Conversation Starter... the Coddled Playwright?

“The most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life.” — An excerpt from Samuel Pepys' Diary about a production of William Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream performed in 1662

"Too much talk, too academic, too haughty, too unsure of itself, whether it was funny or sad. . . ." — comments in rejection letters about Margaret Edson's play Wit

My apologies for the silence, dear blog readers.  I have very much wanted to tell you all about what's happening with The Inkwell.  It seems we're now knee-deep in a rich and heated discussion about new play development… what's working and not working here in America.

I need to take about back more than a month, when The Inkwell hosted its third and final panel discussion at the Source Theatre Festival.  On July 6th (again, my apologies for the great delay in reporting), we asked Arena Stage's David Dower, Literary Manager for Wooly Mammoth Theatre Elissa Goetchius, The Washington City Paper Theatre Critic Trey Graham, and Source Theatre Festival Producer Jeremy Skidmore to talk about their views about new work in Washington.  The discussion quickly broadened to the way new plays are created, developed, and produced in America… and the search for the perfect model.

David Dower knows a lot about how theaters across America are approaching new plays and emerging playwrights.  He's one of the founding members of Z Space Studio in San Francisco, an incubator for all sorts of new theater work, as well as director and producer. (It's fun to read about his collaboration with monologuer Jeremy Kornbluth, author and performer of Haiku Tunnel…scroll down to "Benjamin Franklin: Unplugged.")  As an Artistic Associate for Arena Stage focused on new play development, he's traveled the country, talking with literary managers and artistic directors.  He thinks that the problem of "development hell" (where playwrights find their work constantly work-shopped and never produced) is old news.  There are millions of dollars flowing into play development efforts, he says.  The problem is that resources aren't aligned across the country.  So a playwright may be invited into a rigorous play development process, see their work produced once, and then it's over.  The problem right now is creating momentum behind a play so that it gets a second, third, and fourth production.  And that the playwright still has time to fine tune the piece along the way.

David has written a lot about a "distributed development" model on Arena Stage's New Play Blog, discussing how theaters are now starting to work together to bring a play along through a series of productions.  He also talks about his experience participating on our panel!

Elissa Geotchius discussed how Wooly Mammoth — which is entirely focused on producing work that hasn't been seen before in Washington, DC — engages with playwrights.  To put it simply, she gets around the country and sees a lot of plays.  She also keeps a "stalking list" of playwrights that she feels fit with Wooly Mammoth's aesthetic.  Wooly Mammoth is committed to working with playwrights to see their work produced (they won't develop a piece that they won't produce, she said), although she freely admits that the Wooly Mammoth team struggles to figure out how to increase interactions with playwrights in the development process.

Trey Graham wondered out loud about the sustainability of play labs (he cited the famous Eugene O'Neill Center in Connecticut in particular) and how you can fairly compensate playwrights.  If the only real income that comes from royalties, how to split the pie fairly, especially if more than one play lab or theater is involved in the development a play.  For the most part, the playwright is the one short shrifted in royalty arrangements, because everyone takes a cut.  By the time a play is produced commercially (a rare occurrence), the playwright receives no more than 30 percent of royalties.

And what is the role of the critic in the process? Trey believes he's supposed to clarify for the theatre-going audience the choices made by a director and playwright in a production of a new play, not in the writing of the play itself.  He'll leave that task to the dramaturges.

Jeremy Skidmore heaped praise upon the way playwrights are support in Canada (Jeremy is an admitted and ardent fan of the Canucks).  First, the government provides relatively more generous funding to theater than in America, allowing Canadian theaters to take more risk.  Second, every play that is produced is published, so plays are easily distributed across the country.  Third, there's a model for shared theater space for small companies, reducing one of the major expenses of any theatre group and creating a hub for sharing new works.

Asked the question about the state of new work in Washington specifically, all agreed that a basic infrastructure for DC playwrights is missing.  There's no center for practice and there's no advocate for local writers.

(Hmmmm…. I wonder who can fill that role?)

So this is just the start of the conversation.  Since the panel, Theatre Critic Nelson Pressley has written a rather provocative article in The Washington Post, positing the claim that new play development processes merely coddle the playwright.

"Does the American theater treat its playwrights like babies? You might think so, considering the elaborate midwifing infrastructure that has been erected around play development in recent years."

So starts the article, which goes on to quote The Inkwell's Artistic Director Jessi Burgess with a defense of incubation processes.

Well, we at The Inkwell are not leaving the last word to Mr. Pressley.  Instead, we've invited him to join playwright Callie Kimball, Round House Theatre Artistic Director Blake Robison, and Theater J Artistic Director and playwright Ari Roth for a lively discussion about his article at The Kennedy Center's Page-to-Stage Festival.

So please join us on September 1st at 6:00 p.m. in Rehearsal Room One for another lively panel discussion, Playwrights: Pampered? Patronized? Pushed Aside?

And check out the other activities we've got planned as The Inkwell celebrates its first birthday at Page-to-Stage.