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Freelance Theatermaker Relief Payments

Freelance Theatermaker Relief Payments

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The Public Theater exists to support theatermakers in creating work and sharing it with the broadest audience possible. The pandemic has made achieving this mission harder, but it has not changed it. In tough times and in good ones, one of our core missions is to support our creative community. In our current troubles, those in our freelance community have been made especially vulnerable.

Over the past several months, we have been working towards a plan that would help provide a bit of financial relief to our freelance community, which includes technicians and crew members from our current season, as well as those working in Joe’s Pub, along with our most recent class of artist working groups (Joe’s Pub Working Group, Devised Theater Working Group, Emerging Writers Group, and #BARS) and our teaching artists.

To that end, we have extended a one-time disaster relief payment of $1,000 to these individuals. We’d like to acknowledge the generosity of our board and donor community in supporting these relief payments. In doing what we can to provide some relief, we take inspiration from organizations like artistrelief.org, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Arison Arts Foundation, and many others who are stepping up and stepping in to provide much needed support. We hope in doing so that we will inspire others to join us in offering their own support to our freelance community at this critical time.

Right now, The Public cannot fully be The Public, and not being able to create work on our stages impacts thousands of people - starting with our staff and the freelance theatermakers we employ. The support we are able to offer this broad group of freelancers is not enough to replace their lost livelihoods, but we believe it is our responsibility.

We are all one community, and we are committed to doing what we can for everyone who counts on us. It will never be enough until we are all back together again and creating and producing work side by side. Until then, we will remain focused on lifting people up where we can.