Arena Stage gives playwrights higher billing by putting them on payroll

The Public Theater, also supported by Mellon, has created a Master Writer Chair position. This three-year residency, currently held by prize-winning Suzan-Lori Parks, includes a salary competitive with those of other Public Theater officials, health care, a retirement package, plus a professorial appointment and housing at New York University.

"Certainly, it has been noticed that the administrators of these organizations are paid a salary and most artists are paid on contract," said Diane Ragsdale, associate program officer in performing arts at the Mellon Foundation. "It's hard when you have to juggle two to three part-time jobs."

Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater's artistic director, said, "What the theater says to playwrights is, Why don't you do television and movies, and when you are slumming, come do theater."

Arena is taking the residency concept one step beyond the Public Theater's approach -- in the number of writers getting assignments, compensation (in the mid-five-figure range), the manner in which they are being invited into the company and the measure of financial autonomy the theater is ceding them in guiding the projects' early stages. Out-of-town playwrights will also receive housing.

"It's a very interesting gamble, for them and for us," said Freed, the San Francisco playwright. "It hit in a zone for me, with my despair with the American theater and the pressures that are deforming it."

Zacarias, one in a small band of Washington-based playwrights, had an unabashedly emotional response to being offered a spot. "I wept," she said. "I did. There are health benefits, which a playwright has never really gotten. And you can join their gym! Because being a playwright is a very solitary thing."

Zacarias has begun her tenure with Arena and spent the first few months of it refining several plays she had long wanted to revise. Soon, she said, she will begin thinking about a new play for the company. This summer, she will be joined in the program by Freed and Kron. In January, the final two, Randolph-Wright and Hall, will come onboard.

Arena Associate Artistic Director David Dower said that the company will always have one resident playwright from the Washington area in an effort to keep a local focus as it looks to become a national force.

In addition to the five chosen, two other playwrights -- David Henry Hwang ("M. Butterfly") and Lynn Nottage, a Pulitzer winner last year for "Ruined" -- will be given money for one new play each to be produced at Arena in what are being called "project residencies."

The thinking is, said Molly Smith, Arena's artistic director, that each playwright has a specific way of doing things that might or might not jibe with the institution's. "This will give an opportunity to have artists embedded in every level at Arena," she said. "Part of what this program does is give them the tools for their best work. And it will give these writers an artistic home, with all the pleasure and pain of an artistic home."

The Arena initiative was praised by Polly Carl, the director of artistic development for Steppenwolf, a regional company based in Chicago. "This is awesome, what Arena is doing," she said. Playwrights yearn for more involvement with theater companies, she said. "The depth of what Arena is doing is really impressive."

The playwrights will be free to work on outside projects during their tenure and can write wherever it suits them, although they will spend a good amount of time in Washington. In addition to the yearly salaries, the playwrights will have $15,000 budgets to spend as they see fit for the workshop phases of their creations.

Playwrights are so unaccustomed to having theaters respond quickly, Kron said, that she was stunned to find that after expressing a need for a computer printer, an Arena aide went right out and bought her one.

"It's an amazing thing, to be able to work like this, to be able to say, 'This is what I need,' " Kron said. "That's a really big deal."