Published in the centennial year of the Actors’ Equity Association (AEA), Sean Holmes's book commemorates this organization by arguing for the importance of actors’ unionization to labour history. The founders of AEA are this history's primary subjects; their voices amply exhibit the pretensions and social conservatism that Holmes argues were fundamental to how these leaders reconciled their conception of acting as high art with their need to organize the theatrical labour force. Considerations of the disparate working lives of stars and unknown actors, stage actors’ biases against popular entertainers, and the particularities of life on touring circuits versus Broadway stages complicate previous portrayals of the AEA as a homogeneous group that waged war against the commercial theatre trusts for a singular cause.
Following an introduction that maps the cultural and economic landscape of the theatre industry in the early twentieth century, chapter 1 recounts the AEA's inception in 1913 as a voluntary organization limited to actors of the so-called legitimate theatre. Chapter 2 engages with the consequent difficulties of envisioning acting as work, through a discussion of the AEA's internal conflict over the decision to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor, a union of skilled craftsmen.
The balance of the inquiry is the decade between the Actors’ Strike of 1919 and the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, years during which the AEA crystallized as a labour organization and became a fixture of the theatre industry. Chapter 3's thoroughgoing analysis of the Actors’ Strike is Holmes's most salient contribution. A detailed account of the strike's organization and theatrical elements discloses the lasting effects of protest on the AEA's membership, its actor–manager relations, and its relations with both theatrical and industrial labour unions. Chapter 4 focuses on the AEA's struggle with theatrical producers’ associations to implement the strike gains, particularly the Equity contract. Chapter 5 elaborates the implications for both actors and managers under contract to uphold standards determined by the AEA; the chapter's focus on the AEA's enforcement of Prohibitionist values and Victorian sexual mores among its members demonstrates the organization's desire to elevate acting to middle-class respectability, as well as the AEA's affirmation of the theatre trusts’ authority.
Chapter 6 marks the AEA's failed attempt to extend its reach to the burgeoning motion-picture industry. Holmes convincingly argues that the distinct cultures of stage and screen actors seemingly rendered the AEA irrelevant in Hollywood. Nevertheless, here and in his epilogue on the Great Depression's effects on the AEA and commercial theatre, Holmes misses the opportunity to contextualize the AEA's position in the 1930s within the assemblage of political, economic and cultural factors that concurrently made unionization attractive to film actors, who formed the Screen Actors’ Guild in 1933.
This history's accessibility, precise analysis of archival evidence and substantive investigation into the multiple forces that shaped the AEA in its formative years make it a strong text for undergraduate history courses and graduate methods courses in the fields of theatre and labour studies alike.
