New Plays: The Coddling Can Be Constraining
Frustrated Playwrights Say Approach Does More Harm Than Good

By Nelson Pressley
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, July 27, 2008

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.

The names often have an infantilizing quality: PlayPenn in Philadelphia, or the relatively new Inkubator series here. Then there's that $125 million reconstruction at Arena Stage's longtime home in Southwest that will yield a significant new addition: a new-play venue called the Cradle.

Playwright Richard Nelson took issue with all this complicated, sometimes condescending and frequently enforced support of new plays -- which involves readings and workshops and loads of advice heaped on playwrights, with no guarantee of production -- in a speech last year to the Laura Pels Foundation.

"The play will always not be right," said Nelson, then the head of Yale's playwriting program. "Will always need 'help.' In other words, writing a play is too big of a job for just the playwright to achieve. This, I believe, is now a prevalent attitude in the American theater. And this mind-set is devastating."

Ari Roth, artistic director of Washington's Theater J (and a playwright himself), counters: "These institutions that treat new plays with kid gloves -- why are they doing it? Nobody wants to see a new play unless it's terrific. New plays are nobody's best friend until they've got some heat behind them. So we're protecting them."

This internal disconnect springs from the grand upside of the American theater: a massive generational boom in professionalism as companies have continued to expand and evolve over the past generation. See, for instance, the rash of expensive new stages built around Washington over the past decade, and note how the Dramatist Guild's executive director for creative affairs, Gary Garrison, describes his job as "the care and feeding of 6,000 playwrights." The number and quality of academic programs that train playwrights continue to increase, as well.

That's partly why David Dower, producing artistic associate at Arena, describes this as a period of abundance for new plays. "There are many more playwrights having access to the field than ever before," Dower said last week from Minneapolis, where he was participating in (naturally) a new-play workshop called PlayLabs 2008.

It's high season for the development factories, in fact, whether it's the long-established O'Neill National Theater Institute or the influential Sundance Institute Theater Lab. This month, Garrison led the Kennedy Center's Summer Playwriting Intensive, where 40 emerging writers were in contact with such established playwrights as Marsha Norman and Quiara Alegría Hudes (of this year's Tony-winning musical "In the Heights," and an alumna of the Intensive). From there, he went to Philadelphia for the PlayPenn workshop.

There is much, of course, to be gained from these tightly focused, rigorously organized retreats and boot camps. Jessica Burgess, artistic director of the Inkwell (home of the Inkubator series), says: "Young writers don't know how much can go unwritten, and how much they can ask of their collaborators. A director can create a picture worth a thousand words, and you don't know you can leave those words out until you see the picture."

Yet as the now-common development models became institutionalized, feelings sometimes hardened as playwrights began to feel they were stuck in utero -- more commonly known by the Hollywood term "development hell." Writers have been known to bounce around the country from reading to workshop, never quite landing a full production for the play getting all that attention and help.

The result has been a slow-building backlash epitomized by Nelson's speech. Jeremy Skidmore, producer of the recent Source Festival, says, "I find that playwrights are less interested in just doing workshops or readings unless they're at the very, very beginning of the process or the very, very beginnings of their careers."

So playwrights are saying a polite "no, thanks" to the process that's not aimed squarely at full production?

"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."