The ethicist in “Singing in the Rain”

For many years, I have been attempting to persuade the local professional theater community in Washington, D.C. to develop and adopt an official Code of Ethics. I have not been successful, and it’s not surprising. Theater, indeed professional show business of all kinds, has been almost ethics-free for centuries. These are tough pursuits, and tough pursuits easily gravitate toward the Law of the Jungle—“Kill or be killed”—unless the culture makes a concerted effort to evolve in a different direction. Theater certainly has not. There a few unwritten rules in theater that could form the backbone of a useful code, such as “The show must go on!”, and there have certainly been members of the profession who are thoroughly ethical, they tend to be very successful individuals who have taken on high ideals once the need to back-stab has lessened, people who are so talented and fortunate that the need to lie and cheat never arises, or, a special category, marginally talented but hard-working and versatile professionals whose trustworthiness is their primary asset. (This last group usually fares poorly in the end.)

Not only have I been unable to interest anyone in developing a code for the theater, I have never heard of one being developed anywhere else. Until now, that is. I recently learned that Kathleen Freeman, a great character actress* who died in 2001, wrote and adopted an ethics code for a small theater company, the Circle Players, that she established in Los Angeles when she was 24 years old. Continue reading →