In the artistic community there are many myths. First, that there is an artistic community waiting for you. Second, that your arts-training program has adequately prepared you to participate in it. And third, that you can build a viable career if you only try hard enough.

For my part, I am a theater artist, so I’ll stick to what I know—though I suspect the state of things is the same in the other arts. I am here to tell you the biggest, wettest secret: There’s no place in the arts for artists any more.

To begin with, training programs have oversaturated the market. More than 200 American colleges and universities now offer a Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Fine Arts, or Master of Fine Arts in performance, design, directing and theater management. Every year these programs dump thousands of unsuspecting graduates into a job market that is barely functioning at its sustainable limit. And for what? To sustain the teaching careers of the last batch of artists who couldn’t stomach cold beanie weenies long enough to “make it.” Theatre-training programs are robbing the young to pay the mediocre, and this is a sure-fire recipe for generations upon generations of weak sauce.

We are not only prisoners of our training programs, we’re also prisoners of our areas of specialization. The theater-training programs that are happily taking students’ money are training them in one very specific area and giving them virtually none of the skills they need to survive in the marketplace. (I remain convinced that I owe my continued existence as a theatre maker to the wide array of jobs I have had inside and outside of theatre.)

BFA students, in particular, train in a vacuum, blithely unaware of the many other types of theater artists who are needed to make theaters run. These students are paying to miss their families’ weddings, funerals and births, sitting in the dark in some shitty undergrad technical rehearsal…for a show…about family. They are highly specialized fine artists who aren’t prepared to sling coffee or bar-back long enough to make it one year out of school, let alone file their Schedule C Self-Employed IRS tax forms. Instead they are staffing the executive offices of New York City’s major corporations, fetching, filing and typing. All across the country they are waking up at age 33, exhausted, realizing they haven’t acted or designed or directed in more than a decade, that they have paid off exactly one third of their student loans, and that health benefits and paid time off are better than beanie weenies. From a can.

And then, once you have “made it”—by the grace of god, cracked into the industry, what can you expect? In his 2004 essay No Place For an Artist, lighting designer Peter Maradudin estimates that the total compensation for all the artists who actually create and perform at a regional theater amounts to just 15 percent of any one theater’s annual operating budget. For a theater professional to make a sustainable living, say, $40,000 a year, a union designer would have to design 17 shows and a union actor would have to be in rehearsal or production constantly—52 weeks a year without vacation. Somehow the word “sustainable” doesn’t come to mind.

Unions aren’t helping any either. The League of Resident Theatres (LORT) was created for the sole purpose of establishing sound communication between resident theaters in the United States. Among the well-intentioned objectives of this organization, LORT aimed to establish and maintain stable, equitable labor relations between its member organizations and unions.

Union specializations were invented to protect, cherish, respect and sustain the artist, but what they’re really doing is keeping artists from working. Unions have taken the art out of the work and turned the professional theater into an exhausting system where it’s only really possible or profitable to care about the hours you’re working, the money you’re making and whether you’ll go into meal penalty.

For example, while recently working at one of Seattle’s larger LORT theatres, I bumped into a fellow theater artist specializing in props. I believe she actually has a master’s degree in furniture building. That day, this woman was the only props artist on the clock while everyone else took lunch. She mopped the stage. For $26 dollars an hour in an agreement for a minimum 4-hour call. She shrugged, grinned and said, “I just made a hundred bucks.” You might understand the tragedy in this if you had ever seen a chair she’d built.

The fact of the matter is that art shouldn’t work. On paper, it doesn’t work. And yet true art making is relentless. It will endure—and endures in the face of weak sauce, beanie weenies, training programs and overspecialized unions.

That’s the bigger secret.