Candidate Statement

Doug MacKechnie - Bennington, VT

• Eastern Principal Councilor 2024-2026

• Central Principal Councilor 2020-2024

• CRB Non-Councilor 2012-2020

• Executive Committee 2020-2024

• Chair of Central Developing Theatres/Central Committee for Independent Theatres 2017-2024

• Vice-Chair of Various Regional and National Committees 2016-2024

• Independent Theatre Contract Working Group

• Health Care Policy Working Group

Dear colleagues,

I sat out the Council election in 2024 because my wife and I knew we were planning to move out of the Central Region that Fall (and our Constitution and By-Laws are crystal clear that if you’re in a Region-based Council seat you have to resign if your permanent residency changes and makes you no longer eligible for that seat). Leaving was bittersweet, but I was proud of my contributions, and it was time. Once I landed back home here in Vermont, I was added to the Eastern Committee for Independent Theatres and was recruited to represent the VT contingent as a co-Lead of the Greater Albany Equity Community… and a few months after that I was chosen by Council to fill a vacant Eastern Principal Councilor seat. I was not anticipating a return to service so soon, but it was a genuine honor to have been elected to Council once by our National membership and then again by so many of my colleagues on Council itself.

I know you have a wealth of good options before you. Here’s what I think I can offer (and apologies up front for the relative stream-of-consciousness that follows):

My entire career has been spent working in small theatres and on small contracts, in no small part because I started in science and technology before getting my MFA and I spent 20 years in a not-terribly-flexible day job to deal with the college debt I was carrying… while pursuing my professional career in Chicagoland and nearby regional theatres.

I’m a data-driven, process guy who tries to be kind and to remain curious. I’m good at both building teams and being a team player, and when given the opportunity to lead I work hard to make sure every team member both feels heard and is heard. I very firmly believe that small-group problem-solving is a team activity with plenty of room for guiding principles but very little use for pre-conceived ideological solutions.

I was the first Board/Council member to push to include explicit definitions and prohibitions of sexual harassment in a rulebook — during the 2017 SPT re-promulgation — and I tried to get the concept of intimacy design and coordination memorialized in the CAT agreement back in 2018. I freely admit I was initially unsuccessful with both of those efforts — and it took a lot of heavy lifting from many other people and negotiating teams to finally get those concepts memorialized across all agreements — but I know I helped drive those conversations in our rooms.

Starting with the health plan funding reform resolution I brought to the floor as a delegate to our 2nd National Convention, I was instrumental in the creation of the Health Care Policy Working Group.  That group’s work provided the policy basis that backstopped the successful effort to finally get the Broadway League to start paying its fair share into the Equity-League Health Fund, ensuring the rest of the country will no longer have to continue to subsidize health insurance for those working for our deepest-pocketed producers.

I’m really proud of the negotiating teams I helped build and lead for the cycle of Dinner Theater renewals in ‘23-’24.  Supporting stellar work from Equity’s business staff, those teams were, I believe, the first to achieve our comprehensive language for Reproductive and Gender-Affirming Healthcare Access in any of our rulebooks — alongside mandatory PT, a host of work rule improvements, and some very tasty wage increases.

And just last year I worked with staff and the Single Engagement Agreement Committee to help fill a hole left by the mothballing of the Eastern Staged Reading Agreement, creating a framework that could be used for minimal-to-no-rehearsal staged readings and new work festivals. 

Those of us who make our lives and careers outside opportunity-dense areas tend to have a more symbiotic relationship with our nationally-scattered independent theatres than do folks living and working in more purely transactional (i.e., Commercial) theatrical ecosystems.  Meeting the needs of those members while protecting them presents a different kind of challenge, but it can also provide great opportunity: far more often than not, small independent producers — most of them nonprofits that are, in the words of our Executive Director, "politically aligned with us" — are willing and able to engage the union in mutually beneficial bargaining instead of subjecting us to the antagonistic and distributive bargaining style that’s all too common (and sadly, necessary for us to adopt in turn) when investors are involved.

I know from personal experience that when we can productively cultivate good relationships with our bargaining partners, our membership directly benefits at the bargaining table and in the workplace.

If you’re still with me, I’ll close with some other core beliefs:

Finding the best answer to any given problem doesn’t mean coming into a meeting trying to persuade everyone that you already know what that answer should be.

Every single other person brings something from their experience I don’t have access to and can learn from.

Small-group problem solving is most productive when it’s approached with curiosity, a certain humility, and a sense of joy in the work.

Activism and activists are absolutely necessary, but I know my own skill sets and I’m a sausage-maker and a pragmatist. We need both types in the room in order to achieve anything.

If one can presume good faith on the part of the other person and can do so without risk of harm to oneself, one has the responsibility to do so.

I am absolutely a work in progress.

And I am deeply, deeply uncomfortable with the number of times I’ve used the word “I” in this statement.

Thank you for making it this far, and thank you for your consideration.