New Plays: The Coddling Can Be Constraining

"I certainly am," says playwright Sheila Callaghan, whose mind-set became so development-oriented that she began writing stage directions that would sound artful at readings. "I can afford to now. My plays were getting written to death in favor of me making connections in the business."

Much of this has unfolded in public or semi-private view, with theaters routinely inviting subscribers to attend staged readings and offer feedback, the better to whet the appetite for hard-to-sell untested titles. It's the kind of artistic hand-holding that's less conspicuous in movies or music, where audiences seem to crave fresh material.

But Burgess refutes the comparison, noting the template whereby Hollywood scripts go nowhere forever, "and then Tom Stoppard rewrites your movie." Roth notes that if the music argument is switched from pop to classical, "Symphonies die with their new-music programs. They're playing their hits."

Still, complaints have been heard and methods are changing. At Woolly Mammoth, Artistic Director Howard Shalwitz has narrowed the company's development efforts to plays he intends to produce. (Callaghan has been working happily on "Fever/Dream" with Woolly, where it will premiere next spring.) The National New Play Network -- with Woolly as one of more than 20 member troupes -- has pioneered something called "rolling premieres" shared by three or more member theaters across the country. That was devised to counteract "premiere-itis," an affliction characterized by a theater's willingness to produce a play only if that theater could do it first.

"We're undoing a lot of what the history has been," Dower says.

Then there's the "just do it" ethos that might account for some of the creative energy and audience interest in the Capital Fringe Festival, which wraps up its third season today. The products and goals of Fringe shows are often quite different from what settled theaters are looking for, yet it seems to be answering some sort of hunger on both sides of the footlights.

That attitude, fertilized by playwrights' frustrations, inspired Manhattan's 13P, one of several groups of writers taking the bull by the horns. The motto of 13P is "We Don't Develop Plays (We DO Them)," and their membership includes such well-regarded writers as Sarah Ruhl ("Dead Man's Cell Phone"), Anne Washburn ("The Internationalist"), and Callaghan, whose "Crawl, Fade to White" is due this fall.

"Eight years later I'm finding it again," Callaghan says of that play, which lost its voice in the development mill. "That one was definitely spoiled by the system of too many cooks."