On Guardian

Some weeks I think the U.K.'s Guardian has the best theater coverage in the world. This is one of those weeks. First, a cheeky little roundup of Halloween-time offerings in London theater, including a thoughtful look at the difficulty of staging gore & horror in the theater. Next, a piece on offending the audience. (That story is to be found on the Guardian's natty new theater blog page. Bookmark it.) Also there, by the excellent Lyn Gardner, a piece on the nonprofit practice that playwrights call Development Hell. Money quote: "Play development should be about enabling writers, not tying up their talent in a queue of unproduced plays. It is often a mirage, a substitute for real action and commitment by a theater to a writer and his or her play. It provides the theaters with an opportunity to tick all the right funding boxes while offering playwrights very little at all - except misplaced hope." (Thanks to a commenter below for this prompt/tip.) Never having been a playwright or a literary manager, and not having done the research, I can only say that I've heard yes, this is a problem. Other bloggers have responded here and here. Theaters are actually being paid to not produce work. It's like those European warehouses full of subsidized painting and sculptures that no one wants to look at. I could name you 20, 24 young playwrights who should be produced at the Public Theater, Playwrights Horizons, Lincoln Center Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club and many other spaces. Some already are, I suppose. I can only assume that a toxic confluence of bad taste, mercenary calculation, cowardice, ignorance and favoritism leads to the frequently mediocre seasons at our nonprofits. Bottom line, there are enough good dramatists in NYC to fill several seasons. Do these writers need guidance from literary managers? No doubt they do. But they need to be treated like adult artists who can expect production of their plays. They ought not to be relegated to a cultural limbo of perpetual apprenticehood.

And then you have MTC putting -- what? -- $2 million or so into a piece of crap like Losing Louie. This Americanized version of an unknown English play is the kind of commercial dross that ought to be hemorrhaging money on Broadway, not taking up space on a nonprofit theater's schedule. The critics all piled on Louie, asking why, why MTC produced this turkey. Not why it isn't funny, or brilliant, or relevant to today. Why it was even fleetingly considered for production. I hope that MTC's board is asking the same question of the top administrators. Earlier this year I already got my kicks into MTC's conservative programming, calling the fug of boredom and irritation that descends on spectators seeing shows there Biltmore Syndrome.  Sounds like MTC's case of BS has gotten much more severe. Perhaps, in pandering to its subscribers, MTC might actually lose some.

Comments

[Joshua James]

David,

Thank you for this post.

[Jaime]

I think there needs to be a distinction, in this argument, between the evils of development and the cowardice of theatres to produce daring new work. I don't think any dramaturg worth their salt intends to "[tie] up their talent in a queue of unproduced plays." Development is about making plays better, about enabling playwrights to fully realize their visions. It is not a bad thing. It's part of a troubled system, the system that brought us Losing Louie and dozens of safe, boring, bad shows just like it. But I don't think development is the problem.

[rjt]

The problem seems to lie in the disconnect, in most companies, between development and production. Scripts get reading after reading, maybe even a rehearsed workshop, but have literally no chance of making it onto the mainstage. The development department exists partly to inspire funders, and partly because development is in itself a worth and defensible process, but the development department and the mainstage apparatus are entirely different beasts.

One thing I'm curious about: how common is it that scripts get "tied up" by a development process? Have playwrights encountered this?