Thoughts on New Play Development

I've recently been publicly asked my thoughts on new play development by two friends and prominent artist-bloggers. Like most playwrights, I receive far more development than production. If you count commissions, workshops and readings as "development," in 2006 I received 15 development opportunities, or experiences, or whatever you want to call them. By contrast, I had five productions, loosely defined - of those, two were 24-Hour plays (one of those directed by Mark, incidentally) and two were short plays (one performed site-specifically, another a school production at CalArts). Ironically, the closest thing to a "real" production - that is, a full-length play, performed off book in a theater by Equity actors for two weeks, more or less fully designed - was of an unfinished play, and billed as a developmental workshop. Next year looks as if it will be better - I've got two LORT Productions set up - but I already know that, even if I have a banner year, these will be dwarfed by various "developmental" events. So, yeah, I concede that the ratio of development to production is out of whack, and that many theaters use development as a substitute for the far riskier endeavor of producing new plays. I also think that some (but not all) new-play dramaturgy is too close for comfort to the Hollywood practice of producers and studio execs giving "notes" to screenwriters. But I think that the debate on almost all sides is hamstrung by a compulsion toward categorical absolutes - that is, that all play development is evil (or maybe just misguided), or (the far less popular position, but probably the guiding principle of most mainstream theaters) that all dramaturgy is good, and playwrights need guidance. As Isaac points out, I co-chair a theater lab at Soho Rep, so obviously I'm not anti-play development. The fact is that play development labs can be great and they can be awful, and it's some really complex algebra that decides which is which - the lab guidelines, the people involved, the plays themselves, the length and even things like the location and time of day.

Even the worst play development experiences have yielded some benefit for me, and I am a working playwright, so I'm not about to name names, but I will say that I think that the Soho Rep Lab is one of the best I've ever participated in, and I thought that even before I ran the thing. This might have something to do with the fact that everyone in it feels obligated to be nice to me, but I don't think that's really it - once you get off the internets, theater people are generally nice. I think that the biggest factor is our use of Liz Lerman's Critical Response Guidelines, which everyone making new plays, especially dramaturgs, should read. Seriously. New York Theatre Workshop treats them like sacred texts, and I use them in my playwrighting and screenwriting classes to great effect. These guidelines allow people to discuss a wide, diverse array of work, all the way from kitchen-sink realism (which we occasionally will do in the lab) to weird choreopoems to whatever you would want to call Thomas Bradshaw's insane and brilliant provocation extravaganzas. There are other great things about the lab, none of which I can take credit for (when Sarah Benson and I took over in 2004, the founders, Linsay Firman and Laramie Dennis, told us everything they had learned from six years of trial and error, and we took it to heart). A brief list: (1) the Lab has a great reputation, partially due to the number of excellent, produced plays that have come out of it*. Of course, this can't be imitated, but it helps ensure that everyone coming into it takes it seriously. (2) Work is brought in on a specific schedule, and limited to two plays a night, max - this keeps everyone from burning out. In classes and play labs that try to cram five or six excerpts into a single evening, by the time the last one rolls around, no one feels like talking. (3) Plays are always read from the beginning, unless the writer is using an alternate form of creating work. This solves the problem of people getting confused by out-of-context scenes, or not being able to assess the full arc of the play. (4) Attendance is required, creating a sense of community, and making sure that everyone gets equal attention - the emerging playwright with no MFA deserves just as much attention as I do, or some "hot" playwright does. (5) The lab is curated - the directors are interviewed, and the best way to get yourself eliminated is to come in talking shit about other artists' work. We don't interview playwrights, so we have to go on faith, and so far we've been lucky, but we do consider people's reputations (among many other things). (6) We go for diversity in every way imaginable. This means ethnically (though we have a pretty homogeneous applicant pool), artistically, and even things like where artists are in their careers, or whether or not we know them. It's a tricky line to walk - on the one hand, nepotism is no way to discover new talent, but on the other hand, people shouldn't be punished just because they're friends of ours, so we try to strike a fair balance. (7) We only consider new plays, not written yet. I'm not sure why this helps but it does. (8) We bring food and wine. This makes a huge difference.

Now, there is no ideal setting for new play development, including the W/D Lab - we've had to turn away some really excellent artists whose work doesn't fit our text-centric model - and these are not the only elements that could get one's play development cake to rise, though they've seemed to work so far. I've also recently been interested in bringing designers into the conversation, and trying to stage things as much as possible, which (as anyone who read my American Theater piece knows) is one of the strengths of the O'Neill.

I recently returned from Slovenia, which has no play development culture. In its place is a sort of director-driven authoritarianism - no one talks to the playwright about his/her work, because the director can do whatever s/he wants to it. All playwrights are treated like dead playwrights, and the text is considered to be finished no matter where it is in its life. It's a relatively minor element, either a fixed reality or a tool in service to the director's vision, somewhere between the number of seats and, say, the lighting design. I joked around that bringing the staged reading to Slovenia was like a gift of smallpox-infested blankets, but the local playwrights were genuinely overjoyed to have a change in the endless, circular conversation they had been having. On the other hand, however, our culture of talkbacks and "development" says a great deal about shared American assumptions. The fact is that not everyone is qualified to talk about art. I fully believe in diffusing or breaking down authoritarian structures and sharing power, like it or not - but in America, this is often mistranslated into a kind of vulgar, consumerist, focus-group populism, an idea that everyone's opinion is equally valid, which is in fact far more fascist than it is democratic, and tends to result in the most mediocre art imaginable. For all of its flaws, the old-school Enlightenment notion of democracy is just as much about mistrusting human nature as it is about trusting it. Rather than handing everything over to the wisdom of talkback comments and 5-star ratings, democracy is about putting limits on individual and institutional power, not fetishizing some abstract notion of "the people." One can simultaneously believe in universal human rights and also acknowledge that, as a species, we can be a real bunch of assholes sometimes.

I should point out, however, that expertise has nothing to do with it - some of the terrible development experiences I've had have been entirely due to one or two "authorities" hijacking the conversation (cf. Chris Shinn's comment on Mark's blog, linked above). I believe that guidelines, like the Lerman guidelines, are the best solution to unhelpful windbaggery, whether it's coming from audience members or from artistic directors. In the end, though, the best skill, one I learned early on, is the ability to ignore bad advice, which comes in spades, from random audience members, from dramaturgs, from actors, from other playwrights, from TV and film executives, teachers, editors, and on and on. We all know it when we hear it.



*For the curious, produced or soon-to-be-produced W/D Lab plays include Brooke Berman's The Triple Happiness (Second Stage, The Hourglass Group), Adam Bock's The Thugs (Soho Rep), Thomas Bradshaw's Purity (PS122), Sheila Callaghan's Lascivious Something (The Cherry Lane), Ruben Carbajal's The Asthma Conspiracy and The Gifted Program (OVO), Melissa James Gibson's Suitcase (or those that resemble flies from a distance) (Soho Rep), Madelyn Kent's Peninsula (Soho Rep), Kevin Oakes' The Vomit Talk of Ghosts (The Flea), Kate E. Ryan's Mark Smith (13P), Crystal Skillman's 4 Edges (Amphibian Productions), Anne Washburn's Apparition (chashama, Apparition Productions, Soho Rep), The Communist Dracula Pageant (Soho Rep), and The Internationalist (13P, The Vineyard, The Practical Theatre Company), Anna Ziegler's BFF (WET), and my own 1001 (Denver Center, Contemporary American Theater Festival).