Why Pandemic Pause May Be a Godsend to American Playwrights (and by extension: the American Theatre)
When I was in grad school, pursuing a *PhD in Music Composition, we had a visiting professor one year who had the audacity to suggest that without an orchestra at our disposal, available to read and rehearse pages and pages of early drafts of our orchestral music, none of us should ever have any hope of actually composing strong orchestral music, the sort that sounds as though it was written by someone who understands the way an orchestra sings. And of course I know he was correct because the first time I attempted an orchestral piece and presented it meekly to my less-than-thrilled seventh-grade orchestra teacher, Ms. Straub, there were dozens of musical gestures I attempted that I’d obviously assigned to the wrong instrument.
Imagine the sound of a clarinet. Lots of fast running notes on the clarinet can feel almost watery. Give that same run of fast-moving pitches to a violinist and suddenly we’re hearing the bow slip from one string to the next, sounding more like gravel than liquid.
This professor who had spent the bulk of his conducting career in Paris, was attempting to draw our American attention to the deficiencies of an education in the arts that’s yoked in every way to a university’s bottom line.
To the purist, it’s a crying shame when writers of any kind are told they must limit their imagination according to the constraints of a balance sheet.
Through a quite circuitous route through running a small experimental opera company for a decade, producing and directing a couple of feature films all while engaging with sporadic and mixed results with larger cultural institutions, I’ve arrived at the opposite opinion. In fact, now, having taught Self-Production Boot Camp for Playwrights for a dozen years or so, I’ve learned to respect the genius that can sometimes emerge from the frustration and blood sweat and tears of a creative life on a budget.
When I submit my play to a non-profit theatre, for instance, among the factors they’ll be considering will be the financials. And in the non-profit theatre world those financials can get very murky very quickly. For instance, there are funders with agendas who look more and more for the arts to do more than make art, they look for the arts to also endeavor to save the world through our productions. (Or at least give them a fighting chance of manufacturing some convincing copy to that effect) To the purist, it’s a crying shame when writers are told to limit their imagination according to the constraints of a balance sheet. Then, of course, even non-profits prefer to play to sold-out houses.
I never tire of reminding playwrights that 90% of what goes into the decision to produce or not to produce concerns things that have nothing at all to do with a script’s craft, brilliance or originality.
If you were a presenter, which would you rather? Present a play for a few weeks to 12 people each night or pack them in like sardines and cause folks to queue up for last-minute returns for over an hour?
So in this environment where the market is never too far from view, the new play itself has to thrill and entertain and capture our collective imagination and hold us rapt for weeks as our entire town seems to lean in the direction of that one place where that one amazing show is running. There are many aspects to the debut of a new piece of drama that can contribute to our collective fascination most of which do not exist within the pages of its script. (The way a script itself might improve its odds of grabbing our unwavering attention is the subject of this weekend’s workshop, Now You Draw Us In. The workshop is now sold-out. But I hope to offer it again soon.)
In fact, I never tire of reminding my students that 90% of what goes into the decision to produce or not to produce concern things that have nothing at all to do with its craft, brilliance or originality. In fact, in the U.S. in ways far more acute and menacing, much of the decision-making around what to produce and what to set aside is built on a foundation of fear and panic and pessimism. Take, for example, last year’s Broadway hit, The Inheritance.
I felt a little thrill of solidarity watching these bodies fill the stage. “God bless him,” I thought. Here’s a playwright who made his producers pay for a set composed at least in part of human beings.
It should probably come as no surprise that this thrilling new play by an American playwright made its way to Broadway via the West End; the play had such a large cast plus supernumeraries who only appear once at the top of Part II that my little playwright heart started to go pitter-patter as I sat counting bodies from my seat in the back of the orchestra. And as I started to do some rough math regarding payroll, I felt a little thrill of solidarity watching these bodies fill the stage. “God bless him,” I thought. Here’s a playwright who made his producers pay for a set composed at least in part of human beings.
Long before The Inheritance made its way to Broadway, the costs associated with maintaining a safe, warm, flexible, accessible and appealing space in which to present new work had been steadily climbing for decades.
Which brings me to 2020.
Around this time last year, with a velocity and a relentlessness that no one could have predicted, culture in this country found itself almost completely confined to the narrow confines of millions of laptop and home computer screens. Suddenly nobody was spending money to sit in an overpriced (and heavily mortgaged) seat in their local theatre.
And so, suddenly it is quite literally true that David Mamet has no advantage over me in the arenas of venue, production value, etc.
Of course he still has his celebrity status, which no one can or will take away from him. But… I would argue, there are a considerable number of playwrights (not Mr. Mamet, certainly) who have benefited from having come out of the right MFA programs, for instance, who had been receiving a fairly steady diet of relatively flush productions of rather unremarkable or unmemorable plays because, well, they knew how to write crisp dialogue that jumps off the page, actors of a certain notoriety either from a television series or from a Tony Award or two could be convinced to perform in them and subscriber-based ticket sales could be all-but guaranteed once these essentials were taken care of.
Now, I’m sorry to say, these borderline hacks are in danger of an impending “Emperor Has No Clothes” reckoning. Because in today’s theatre, there are no fancy lighting cues, there are no moving sets, chorus boys or dancing gals nor even a reliable box office. There’s just a few scattered humans tilting toward the flat glow of their computer screens and its natural pull down toward the banal.
This is why 2020 should have been the year of the overlooked under-appreciated playwright.
Think of all the stuff that dramatists live to realize in their art: hopes dashed, dreams deferred, cruelties endured. Within the unremarkable geometry of the uninspiring Zoom box, if an audience is going to be made to feel something — anything! — it can only be the result of your unmatched and unbridled imagination and your keen eye and ear for the details of human nature. You, the writer of scenes composed of people in conflict — today you are — in ways never before conceivable, the main attraction in every theatre everywhere all day long and every day — the wrought play is the only show we can afford. Anything else might kill us. Period. Full stop.
The Zoom box is doing one thing most playwrights don’t enjoy but crave all the same: it’s shining the spotlight on the person who faces the blank piece of paper to create something out of nothing.
Take the silence of 20–50 people waiting for your character to speak and harness it into your next great achievement. And when it’s ready to share with the world, please don’t forget to put me on your mailing list.
Because the day the American Theatre looks around and sees that any hope of connecting with an audience is in your hands, the writers hands, well that’s got to be a bright new day for the American Theatre.
Watch what happens. We might just find something buried deep within us we had no idea was waiting there to be uncovered. Let’s hope at least that some of it works its way up and out and into some form of greatness before we figure out a way to kill it.
*postscript: I never did get the PhD. I made a feature film instead. Go figure.
Roland Tec teaches writers and other artists hoping to make work that has great impact through the Dramatists Guild Institute and at RolandTec.com. He is also the Founding Producing Director of Hear Me Out New American Monologue Competition and Festival. Call for Entries to be announced Mothers Day. Now You Draw Us In, his workshop on harnessing audience curiosity is almost sold out this Sunday April 18th. On the first Monday of each month he hosts Some1Speaking at which we are introduced to 5 characters through 5 new monologues from 5 American playwrights.
