LH
@halvorsen
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dramaturg & writer | I write Nothing for the Group, a newsletter about the American theatre | she/her
Washington, DC
Joined February 2007
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the rush of serotonin I get when someone texts the group chat "can I be a huge bitch for a second" is better than my anti-depressants
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everyone in New York right now, staring out their windows because they've clearly forgotten the plot of Independence Day
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saving my Tonys commentary for my group texts but I just need to publicly say that Raul Esparza is so hot it's a crime
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always a good time to repost Kirsten Dunst on how she fell in love with Jesse on the set of Fargo, I don't like to stan celebrity relationships but if these two ever break up, love is dead:
This photo just added a good three years to my lifespan
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after this week in theater news, it's worth repeating: there's not a single play/musical/theatrical experience that is so transcendent and vital that it justifies exploiting, abusing and traumatizing people
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Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Olivia Colman, Sian Clifford, Kristin Scott-Thomas, AND Fiona Shaw were all nominated for their performances in Fleabag. Petition to give Phoebe unlimited funds to write all the hilarious, flawed, complex women she wants.
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the problem with so many theatre actors being cast in Gilded Age is that I'm never going to bother to learn any character names, it's just "oh, there's the wry observant valet, Michael Cerveris"
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at a musical theatre-themed bat mitzvah and I feel seen and owned by my table assignment
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the anti-union framing is already rampant and obscures the issue: the reason the Tony Awards aren't being televised is because billionaires don't want to pay their workers
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anticipating every possible argument from people who are angry about this, but sorry babes: the whole point of a strike is to be disruptive. the withdrawal of labor is supposed to hurt. solidarity with the WGA.
Tony Awards Will Not Be Televised As Scheduled on June 11 (Exclusive)
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if you're a theatre producing a play about abortion, the only press release you should be sending right now is an announcement that you're donating a portion of your proceeds to abortion funds. miss me with this lazy, offensive "our work is more relevant than ever" messaging.
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The Gilded Age is true smooth brain entertainment, just gowns and Carrie Coon's vocal inflections and Morgan Spector looking hot and the most low-stakes, who-cares assortment of plotlines. I will obviously be watching every episode
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I can't listen to Being Alive without crying on a normal day so not even going to attempt it now
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don't want to speak for medical personnel but instead of saluting them with flyovers over the National Mall maybe we give them hazard pay and adequate personal protective equipment instead
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It Happened to Me: I went on a date with a non-theatre person who knew what a dramaturg was
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Some sad news: due to the pandemic, Studio Theatre has eliminated my position.
I've said this before but theater is a ridiculous & worthy way to build a life for yourself. For nine years, I had the best job in the game. I knew it every day. I'm heartbroken.
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the noise I made when I saw David fucking Mamet is on the advisory board of Bari Weiss' scam university
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love how bridgerton musical discourse always makes everyone act like their BFA is in copyright law
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yesterday was my one-year anniversary at my non-theatre day job and a living wage & 40-hour work week has bolstered my physical & mental health so much that it's almost impossible to think about returning to theatre full-time
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if we're posting our fave tweets I can't let
@hunteryharris
' 101 Dalmatians investigation go quietly into the night
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over/under on the number of theaters who will have this all-staff meeting in the next six months:
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If you work in theater, and you're not independently wealthy or in a high-level position, it's time to have a reckoning about your finances and start thinking about how you can support yourself outside this industry for the next few years. The time for magical thinking is over.
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just give us equal pay and leave us alone!!
This revamped D.C. hotel opened with a “female empowerment theme” that features:
• A portrait of RBG made out of 20,000 hand-painted tampons
• Cocktails named “the huntress” and “empowermint”
• And a head chef who is male.
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still not sure how anyone with a regular 9-5 also writes/does anything creative on the side because I am a year and a half into this schedule and I still haven't figured it out
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Be wary of any theatre that publicly refers to its staff as a family. Your workplace is not your family. That language is designed to manipulate and exploit employees, especially ones that are younger and underpaid
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someone told me yesterday that a friend got their theatre to pay more for a new position after telling them if they didn't that I would probably blast it in That's Not A Living Wage...the newsletter is worth every hassle and weird horny email I get when I hear stuff like this
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i have no valentine's day content for you except last week I went on a date with a guy who told me he looked up what a dramaturg was because he thought it might be a sex thing he didn't know about
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you've got a half dozen Tony Awards among the kitchen staff on Gilded Age and they're saddled with the most boring plotlines
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continued to shape America's youth today by introducing my students to the genre of "bong hit musicals", i.e. shows with a premise so bonkers they only could've been conceived while high (e.g. Bugsy Malone, Pippin, Cats)
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if you told me one of the Succession cast members was going to drop the word "dramaturgically" in their after-show talking head I would've guessed Jeremy Strong on the first try
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@Nicole_Cliffe
The best part about the seven paragraph break-up email I received—which referred to our relationship as "an experiment in heavy candor with my priorities" and a line about how much he liked "my flesh and kind heart"—were the suggested auto-replies from Gmail at the end
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i feel bad that anytime someone asks me for career advice i just want to say "take your copious, versatile, extremely valuable skills that are supremely undervalued by the theater industry and do literally anything else for a lot more money"
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if you look at the full slate of theatre season announcements from around the country: 1) it is glaringly obvious that the post-pandemic financial rock bottom is here and 2) everyone's still making a real effort to program artistically eclectic & interesting & diverse work
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love when I post some hot take about theatre and people are like "well how are you going to fix it??" like I didn't spend thirteen of my hottest years trying to improve things from the inside from my various thankless mid-level roles, man leave me aloooooone
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someone needs to break it to DC theatres that a 40K salary is not a living wage in this city (it's me, I'll break it to them)
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me reading your play about rich white people and their secrets, set at a dinner party in a New York loft apartment
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late to the Black List discourse but anyone expecting playwrights to pay $30 *per month* to host their script on a server is high on their own supply; people are already (rightly) mad about the O'Neill charging a one-time fee of $35, this is just straight up pay-to-play
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launching a new regular feature in the newsletter this week: it's called "that's not a living wage" where I post salaries from job listings juxtaposed with the living wage for that city
if you see a particularly egregious one, send it my way!
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decided that my ideal career is advising celebrities who want to be on Broadway what world premiere plays they should star in rather than throwing their weight behind some bland Arthur Miller revival. How do I make this happen
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glad we're past peak Hamilton meme era because otherwise my timeline would be a flood of "you don't have the votes" gifs
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me, riding a horse through the town square with a megaphone: READ ANOTHER PLAY BESIDES THE CRUCIBLE
Arthur Miller’s play is a chilling allegory for today’s Twitter storms.
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I might be in the minority here but I do not want/need a season announcement video or Instagram reel or whatever, just give me one page on your website clearly linked from the homepage with your season titles and artists clearly listed, thx!
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at what point do we just declare a general strike
IATSE Holds Strike Authorization Vote for Theater Workers on the Pink Contract (Exclusive)
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so is 1-2 theatres per week announcing closures/months-long shutdowns the theatre industry rock bottom or is there yet another unreached layer of despair
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...or you could just produce a play written by a woman+ with roles written for women+ on Broadway
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people who heard Stephen Sondheim died and then immediately listened to Someone in a Tree are masochists or have an emotional fortitude so impenetrable that it's beyond human comprehension
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The reason I screech about living wages & work-life boundaries is because I know now how transformative basic, humane working conditions can be. Theatres glamorize working yourself to death because it's good for their broken business model -- not for you, and not for the art.
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worst part about theatre coming back—besides people not getting their jobs back—is going to be all of the "Theatre is Resilient" themed messaging
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"who needs voting representation when you can have vibes"
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A university theatre program asked if they could reprint my dramaturg's note for The Wolves AND PAY ME FOR IT and they are leagues better than the theatre orgs with multi-million dollar budgets who just publish my writing on their websites without permission or compensation
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This isn't about passion, it's about privilege. The only people I know who can wait out a years-long industry recovery without switching careers have family money.
“It’s going to be almost impossible to make a living from theatre for the next few years. The people who get out there are going to be the most passionate ones. The next age could be a time of innovation.”
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Lincoln Center is hiring a Literary Manager for 125K-135K a year. The rare (and deserved) six-figure dramaturg salary!
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A year ago today I got laid off. I'm lucky that I found a new non-arts day job that's stable and chill and doesn't absorb all of my creative and mental energy. But I'm mostly happy that my job isn't the cornerstone of my identity anymore. It was wildly unhealthy.
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picked up my ticket & the box office associate said, "Halvorsen...like from Nothing for the Group?" and I feel like a very niche celebrity
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you mean to tell me that having a convicted fraudster as the lead producer wasn't a good idea?
Unions Take Broadway Show ‘Paradise Square’ to Court for $350,000 in Unpaid Benefits, Wages
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if you're a celebrity looking to be on broadway, i'm more than happy to generate a personalized list of world premieres/underproduced plays by womxn and writers of color for you to star in rather than a Mamet revival no one asked for
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Emma Stone looked absolutely ill when they announced her name and for that she has my respect
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tbh i think every award show should have a category for Best Ensemble but especially the Tonys
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need theatre boards to stop acting like fools for one minute; the newsletter is gonna be War and Peace length this week
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there needs to be an investigation into why every artistic director in america ultimately writes their own adaptation of a christmas carol
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18 months after my layoff, I have officially fully divested from St*dio Theatre because someone finally changed the actor housing's Showtime password that I've been stealing for years
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are writers really "at the center of everything we do" if none of them can make a living wage through playwriting alone
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when people ask me how to fix non-profit theaters, i always say this. there's just zero supervisor training happening, which leads to employee discontent, which leads to constant turnover, etc.
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there are a lot of lessons that theatres learned during the 18-month shutdown but prominently displaying the run time on the show page is still not one of them
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things I've learned from having a dumb tweet about The Crucible go viral: you all need to read more than one play
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made a thrilling website update today (still can't believe this is happening, even after my first payment hit)
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This is a must-read piece on playwright compensation, pay transparency and equity, and how to advocate for yourself as an artist. We need to demystify how much unpaid labor is expected from writers during the production process!
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thought about applying for a theatre job but I tried to write a cover letter and couldn't because I know too much about the internal culture; my capacity to bullshit & compromise is at zero
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companies that include a land acknowledgment in their job postings with a below-living wage salary...it's like, you're so close, babe
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one of the most irresponsible plays i've read in the last five years is premiering soon and i was cranky about having to put it in the newsletter and then i remembered that i can just...not list it
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Joel Coen having no reaction to his wife howling onstage as she accepts an Oscar is the exact marriage energy that I want
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There's so much to love about Fire Island but reimagining Lydia & Kitty as theatre school dropouts is truly chef's kiss
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14th Street weed shops are now courting the ever-lucrative classical theatre nerd/stoner demographic
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practically everyone I know, in New York and around the country, who works in theater and isn't a fundraiser is furloughed or laid off. extend federal unemployment benefits now.
Broadway will remain closed for at least the rest of this year, and many shows are signaling that they do not expect a return to the stage until late winter or early spring
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drives me insane when people refer to me as a "former dramaturg"; i haven't renounced the profession, i'm just not on an artistic staff anymore (so I'm being well paid and I have a personal life)
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The EPI calculator that I use to compile That's Not A Living Wage every week just updated its data to 2020 dollars so you can look forward to the discrepancy between theatre salaries and living wages becoming even more egregious, happy wednesday!
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a lot of people are sending me a certain job posting, and I'm happy that people are thinking of me, but I think I'm done working 65+ hour weeks for only 50K a year. I'm 35. I want a life, I want a dog.
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@Nicole_Cliffe
The opening themes to The West Wing & Game of Thrones because he made up terrible fake lyrics that I can't unhear
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probably not the right thing to say when you just did a second round of mass administrative staff furloughs my man
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a certain DC theatre is gonna make their That's Not A Living Wage debut tomorrow, you know I had to do it to em eventually
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Today is Chekhov's birthday, an occasion that always kickstarts a new cycle of online thirst for people desperate for the comfort and relief of knowing that fuckboys are not a modern invention, as this picture shows they've been around since at least 1892:
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if theatres don't post salaries in job listings, it's because 1) they don't want employees to know what their colleagues make and 2) this
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I understand that this is a truly grim time for theaters, that artistic leaders are being forced to make impossible choices, but a pandemic doesn't let you off the hook for programming an all-white season
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I missed this news over the weekend. I understand the desire to take more safety precautions but unless you're doing rapid COVID testing at the door, requiring audience members to provide their own tests is a massive accessibility issue
The Public Theater adds negative COVID-19 test policy for audience members.
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said this before & it's still true: asking for salary requirements in a cover letter is a racket; nonprofits have very limited ranges, just include it in the job posting instead of trying to scam people who are already conditioned to devalue their labor into lowball offers
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every time I post about not working in theatre full-time someone who doesn't follow me air-drops in with "well, I'm STAYING", like that's fine! do what you want! just give yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind once your priorities inevitably change!
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Stay for the talkback
Write a horror story for your industry using just four words
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my career ambitions mostly eroded in 2020 but i had a goal to make 10K more in freelance income this year than I made last year & i hit that today. still figuring out how to balance all of my various gigs but after spending 15 years in nonprofits it turns out making money is good
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