The Actor You're Watching May be Earning Less Than a Ticket To the Movies

...or s/he may be pulling in somewhere in the vicinity of $150 to $200 per week for his three nights of work.

Granted, that's by no means a king's ransom when measured against the take of the Tom Cruise's of the world, but for the bunches of bunches of actors performing on the tiny playhouses around L.A., it's a heck of a lot sweeter than $7 per night.

For its current production of "Love's Old Sweet Song," the Syzygy Theatre Co. which operates out of the GTC Burbank is paying 14 of its professional performers and stage managers in the vicinity of $2,500 for the run of the production. That includes payment for performances and rehearsals, but not health insurance or pension.

Granted, this is not a lot of dough to live on (I'll now stop saying this), but it's quite a sum for a smaller theater company to pay out, AND you can bet your $3.19 at the pump that it will trump what most other smaller companies at 99 seat theaters in the city are paying their actors.

Syzygy operates under a Letter of Agreement (LOA) per performance to the Hollywood Area Theatre (HAT) agreement with Actors Equity Association, the union of professional stage actors and stage managers.

That's a fair amount of alphabet soup, but basically, when you're company is filling more than 99 seats, Equity contracts require that performers and stage managers receive a certain level of compensation. Below 99 seats, a theater could choose to offer Equity contracts (thereby bumping up the actor's per performance fee), but they are not required to. Most don't.

There are a handful of L.A. 99 seat houses that offer Equity contracts. Syzygy opted to go with its LOA/HAT agreement from its 2003 inception even though it meant the company would not be able to produce as often. Twice a year, company officials say, and even that's a struggle.

But the company's goals, artistic director Martin Bedoian, were clear from the beginning: a professional company sets its sights high and pays its performers accordingly.

"If we don't say to the public that art has value, then the public begins to see it as not valuable and if the people creating that art aren't given something for the value they create, I think it falls into that," says Bedoian, who also directed "Love's Old Sweet Song."

"We're working with people who have been nominated for or won major awards, who have advanced degrees, and we felt they deserved to be rewarded for 12 weeks of very hard work and a lot of time, " he continues.

This falls into the category of company philosophy. Syzygy's board of directors voted to hit the ground offering Equity contracts rather than start with no contracts and eventually grow to their goal.

"It's hard to change once momentum gets rolling," Bedoian says. "We wanted to be a professional company, a fully professional salaried ensemble. Actors could join and that could be their lives. In terms of momentum and getting to our goals, we felt it was smarter to start by being the company we wanted to be as much as we could."

According to Actors Equity spokesperson Maria Somma, Syzygy was the first L.A. theater of its size to start a company at a 99 seat theater with Equity contracts. Several others _ including Havoc, Salem K, and Independent Shakespeare _ have since followed suit.

"It's clearly a long term growth plan of Syzygy's to remain an Equity theater. and The theater itself is growing," says Somma. "The company is growing in business plan and in its overall artistic endeavors, really."

By contrast, the 99 Seat Plan, as its informally dubbed, pays performers anywhere from $7 to $11 per performance depending on the size of the theater and the price of the tickets. As the run extends past 13 weeks, that amount could bump up to $25 per performance which is still about half of what Syzygy is paying and doesn't cover rehearsals.

Understand, there are many, many very fine theater companies in L.A. whose actors are accepting very meager paychecks to deliver very fine work. Obviously, they do the work because they love it, and if a better paying job comes along, they have the right to jump ship to the more lucrative gig.

Even Bedoian isn't crusading for companies to take on pricier actor contracts if and when they're not ready to do so.

"I believe in the 99 seat plan," he says. "I believe that as a piece of the overall tapestry of how theater works in L.A., great work would never happen without the 99-seat plan. What we do is ts not meant to be a criticism of the way other people are running their companies. It's meant to be our path to our goals, and that's important to me."

"Love's Old Sweet Song," a play by William Saroyan honoring what wold be the centenary of the author's birth, is a larger than average endeavor for Syzygy. The cast is large: 22 actors including several children. The budget is somewhere in the vicinity of $60,000. The company was able to pull off a larger cast and larger budgeted play in part thanks to a grant from the Michael J. Connell Foundation and the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.

The production continues 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday; through Nov. 22 at 1111-B West Olive Ave. in Burbank. Info: (800) 838-3006 or visit www.syzygytheatre.org or www.brownpapertickets.com