Every mother-to-be has some level of nervousness around what it means to raise a baby, but as an actor, Bermudez is also experiencing a good dose of professional fear about the changes to come. Can she be a mother and still maintain her career as a performer or will her choice to start a family mean the end of her time on stage?
“I have a fear of being forgotten or not having the time or energy to do it,” says Bermudez. “I have a fear of people thinking, oh she just had a baby so I shouldn’t call her for this role….or that there are auditions I’m going to miss out on and that will sting at times.”
This laundry list of "what ifs and how will I” is familiar ground for every Houston theater artist mother we spoke to for this piece. Whether they had their kids a decade ago or recently, these mums share the same worries and more frustratingly, many of the same institutional challenges when it comes to parenting as an actor.
The challenges the women say, begin at pregnancy.
Krystal Uchem was pregnant during the first year of her college theater degree, not that anyone knew. Fearful the news would affect her opportunities to get roles or make people question her ability as a performer, she hid the pregnancy. “I felt ashamed having to hide it,” says Uchem. “But I didn’t want to give anyone on the administrative end a reason to say no before they said yes.”
Shanea’a Rae Moore’s pregnancy was met with wildly divergent attitudes.
“I had two different pregnant experiences," says Moore who found out she was expecting mid-run while performing in a show. “That same person was going to hire me again for the fall but when they found out they said nope, can’t hire you after all. And they did it without even talking to me about it.”
Yet in another casting situation, Moore says the person was eager to make the role work for her. “So, I lost one role and another person thought my pregnancy would make the character more vibrant.”
Professionally speaking, mums-to-be are very much beholden to whatever attitudes they encounter along the way, making it even more difficult for them to make decisions about career and family.
But if pregnancy is tough to navigate as an actor, having children is even more difficult. The first thing they learn is that financially, they’re on their own. Even if the artist is part of the union (Actors’ Equity Association) or an actor at a big regional theater.
Elizabeth Bunch had both her children as a member of the resident company at the Alley Theatre. “There was nothing in place to help me,” says Bunch. "I'm at the Alley but I'm not staff and Equity doesn't have maternity leave, so for me, it meant I had to stop working and it took me out of a show."
Bunch was back on stage a mere seven weeks after having her baby, a show that both she and her husband (also an Alley resident member) starred in. “It felt very fast, but I hadn’t worked in three months and that meant no income.”
If an actor can weather the financial burden, then there’s the scheduling crises parenthood in the theater creates.
With such long, non-traditional hours, actors rely on family/friends for support or pay for some other mode of child care. And in this case, other doesn't mean regular daycare. Most childcare facilities insist parents pick up their kids by 5:30 p.m. but theater actors often need to drop their kids off to care at 6:30 at night during a show, not to mention find care for the lengthy dress and technical rehearsal process.
If you’re a stage manager, the hours are even longer.
“If tech ends at 10 pm, the actors get out of costume and leave but my team still has to clean up, then we have a production meeting, then I still have other things to do,” says Rachel Dooley, Equity Stage Manager. “So, my days are massively longer than the actors and that's more time that I don't see my children or need to find childcare.”
What if there’s an emergency or your child is sick or needs a chaperone for activities? Working in theater is a collaborative endeavor, meaning things grind to a halt if an artist isn’t there. And rescheduling is almost impossible when so many people have made time for the set hours.
“It was like, OMG who can I call, because we don’t have family here,” says Bunch. “It meant calling a paid babysitter to take my kid to urgent care, which was awful. Or the babysitter watching my kid's Little League games because they were on Sunday afternoons. And you're like 'I hope my kid isn't psychologically damaged because I dropped him off and said this nice lady is going to root for you…bye!'”
What has made motherhood as an actor easier for some women is the ability to bring their child to work with them when needed, that is, if the theater allows it.
“At this point, if the theater isn’t kid-friendly, I don't want to be there,” says Moore. “I’ve had companies say bring your kid to rehearsal and we’ll figure it out. There are a couple very small companies in town that have childcare, Creative Movement Practices and The Octarine Accord, and if they can make it happen, I don’t understand why others can’t.”
Uchem also believes that daycare is urgently needed in the industry. “Oftentimes artists have it in their mind that children just aren’t part of their life picture because they just can’t be,” says Uchem. “But with the right support system and the right understanding it can work. People want to build families separate from work. It’s a life we want to build for ourselves and it needs to be supported.”“Oftentimes artists have it in their mind that children just aren’t part of their life picture because they just can’t be.” — Krystal Uchem.
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It was the inability to have her children in the building that eventually led Dooley to leave her stage manager position at the Alley.
“With my first child, I was lucky enough to have her in a dressing room with my mother-in-law so I could still breastfeed and see her on breaks and that was night and day compared with my son who was born post-pandemic. By then children were explicitly not allowed in the building.”
Dooley was optimistic during the pandemic when there were so many conversations at the Alley about how to do things better, but ultimately, she felt frustrated at the end of 2023 when she said she realized change wasn't going to happen in the way she needed it.
“Post-pandemic, I didn't get any time with my kids whatsoever,” says Dooley. “It didn’t necessarily have to be childcare in the rehearsal room, but had the organization been able to create any inclusive policy for caregivers it would have made a difference. They wouldn’t have solved every problem, but completely shutting kids out – there was no working with that.”
And of course, not all mothers need or want the exact same thing.
For Bunch, kids allowed in the rehearsal room or daycare at the theater was never something she pushed for.
“I’m not fully present at work as an artist when my child is there because I’m not off duty as a parent. So, I don’t have the same quality of work when I’m worried about him not sitting still doing something inappropriate, “says Bunch. “Who wants their 2-year-old to go to bed at their job six nights a week and then I have to go and wake them up and take them home and hope they go back to bed – it’s not healthy for the kids to adapt to my awful schedule.”
Brandon Kahn, Alley Theatre General Manager, a parent and former stage manager himself, says he understands how challenging it can be to juggle work and personal life. According to the Alley, they never had a formal policy on the matter of letting children not involved in a show into the production and office spaces. During the pandemic they decided in the interests of safety for everyone, they would not allow it going forward.
The Alley's rehearsal schedule was reduced from a six-day work week to no more than five days per week with Sundays and Mondays off, they eliminated ten out of 12 rehearsal days, they offer staff discounted camp tuition to help with childcare during Spring and Summer breaks and there’s a wellness room where nursing mothers can pump or any staff member can take a mental health break.
The wellness rooms at theaters such as the Alley and Stages are a step in the right direction for nursing mothers and a definite improvement says local director and producer Laura Moreno. “I've seen a lot of mothers take advantage of the private space to pump. I know five years ago when I first had my little girl, these rooms didn't exist in these theaters because I pumped in a bathroom at one and in a storage closet in another.”
While change isn't happening holistically enough for many theater artist mothers, there is a feeling that the issues at least can finally be raised and are no longer a taboo subject. Mothers are demanding consideration and respect in the places they work.
“In the past, I’ve worked for many people where it was having kids is your problem… you cannot let your problem invade my workspace,” says Bunch. “The thing that’s changed globally is that while there’s no solution for it yet, I’m not terrified to go up to the stage manager and say I just got a call from school I need to go pick up my kid and take him to urgent care because he’s throwing up.”
“Progress is happening slowly and systematically,” says Moore. “But there is still little piddly stuff – don't ask me to lose baby weight, that's rude. Don't assume I'm not going to have the energy or care about the work or that I have bigger worries at home. Has being a mum been proven as a problem of actors not being able to do their jobs? And is it a problem different than any other distractions we have as humans?"
For her part, Dooley says being a mother made her better at her job. “I am a better stage manager for being a parent. Going through pregnancy and existing in spaces that are no longer designed for you really opened my perspective to access … I’m better able to connect and empathize with people and take the time to learn about their experiences and see the common ground.”
Bermudez hopes that when it’s her time to go back to performing she’ll be prepared for any challenges that being a mother and an actor entails. “I have been told it is difficult but a lot of it depends on the baby. However, I do know it's possible because I've seen it done.”
“In a perfect world – I could have day hours instead of evening hours but that's not the job," says Bermudez who thinks that realistically onsite daycare is the dream that could come true. “Think about it, you can go to the gym and drop off your kid while you work out…something like that for the theater would be setting themselves up for the flexibility of mothers.
