Who I am. Why I do this.
Campaigning – for anything, as I think we’re discovering nationally – during a pandemic is just somehow deeply weird. And for me, there’s always been an aspect of self-promotion to it that I personally have never been super-comfortable with. I really enjoy the process of governance, and I really don’t care much for politics. Love the work, hate the hoop-jumping and schmoozing sometimes required in order to get the job.
But if the work is important – and I think it is – and I think I am or would be good at it – which I think I am and will be – it’s only fair to acknowledge the reality, make the effort to open up, put myself out there, and ask for the job.
So, hey, hi, thank you for joining me here. My name is Doug MacKechnie, I’m running for Central Region Principal Councilor, and I’d very much like your vote.
I’ve been involved in Equity governance for almost a decade, but outside committee, Board, and Council rooms, there’s no reason for most of our national membership to know me. I’m not a name, never toured, don’t sing. I’ve worked entirely in the Central Region, mostly on smaller contracts.
And while a lot of us will put out campaign statements ringing various changes on generalities of “Union! Money! Jobs!” there’s a lot of problem-solving work done in small rooms, in small groups, on very specific issues under very specific circumstances – issues and circumstances that right now at least seem capable of changing week-to-week if not day-to-day. And unless you know who a candidate is, how they think, I’m not sure how much soundbites and slogans can tell you about how that candidate is going to function in those small rooms and small groups.
So for good or ill, I’m just going to begin by telling you about myself.
I was born on Long Island, youngest of three after a 7-year gap. My family lived in Levittown, and moved to Wappingers Falls, NY in 1968 when I was 2 and Dad started work for IBM as a draftsman, then to Colchester, VT in 1977 when Dad finagled a transfer to the Essex Junction plant. My parents split less than 2 years later, and through high school it was just me, Mom, and her grandmother. There were some rocky moments… but I was pretty much a straight-A student, and in band, drama, Scouts, Student Council, National Honor Society... I went to an upstate NY engineering school and got a BS in Physics and an MBA, mostly on scholarship, and did a bunch of theatre but much as I loved it I thought acting would remain a hobby.
2 years later, after no luck finding work in the early ‘90s recession, a lot more community theatre under my belt, some Meisner classes with a graduate of the Neighborhood Playhouse who’d moved North out of the city, some success paying rent with local nonunion commercials and industrials, and coming out the other side of a pretty devastating breakup, I was packing up and moving to Chicago to start an MFA in Acting at The Theatre School @ DePaul.
I finished that in 1995 and have been here ever since.
After graduation, I dove right into the non-Equity scene in Chicago and began doing show after show, teaching standardized test prep classes to pay the bills. The problem was that I didn’t know what I was doing, in terms of navigating the actual business. At that time DePaul didn’t really have many working acting or directing faculty – so we’d had no active connections to or information about the national theatre industry. As students in a conservatory on a quarter system, we weren’t allowed to work in theatre outside school during the year, and Spring quarter ran too late to be available for Summer work. It had been a physical and emotional bootcamp, and we were trained to the teeth, but had a year of an audition class that was almost exclusively on-camera focused and were then dropped into the world with little to no guidance about how to actually begin building a career on stage, if that’s what we wanted. At that time, I didn’t even know the right questions to ask.
On top of that, not long after graduating, with the rest of my 30s looming and a wedding on the impending horizon, I determined I needed a far more stable paycheck, and thus a full-time day job. I set aside the notion of making a living on stage, at least in that near future, and let myself get pulled back into corporate America. I began working for a start-up Medicaid HMO, first in Government Relations and then as a Business Analyst in IT, a field I stayed in for the next 20 years. I eventually wound up back at IBM and a few years ago ended my corporate “career,” such as it was, on a VP’s leadership team as a cognitive data analyst working on IBM Watson search technology.
But throughout and alongside all that… I continued working on stage and on camera. I finally got my Equity card in 2005, and have since worked CAT and SPT contracts, some Special Appearance agreements, and lots and lots (and lots) of Staged Reading codes. As I said above, I’ve spent my entire professional career here in the Central Region, and a good portion of it working on new plays. I’m an Associate Artist with Chicago Dramatists, and was a de facto company member with ShawChicago in its last 4-5 years.
I’d begun working on Equity committees a few years after getting my card, and was elected to a non-Councilor Central Regional Board seat in 2012.
Now, eight years later, I chair the Central Region Developing Theatres committee, with responsibility for oversight of our Central Region SPT, LOA-, and Special Appearance agreements, and I’m 3rd Vice-Chair of the CAT committee. CRB non-Councilors can chair or vice-chair national non-contract committees, and I’m 2nd Vice-Chair of the National Media and New Technology committee and 5th Vice-Chair of National Membership Education. I’m also a member of the National EPA, Agency, LORT, Guest Artist, and Organizing committees, and have served on special review working groups for codes and membership rules and Special Appearance agreements.
Throughout my committee work and in the leadership roles I hold I’ve sought to be a voice not only for the membership in the Central Region, but for a significant portion of our national membership: the vast majority of us – 70% in some years – who don’t work a single contracted workweek in any given year. Those who have – for a variety of reasons, some actively personal, some involuntarily economic – structured their economic lives so as not to rely on the stage for a living but who still hold their Equity cards – and withhold their labor – proudly, in solidarity, against the periodic opportunity for themselves to work in professional theatre.
Throughout the next few weeks, I’ll be posting more notes on how we’ve increased those opportunities in the Central Region and why we need even more, my passion for promoting a sustainable theatrical ecosystem and what that means for both our membership and our bargaining partners, what it means to hold an entertainment union card in 2020, why it would behoove the union to push for national universal health care in addition to vastly increased public and private arts funding, and the role of a cis-het fifty-something white guy when it comes to matters of EDI, and of harassment, among other topics.
But for now, this is who I am and why I’m running for Council. For me, in essence, it’s a little like asking for a promotion… to a job that’s got even more responsibility but is just as unpaid. And it’s a job that needs certain skill sets.
I’m a caretaker. I run an effective meeting, and I work hard to facilitate conversation and make sure everyone is heard and understood. I’m very good at recognizing when smart people are talking past each other because they’re working from different mental frameworks, and can usually help get everyone on similar pages. And I’m really good at problem definition, analysis, and solution.
I think we’re going to need these skills even more as we look forward to the next year, working with theatres as they re-open, getting our members back to work safely, and putting our theatrical economy back to rights.
I’d very much like to be a part of that work.
And by the time you send your ballot in, I hope I’ve earned your vote.