The “Playwrights in Mind” conference is sponsored by the New York-based Dramatists Guild of America and will be hosted by Theater of the First Amendment, a small equity company based at George Mason. The Dramatists Guild is a service organization that helps playwrights in dealings with theaters. The guild has existed for more than 80 years, but this is the first conference the organization has held.
Gary Garrison, the guild’s executive director for creative affairs, says the higher-profile speakers — among them playwrights Edward Albee and Christopher Durang and musical theater composer/lyricist Stephen Schwartz (“Wicked”) — will “have a lot of wisdom to share” with attendees, but, he says, “not everybody wants to hear a big name speak about their career. . . . A lot of people might want to learn how to write a synopsis of their play.” More and more theaters require it, and it’s a totally different skill, he says. Todd London, artistic director of the New Dramatists in New York, a kind of artists’ colony for select young playwrights, will speak about the progress made since his 2009 “Outrageous Fortune,” a book that described the fact most young playwrights can’t make a living at their trade. The writers interviewed were almost universally critical of the corporate culture of larger nonprofit theaters and how playwrights are treated as incidental guests at such institutions.
Since the book came out, London says he’s seen positive changes, citing Arena resident playwright program. Arena’s Smith agrees that “writers need a living salary, need to be treated as workers in the same way that if you are a professional working in a law office . . . that you’re paid for your work. No surprise there. And that people need health care, and in the theater, it’s really important for writers to have ongoing relationships with theater companies,” she says.
The biggest change, London says, involves theaters backing off traditional demands for a percentage of a dramatist’s earnings from future productions of plays that premiere at their theaters. “Now the large theaters [have] finally understood that playwrights don’t earn any money,” London says. “That’s a tidal change. That’s a huge change.”
Another speaker, playwright Julia Jordan (“Tatjana in Color”) and some New York theater colleagues lobbied two years ago for productions of more works by women. A study commissioned for Jordan and her fellow writers revealed that although women make up half of most playwriting programs at universities, they weren’t transitioning into professional theater, perhaps scared off by the economics of it and stories of bias, Jordan says. About 33 percent of all plays sent to theaters for consideration are by women, and only about 17 percent of plays produced are by women.
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