to be trained.

“People are always saying, ‘I would love to employ more, but — dot, dot, dot, ‘ ” founder and Executive Director Sherri Young said. The goal of the program, she explained, is: “Let’s get our artists of color up and working.”

But former interns have their own ideas about how to better attract young people to the field. Campbell is a part of the new nationwide organization Lift the Curtain, which is dedicated to ending unpaid labor in the field. “Budgeting is ethics, and where you’re putting your money shows what your priorities are,” she said. “One classic pitfall that I think a lot of theaters fall into is overprogramming.”

What would happen, she asks, if theaters were really rigorous with themselves about which programs matter most and which they can execute sustainably?

Savage concurs.

“Theaters aren’t willing to cut back on other programs that they feel like they’ve centered for so long,” he said. “I think it comes from a place of altruism: How much can we stretch the dollar to serve as many people in communities of need as possible? But when we try to help so many people, are we really making as deep of an impact as we could?”

For instance, what if a company took on many fewer interns but paid them more?

Naysayers have been forecasting theater’s death for a long time. Theater artists usually fight back. But with internships, Savage said, the other side has a point. “Of course it’s totally going to die if we’re not going to give the new generation opportunities and kindness.“