The stagehands, who voted last summer to be represented by Philadelphia’s IATSE Local 8, went on strike in January after negotiations with PTC stalled over issues including the ability for PTC to hire non-union replacements. IATSE Local 8 started negotiating with theatre management on the stagehands’ behalf in Sept. 2012.
Mike Barnes, Local 8’s business agent, who had dismissed the PTC’s Jan. 20 contract offer as “punitive,” called the Feb. 1 agreement “a good deal.” He also credited PTC’s producing artistic director, Sara Garonzik, for helping to break through the impasse.
Although PTC had asked media outlets to refrain from reviewing their pared-down production, which imagines Martin Luther King’s last night before his assassination, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jim Rutter posted a critical review on philly.com after the show opened Jan. 19.
“Lightning and thunder should have raged across the set as harbingers of the next day’s doom,” Rutter wrote. “In their place, words — anemic, colorless words — let us know what we would have seen in a fully realized production.”
The bare-bones production included actors who are members of Actors’ Equity Association, working in accordance with their union contract. They were expected to start working together with PTC’s unionized stagehands in early February, well before The Mountaintop’s run ends Feb. 18.
Although details of the agreement were sketchy at presstime, Barnes noted that, in addition to their insistence against the hiring of non-union stagehands, the striking stagehands were seeking a 25-cent-per-hour raise, health benefits and rules against retaliation firings.
