Two Corrections

I kind of like The Guardian's blog's "Noises Off" feature. It always signals to me the moment a debate has been over for a little bit and it's time to summarize it. Journalism is supposed to be the first draft of history, but the "Noises Off" feature is basically the second draft: rarely is The Guardian's blog a primary source of discussion, but it's a nice way to round up everything that went on. At any rate, if I want to link to a complex discussion (like the one we had about Quality/Diversity or the one we had about Thomas Garvey -- good times!), it's a lot easier to link to their index-of-important-moments than to try and hit all the original posts myself.

That being said, they don't always get it exactly right (as is always the case with the second draft of history. And I thought it would be worthwhile to correct two quick points, both in reference to myself.

Firstly, in this post, I'm described as an "actor-turned-playwright." That makes it sound like I don't perform anymore... contrary to popular belief, I do still act! In fact, if you want to see me act, my show is still running this week:

Thursday at 9:30 PM

Friday at 7:30 PM

Saturday at 2:00 PM and 8:30 PM

All at 721 Broadway's 2nd floor Shop Theater. I'd love to see you there, and you can see for yourself that I still perform. Granted, I also wrote the play, but I am a performer!

Secondly, in this post, my brief response to Nick Clegg's liking Samuel Beckett is summed up in the sentence, "Clegg did come in for criticism from some quarters." Actually, when I said that "As usual, liking theatre is apparently on par with the worst opinions of bigots towards black community members," I was not criticizing Clegg, I was criticizing the horrible cultural atmosphere we have that makes Clegg's statement so rare.

I'd much prefer if Clegg's statement was the norm, just one of many intellectual acknowledgments that politicians made. Instead, it landed in the cultural sphere like a bombshell -- Somebody cares about us! The implication behind all of the glowing praise of Clegg was, "How politically risky it is to approve of the arts!" That's what I meant. That's the problem. Certainly I didn't criticize Clegg for not playing into it.

Also, I do have to say that this mischaracterization of my meaning (which I will accept some responsibility for, because that was kind of a throwaway post) does come at least in some part because of the common journalistic formula that gets applied often, not only here but in many media. The formula goes something like:

Token Liberal said: XXXXX

Token Liberal 2 agreed, saying YYYYY. Token Liberal 3 explained further, ZZZZZZ.

Not everyone agreed with Token Liberal, however. Token Conservative said AAAAAAA. Another Token Conservative said BBBBBBB.

Obviously that's almost insultingly reductive, (and I'm using Liberal/Conservative in place of any reductive "with-us-or-against-us" mentality) but when I saw how I was quoted in the Noises Off it seemed to me that I was suffered by being shoehorned into the wrong paragraph.

Just setting the record straight.

The Major Dramatic Question

So, right now I'm in yet another new experience for the theater -- I wrote a play, and I'm acting in it, but I'm not directing it. My friend Stephanie has that quite, quite well in hand. In a way, it's allowing me to focus myself on just diving in to really explore the question I wanted to tackle with the play.

When I went to school, the Major Dramatic Question was one of those core concepts that we as actors were given to analyze the play and the role, along with "tactics" and "beats" and all that jazz. Often, people put forward the Major Dramatic Question of the play as being that one question that needs to get answered for the plot to resolve. For instance, supposedly the "Major Dramatic Question" of Waiting for Godot is "Will Godot ever get there?"The "Major Dramatic Question" of Macbeth was once put to me as "Will Macbeth get away with it?"

But these are very different from the questions that actually drove the playwright to write those plays. I can't speak for those authors, but I bet the real dramatic questions were "What do we do when we're trapped in waiting?" and "Can we really step outside our own fates?"

That's the unique privilege I have right now -- as the central character to the plot, the question that's leading my character along is the question leading the heart of the production along, and it's the question that I the playwright am still investigating. It's a unique privilege because it's a question I felt completely lost on myself, going into the play. There was no amount of thinking about it or writing to it that would help me figure it out. For once, I have to be through the question, and that's the experience I'm going through.

Collaboration III: Stage Directions pt. 3

Isaac, apparently separately, starts thinking along the same lines as I was thinking:

Let me make what I'm going to assume is a somewhat controversial assertion about non-experimental theatre: The way we think about the plays we see and do is too writer/text focused.

And he doesn't use Derrida to back himself up. RVCBard has a good laugh at his expense, before stating:

Anyway, part of what I like about theatre (as opposed to film) is that it's more democratic than other art forms. There isn't (or rather, doesn't have to be) a central authority figure who makes all the "important" decisions about the play. I like not having complete control over the process. I like the unpredictability of it, how the story and characters in my head can be given a life I never imagined while still using the same base ingredients (my words on the page - whether dialogue or stage directions).

(...)

As a writer, I've never understood the "need" to create "actor-proof" or "director-immune" scripts. As far as I'm concerned, I'm just there to get the damn story on paper. My duties are pretty simple. Let my collaborators know who is doing what onstage. That's it. Whether that takes the form of a coherent narrative with more-or-less natural dialogue or is a shifting series of images and/or sounds is anybody's guess. But as far as I'm concerned, that's all I'm there to do.

I agree with RVCBard that there's something different here than what goes on in Film... after all, when I saw Alice in Wonderland, I was seeing Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, and nobody seemed to care about poor ol' Linda Woolverton who only wrote the screenplay. It was her screenplay that bugged me -- I think they took a very beautiful story about a girl exploring a world of wordplay and logic puzzles and turned it into something between The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe and Shrek. But I don't think anyone particularly cared -- the whole movie was really just there to support Tim Burton's visual sensibility.

I'm getting carried away.

99 Seats says something similar in the comments section of Isaac's blog:

I never really understand why we need to parse it out so much, to what end. I was just talking to Matt Freeman about this the other day and he quoted the old saw about being a playwright and how, if everyone loves the play, they'll credit you, but if no one loves the play, they'll blame you. Every play changes in rehearsal, in performance, has limitations that are fixed by the actors or directors, sometimes in the actual words on the page, sometimes in the performing. We all know this, we've all gone through production, but the attitude is still it's all about the playwright. Which, I think, puts undue pressure on playwrights and adds to the frenzy for The Right Play.

If I understand right, RVCBard has her chuckle at Isaac's expense because this idea -- that the playwright isn't the star quarterback, he's just another team player -- isn't really so controversial as it may have once been.

Obviously, take anything I say about "before my time" with a grain of salt, but it seems to me that if this theater industry that we've not a part of used to work, then back when it was working playwrights would have probably been a lot more likely to get up in arms and scream and shout about directors trampling over "their vision." At the time, their agent would have been there to fight for precisely that thing. But in today's reality, I don't think a playwright can afford to be that controlling over a script.

When a playwright works with a small independent or local company, they're not just putting together one play -- they're building a relationship. They don't want to be a failure. They also don't want that company not to say "Screw that chump, let's not work with her/him anymore." David Mamet can say things like "Actors keep getting in the way of the play I've written," but if I tried to say that, I'd find myself without actors. That's the reality of it.

Small companies don't want to license a play that comes with hundreds of strings attached. Why do you think they love Shakespeare so much? It's the only thing that they have both wide latitude with but also established audience recognition -- although apparently you can get some mileage out of Jacobean drama, if you love it enough. If you want a company to work with you, you have to be willing to work with them.

So in the face of that, the shift in norm becomes apparent. Critics (that is to say, writers) still find the written word to be important, unduly, for a number of reasons; they can still appreciate a play in which the words are deliberately not the mode of communication. And big Broadway musical writers can still sue NYU students not to do an all-male production of Company because it wasn't their original vision. Sure. But I think, overwhelmingly, the idea is now that it's a playwright's decision to determine how much control they want to exert, and how they relate to the other parts of the pie.

Collaboration II: Stage Directions Pt. 2

The responses I got to my Stage Directions post revealed to me the philosophical differences that underly the whole "how much change is too much change?" question that I posited. Here's the first comment, from Dinah:

This makes me think of a talk Sarah Ruhl gave recently, where she was asked for words of advice for actors handling her stylized, poetic language. She said that she prefers that actors speak her words "non-adverbially." That is, that the text itself is the point and contains everything that needs to be conveyed in that moment, and the actor's job is basically not to let all that "action" and "emotion" business get in the way of the words. That the actor's job is to make the words audible and understandable, but not to interpret them, because that's the audience's job. This obviously rules out the paraphrase, except when she's involved in the production.

Ruhl is very much in the same camp as David Mamet on this score. And I think there's a recent history, starting from just after Shakespeare and onward, that posits nearly the same idea, although usually not to the same extreme. To lay out the idea I will, much to my own horror and disbelief, quote something I was just reading in Jaques Derrida's Writing and Difference. (It's my damn thesis, I'm sorry).

The stage is theological for as long as it is dominated by speech, by a will to speech, by the layout of a primary logos which does not belong to the theatrical site and governs it from a distance. The stage is theological for as long as its structure, following the entirety of tradition, comports the following elements: an author-creator who, absent and from afar, is armed with a text and keeps watch over, assembles, regulates the time or the meaning of representation, letting this latter represent him as concerns what is called the content of his thoughts, his intentions, his ideas. He lets representation represent him through representatives, directors or actors, enslaved interpreters who represent characters who, primarily through what they say, more or less directly represent the thought of the 'creator'.

He continues:

There is here a confusion over terms, stemming from the fact that, for us, and according to the sense generally attributed to the word director, this man is merely an artisan, an adapter, a kind of translator eternally devoted to making a dramatic work pass from one language into another; this confusion will be possible and the director will be forced to play second fiddle to the author only so long as there is a tacit agreement that the language of words is superior to others and that the theater admits none other than one language.

Oh, the avant garde and hyperbole. Anyways, over-the-top language aside, I think this is the more interesting division. After all, why is futsing with staging and actions--and even the intentions of the lines--allowed, but paraphrasing is not? To say that the answer is because the staging probably came from the first director in Samuel French editions and not the playwright only underlines the structure laid out above--the director's work is not a form to be followed strictly.

In today's world, if we wanted to, we could videotape the first performance, and we could emulate it perfectly, down to the lights and the sets and the props. We could demand royalties on all of it, and pay each set of royalties to each designer, director, writer, and actor. After all, why shouldn't actors have their work protected from being copied?

My point is that there's a strange double standard, where actors and directors and playwrights make their own interpretation on how to say the lines, and actors and directors and playwrights get to make their own interpretation on where to say the lines, but the words themselves have a strange inflexibility, born of the perception that the words on the page are the play.

I think I've mentioned that, in producing/playwriting terms, part of what drove me to the independent theater realm is the ability to control the means of production of my own work (uh oh, Derrida and Marx in one blog post...). But I think part of what drove me away from being an actor in what is aptly termed the "industry" (cheap labor and all) was this philosophy that as an actor, you're there to fulfill someone else's play. When a company gets together to make a show, it's the company's show: and nothing, not the words, the acting, the director's vision, is worth more than the success of the production as a whole body. Leastways, that's how I hope it goes.

God, I hope I don't have to quote Derrida again to make a point for a while.

Collaboration: Stage Directions

I went and saw last night's baffling and amazing performance of Radiohole's Whatever, Heaven Allows at PS 122. It had in it, among other things, a hysterical reference for instructions on stage kissing. I googled it this morning, and instead found this great screed on stage directions:

Ignore stage directions?

That’s like putting on a blindfold to drive on the interstate.

Do you want to be a passenger, in that car or on the stage, with someone blindfolded?

I had a good laugh, considering as almost every show I've ever worked on that started with a script has had, as step one, crossing out all the stage directions -- if not actively crossing out, then basically ignoring them whenever the director felt like it. Of course, plot-important stage directions (Exit, pursued by a bear) can't be ignored ("No, I don't think Hamlet should stab Claudius."), but most stage directions are unnecessary or pithy, like "Turns away, crying." And the director or actor will decide whether or not she is actually going to turn away, crying.

To drop my actor hat and put on my playwright hat, I must confess that I rarely write in stage directions for precisely this reason. Having been an actor, I know that they're going to figure out the physical actions to justify whatever is going on. I put in the stage directions that, like Hamlet stabbing Claudius, are important to the plot, but otherwise I leave that up to the actors.

On the other hand, as a playwright I am also not particularly moved by a director who is taking on my work taking different interpretations, changing a few lines, etc. I cannot understand the kind of mentality that breeds a Samuel Beckett, who (even though dead) still won't allow his work to be produced unless it looks exactly like he intended it. Which means that ever since I saw the Gate Theatre performing the definitive Waiting for Godot (one of my favorite plays; they still use some of the original performers, if I'm not mistaken), I have not had any impetus to see it again. I didn't leap up to see Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin; however great their personal flair, it will be choked by the restrictions placed upon them to represent the work "accurately."

But I wonder about the rest of you. How do you feel about a director tossing out your stage directions? How do you feel about an actor rewording some of your dialogue so that it sounds more natural (I'm a terrible paraphraser, and that's probably why I do a lot less acting than I used to...)? Where's the line between other collaborators taking on the work and making it their own, exercising their rights as de-facto editors of the work, and pissing on your play?

This problem is unique to the current division-of-labor model of theater, after all. Collaborational models, where the playwright is in the room working with the actors -- or where the actors and directors are devising the script together -- can simply talk about it. The playwright/creator can say "This is why I did it this way," and the others can say, "Well, this is why we want to tweak it." But if the playwright isn't in the room, they're not going to call him every time a "Turns away, crying" turns into "Turns away, fighting back tears" or "Faces him, defiantly" (because the director doesn't feel like the actor should break in this moment).

I worked on a play in Southern California that was from a playwright in New York. He would get revisions to the script regularly. And once or twice, something that was changed in rehearsal would, four days later, be changed back, because the director had thought a minor cut was minor but the playwright felt it was not as minor as the director thought. It ultimately was not a major drag on the production, but I can see in other contexts, with higher stakes, it might have been.

Anyways, I kick it over to you. Thoughts?

Why We Do What We Do, Pt III

So, I listen to science podcasts when I get the chance, and one of the things that is most fascinating to me in the scientific world is how much there is to be interested in. Seriously. Today's episode of Quirks and Quarks included someone who sequenced the genome of an extinct human being, someone who studied whether six month old babies who can read our intentions, and someone who studied the tentacled snake to figure out why it has tentacles. Oh, and a Canadian astronaut who spent six months in space.

And then there was This American Life's 400th episode, where they let their parents pitch stories to follow up on -- and they wound up covering a car, the Erie Canal, a near-destroyed university in Haiti, the humor of death, and corporate personhood.

What it reminds me is that we, as artists, have so much potential to do work about. In the same way that scientists can find out interesting and cool stuff about any number of obscure creatures or beings, we can find ourselves in an unlimited sea of ideas and possibilities.

It's on my mind because my theater company is in the process of figuring out what we're doing for the next year (as for this year, come see our production of Hamlet that opens next week!). And I guess there's a lot of ink that has been spilled over how plays are selected, but I'm interested in the independent theater from the DIY crowd -- how do they select ideas?

What's the general process? Are there tendencies in terms of what we're drawn into taste-wise? How much do we draw inside of our own organization, and how much do we draw from outside? When we draw from outside, how much do we take in from strangers and how much do we take from acquaintances? What is our prime focus? Is it finding something new? A unique structure? Something that seems topical or immediate? Something that leaps off the page as being well-made? Something that accomplishes the mission statement? Something that you can striking home for your audience? Something that you imagine will be fun to do?

I'm thinking of stumbling my way towards making this a survey of some kind. Not just a collection of anecdotes, but something--if not 100% empirical, but something to look at trends in DIY theater season-making.

Solutions VI: New Solutions!

Nothing makes me more excited to get on the internet than to get up to see young enthusiastic minds cranking away at the problems of today.

Want a little enthusiasm for your own morning?

1. RVCBard is getting together a group of Playwrights of Color together to learn about what they need to get themselves produced. Their ad on Craigslist is here. I'm almost jealous that my 50% Jewish North African roots don't count me as a Playwright of Color. But seriously, the sort of community that they're hoping to build is priceless, and I wish all of them the best of luck.
2. August Schulenberg has a simple plan for the producing community: The Homing Project, a process to help theater companies home in on playwrights that don't have a home of their own, and basically performing a marriage: a commitment to present three plays by the playwright over the course of three years. Sign my company up!

Both of the projects can trace their genesis from one of the conclusions of Outrageous Fortune: that one of the hardest parts for playwrights is the lack of sustained development and promotion. The two projects oddly mirror each other -- one creates a group of playwrights in search of producers, and the other creates a group of producers in search of playwrights. Either way, it seems like positive movement.

Self-Producing: "Playwrights"

Okay, okay, sorry David Dower. I didn't RTWT with regards to Outrageous Fortune. In my defense, when I began to read posts on the report, I saw things like "Aristotle Said There's Supposed To Be Catharsis... but there isn't. Not in this book," and I just had no taste for it. It doesn't sound like I missed much -- much as, when I read the reviews of Bye Bye Birdie, I can decide I don't want to see it. (Adam Feldman: "Bye Bye Birdie; hello, turkey. The featherbrained revival of this 1960 musical is sure to be roasted in so many critical pans that it seems almost cruel to add to the fire...")

But I was fascinated by most of the writing in response, and obviously there are hat-tips all 'round. As the blogging wraps up, I did want to point out what Scott said about self-producing:

As the Outrageous Fortune - a-thon got underway, more and more people seemed to find themselves at a tipping point, with OF providing the fatal push. With the arrival of the new year, J. Holtham revealed his identity (gasp) and indicated "I'm going to be looking very seriously at self-producing, about starting a production company, probably under the name of 99 Seats. More about that as it comes. At any rate, it's a new year, a new decade. Time to turn the page." Josh expressed admiration, and then Matt Freeman and Travis Bedard issued a call for a guide to self-producing. James Comtois obliged, creating an ongoing series entitled "Little Jimmy's Guide to Self-Producing," which provides an excellent how-to for playwrights who want to take control of their own productions in NYC. And suddenly everybody was jumping ship and following Don Hall into self-producing.

To which Matthew Freeman rightly responds:

4. Self Production isn't a bandwagon people recently got on. I've been hearing "self-produce" since I got started writing. Everyone has. I just think people need to know how to do it.

I recently became a student member of the League of Independent Theatres, which is basically a group of folks who've been doing this for probably a decade on average per group. If you look at the number of theater groups in New York (which Robert Zimmerman of NYSCA estimated at about 1000 when I saw him in person -- btw, you were there, Matthew Freeman? I was there too!), you'll see that there are quite enough foolhardy individuals who have been on that bandwagon for years (one of the more recent of which is me).

And there are clearly models of success in this path in the industry, the clearest contemporary I can think of is Moises Kaufman on the big stage and 13P on the up-and-coming. Sure, we folks can't necessarily generate the amount of revenue that Kaufman has been able to generate, but hey -- that's the nature of the game!

But to reflect back on Moises Kaufman for a second, I think that the big change in realization that is coming -- and it hits each person individually -- is that the idea of "Playwright" may actually become an anachronism. "Playwriting" was a step along the path of division of labor in the arts, the creation of big centralized artistic machines. What originally was a group of theatermakers became an actor, director, designers, playwrights, dramaturgs, producers, stage managers, etc. ad nauseum. But look back to what Scott said about Shakespeare:

Shakespeare was a shareholder in the King's Men, and also a householder in the Globe. Meaning that he had a financial stake in the theatre's success. As one of the chief playwrights for the company, it was up to him to crank out new material that would bring in audiences hungry for new material. [...] And he not only wrote plays, but he acted, and helped run the theatre space -- hell, he probably swept up the pit after the groundlings spilled food all over it. And they also took in apprentices, for whom they were responsible to provide room and board in exchange for teaching them the theatre ropes and, possibly, integrating them into the company.

Scott was using it to point to self-producing as an injunction for playwrights to be invested in the companies which they work. But I think it points to something else -- Shakespeare wasn't just a playwright. He didn't see play-wrighting as the end of his responsibilities. Granted, he didn't do everything -- he wasn't Atlas, holding up the globe (which, by the way, is a misconception started by Mercator, who named his collection of maps after King Atlas the map-maker but also drew Atlas holding a globe on the cover despite the fact that Atlas held up the sky). But every part of the process was considered part of his purview.

It comes up a lot for me, in the realm of self-producing. People keep asking me if I'm "sad that I am not going to perform anymore." So far I have performed, in minor capacities, in both plays I directed and self-produced. And my goal with my company is to create a group of self-producers, meaning that sometimes I will be able to perform and let them carry the load of producing, and other times I will be there to support their projects.

But we're trained, from fairly early on in our experience of theater, that there's a specific heirarchy in the world of making theater. Each of these roles, we are told, is distinct, and performed by different people. Well, maybe that worked for the regional theaters. It doesn't work for me. I like having actors collaborate on the script, and I like it when they help design the sound. I like them being involved in their costume design. Some things take technical craft that nobody else has, and so sometimes you need a specialist, but even those specialists I'd prefer if they saw themselves as being part of the project, not just someone who points the lights.

It reminds me of how, early in my training, we were told that when we direct we should never tell actors what result we're looking for, rather, we should employ a careful Socratic method to ask the right questions to lead the actor to the right emotional response. Hogwash. If you have talented, intelligent actors, you can speak to them like partners. You can say, "Here's what we're trying to do right now." You do often have to help them get there, but there's no need to pretend that as a director you're some kind of mystical shaman. You partner with them, communicate with them, and then on day 1 of tech week when you realize that there's a problem in your play that you don't know how to solve, you can turn to your cast with upturned palms and say, "Okay, what do you guys think?" So long as you've shown leadership along the way, they can help you when you're lost.

Because rather than being some militarized hierarchy with a ranking system and a chain of command, the self-producing world is a group of people with a task in front of them. Practices that make that task easier will be repeated. Practices that don't make the task easier will be cut down.

The term "playwright" means, essentially, exactly the same as "theatermaker." And hey, look at this, "theater producer" means "theatermaker" too. In our current tradition, we have equated "playwright" with "writer." There's another wave today of playwrights realizing that wrighting a play may not just mean writing a play.

Should Literary Managers Be Developing Playwrights?

Mead Hunter asks:

Do playwrights really want unvarnished honesty? If I say to you, “We passed on your play because we felt your ending was lame,” what subtext do you hear? If you rewrite that ending under the impression that now Theater XYZ will gladly produce it, and that doesn’t happen, then you will really feel had. The danger of specific criticism is that will be received as advice -- or even as a promise.

Isaac responds:

I will respond to this by telling a story, a story of rejection! Rejection of me!

The story is a pretty simple one about an agent who took the time to gave Isaac five pages of quality, incisive, honest feedback. Says Isaac:

This is the important part [of the story] here though: These notes were far, far blunter than I have ever seen notes given in theatre to anyone working in any field other than design. And I'll tell ya... it didn't feel awesome. It took a couple of days before I could get through that I was kind of upset at the rejection to actually see what the notes were. But at that point, I dusted myself and the proposal off and went to work. That project has laid dormant for awhile, because of other writing needs, but when it's time to go back, I'll reexamine those notes and see how I feel.

From Isaac's perspective, the downside from the perspective of playwrights is a bit of bruised feelings, and the upside is higher quality work.

I always favor the honest, polite, incisive commentary. The key, of course, is in the politeness. I believe that there is always a way to phrase criticism in such a way as to remove any of the personal rancor from it. There is no need for you to pretend that things are not wrong when they are wrong, but there's also absolutely no need for you to use the sort of language such as "your ending was lame." In fact, the more specific your criticism, the less likely the playwright is going to be insulted.

The times that criticism really hurts, emotionally, is when you realize it is both right and difficult to fix. If someone gives you a straightforward, clearly true criticism, you tend to just implement the change and be done with it. If someone gives you a complex and clearly wrong piece of criticism, we tend to ignore it. But when something cuts down to the core of what you're working on, boy, that hurts like a raw nerve. They don't have to insult you, or be brusque, or dismissive--the truth and the depth of the criticism does all the pain itself.

I had that recently myself. A friend of mine sent me back a draft with the note that, from moment to moment, the play stands very well on its own, but the logic behind the characters' motivations are confused and conflicted. I stared at the script for hours with a terrible, sinking feeling that the hours and hours of work I had put into it was worthless. It's a really painful feeling.

But what's the alternative? That I walk around with a terribly flawed script without knowing it? Without being so trite as to say "no pain no gain"... wait, I just said it.

Anyways, a separate issue is whether literary managers have some sort of responsibility to do this. And the answer is no. They are busy. It would be nice if they could. But they are not our parents, or our friends, or our mothers. If a theater decides we have potential, then we should be developed. But theaters and their literary managers have the right to decide how to spend their time. I know how much time I spend just responding to my friends' work, and I get something on the order of two or three plays a month. It takes me time to give good criticism. How much time are we expecting a literary manager to spend giving criticism?

Outrageous Fortune II

Okay, I'll say something quick.

August Schulenberg notes this:

...the study is specifically looking at playwrights who are "successful", a term defined loosely in the book, but understood to mean playwrights who are regularly being produced at a regional and Off-Broadway level. The survey focuses on a sample of those playwrights, and the theatres that are able to financially produce at that level.

Matt Freeman notes:

One thing that struck me in particular was the expression of frustration that there aren't companies that coalesce around a playwright anymore. I don't see that, personally. Maybe that's true on the scale of regional theaters 'filling slots'...but on the Off-Off scale, I see it all the time.

I have been working with a single theater company (more or less) in New York City since about 2004. Just over six years of productions. Do we produce on the scale of Manhattan Theater Club? No. Have I gotten reviews and publications and all that other nice stuff? Yes. Do I still work, and work hard, in an unrelated field to make ends meet? Yes, yes I do. Still, when I read chapters about the nomadic lives of playwrights now, I felt a bit happy to know that's not my position.

So if playwrights like me who work Off-Off-Broadway are:

1) Not that much less financially stable than the "successful" playwrights

2) Supported more by companies willing to champion our works (I write plays and have my own company, Freeman notes his own relationship with a good company)

Then the term "successful" appears to be better worn by the off-off-Broadway folks than by the industry writers! Here I was thinking that I had chosen passion over money, but it sounds like all I did was choose to be happier.