In Defense of the Closet Drama

When I started trying to work as a playwright, I would often insist that I wasn’t writing plays to sit on a hard drive somewhere. I was writing plays to be performed. In the decade-or-so since then, I have been fortunate enough to have some of my work performed, but the most I have ever seen many of my plays come alive is at a reading. For many years—and, to some extent, still—I felt as if these works I loved so much were never allowed to be fully born. This led to resentment and demoralization, and I stopped writing for about two years. Now, in a new decade of my life and a new political climate, I find myself questioning the primary point of writing plays. What if the writing is as important and valid as the performing? What could this unlock? The “closet drama”—a play intended to be read rather than performed—has great and untapped potential for the playwright.

I have been fixated on the question of how we fix theatre in the United States. The situation for new play development in this country was dismal before the COVID-related closures of many key development companies. As it stands now, new play development is a long and expensive process, largely controlled by gatekeepers, with many pragmatic (and political) constraints due to the capitalist nature of the theatre industry—including the nonprofit theatres that have to rely upon wealthy and corporate sponsors/donors. In our current moment, as a result of far-right censorship and budget cuts, even the remaining new play development companies are under existential threat. Regrettably, I believe that the only meaningful solution to this crisis is major government funding, which seems inconceivable under this administration.

I consciously set the production trap aside and began to accept that I was writing a closet drama.

To get a new play on stage in the United States, there are typically months or years of “development” where the play is worked on through readings, workshops, and dramaturgy sessions. This process can sometimes be confined just to one theatre company but is often largely dispersed. So a playwright will likely develop their new play in multiple places over multiple years before finally finding a company willing to produce it. There are artistic benefits to this process—it helps make plays into tight drums of drama—but it also means that mounting new work is slow, expensive, and involves many different voices in the process. I am not opposed to artists taking their time to create, but I want to challenge how much of this process is actually about making a play “better” and how much of it is about making a play more commercial/palatable. For this essay, I am mainly interested in this consideration within the mainstream theatre, which is the place where artists can theoretically earn a living.

My fixation with the problems of the theatre industry is driven by my Marxist politics and by my experiences as a trans woman who writes in experimental plays. The former grounds my analysis of theatre as an industry of hyperexploitation that systemically disenfranchises theatre workers, from creatives to administrative staff. The latter showed me that the various gatekeepers—such as high-ranking theatre administrators, literary managers, artistic directors, and producers—won’t give me money to do what I want to do, so I will never be able to earn a living primarily as an artist. I am, of course, one of many in this position. I firmly believe that the greatest theatrical voices in the United States are never heard because they come from disenfranchised and oppressed communities and lack the finances necessary to “earn” a “career” in US theatre, a tragedy not just for those artists but for all of us who are invested in the art form.

So, what is to be done? I will not argue that closet dramas are a magic bullet or substitute for political organizing, but I do believe that they have the potential to provide a new artistic life for playwrights.

Closet Drama as a Method to Unlock Artistic Ambitions

My first play produced in New York City—as a 29-Hour Reading—was perhaps my most cynically written. The summer before I moved to the city, I set myself the challenge of writing a full-length play that was commercial, with only one location and two actors. While I am proud of the piece I wrote, it came into being through a limitation of my ambition. This more or less worked. Thrilled, I sat down to write a follow-up with similar limitations and found myself totally unable to finish. Instead, I worked away on an epic, trans retelling of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, even though I knew it wasn’t at all what anyone wanted. At least not anyone but me. I finished the play and essentially locked it in a drawer.

I was, like so many playwrights, caught in what I’ll call “the production trap”: the belief that plays are made worthwhile or “real” only when performed. This perspective acts as conscious or subconscious pressure on writers who try to fit themselves into boxes they believe will be easier to produce. The quest for productions, then, is not an inherent ally of artistry and creativity.

The production trap has been particularly disorienting for me due to my intense relationship with writing. I am one of those artists who uses their art as therapy (supplemental, to be very clear, to actual therapy with a licensed professional). Most of my major “gender evolution” moments came about through writing about gender. Because of this, writing cynically towards productions eludes me. I find myself continually running toward the controversial and uncommercial. Recently, coming out of my two-year writer’s block, I wanted to write about my experience with sexual assault. As I fell in love with what I was writing, I also became convinced that it wouldn’t be ethical to actually produce the play due to its content (though I am flexible on this point; it would require the right intimacy director). Still, it felt vital to me—and vital plays are the sort of plays I want. So, I consciously set the production trap aside and began to accept that I was writing a closet drama.

This change of form changed the way I wrote, not just what I was writing. It freed me to create more ambitious work. Suddenly, I could use parts of the page and elements of writing that were previously not available to me as a playwright. As I continued to write I Won’t Be Your Daddy or Rape Play, I had new toys to experiment with, like footnotes. In one monologue, for example, I used three footnotes: one to cite a primary source I quote in the play, one writerly aside about a girl who ghosted me, and a citation of a song that is quoted.

I also started playing around more intentionally with the stage directions now that the “audience,” not just my potential collaborators, could see them. For example, here are my opening stage directions from a piece called School Play or Why Am I Sending You This Email:

Lights Up
An Acting Class
Maybe there are other people but there are four who are important
There is You

You are an 18 year college student who is secretly a girl
So Secretly, in fact, that even you don’t know yet
You know you’re something tho
And You’re About to Come Out As “Bi” or “Queer” or “Gay” or “Faggot”
You were homeschooled
This is your first time being away from home
You weren’t cool in high school
Until senior year
When you were
And that gave you confidence
And now You are enrolled at the most prestigious theater education program in the State
You feel very proud 
And scared
You want friends
Maybe these people around you will be your friends

There is the Friend Who Is Also Secretly a Girl

The first time you see a picture of her you think she’s a girl
Throughout the play she will do different things to disguise the fact that she is also secretly a girl
And she is able to fool a lot of people
Even You
But to hide she becomes monstrous 
And that is sad
Her story in this play is a sad one
Don’t let the lines confuse you
Her story is also a tragedy

In both of these plays, I speak with the audience more directly than I could in a piece that is not a closet drama. It is possible that these experiments won’t work, for me or for you, but I believe that removing the need to be produced or performed can allow playwrights to create with real joy, energy, and passion again.

What I describe in this essay are experiments to push the art form of theatre forward. Experiments help us reinvent our own work and reimagine the entire canon. They are also, largely, non-commercial due, in large part, to the limitations on risk-taking. Both producers and audiences make their choices in response to the high cost of tickets—across both for-profit and nonprofit theatre—which means each play needs, to some extent, to be a “sure thing.” If you want to stay booked, writing experiments probably aren’t the easiest way to do that. Yet without theatrical experiments by playwrights, we’ll stay in one place forever theatrically.

A closet drama removes gatekeepers. If I have access to writing materials, I can write a closet drama.

Closet Drama as an Avenue for the Political Play

If I wrote a play tomorrow about this current moment, it wouldn’t reach the stage until the moment had passed. That’s true even if every gatekeeper lines up behind me; the process of getting new work on stage in this country is achingly slow. Functionally, this means that it is very, very difficult for of-the-moment work to reach a major stage while it is still of-the-moment.

As an example, I want to read what Minneapolis-St. Paul playwrights have to say about what’s happening to their city now, not see it in five years when the crisis is no longer (one hopes) ongoing. I’m sure there will be pieces about immigration coming down the pipe, but they will struggle to meet the moment because many moments will pass between when the play is written and when it is produced. This will likely mean that these plays don’t hit as hard, that their political content has been defanged—if not consciously then just as a result of time passing.

Many of us found ourselves drawn to the arts because of the political potential of art, but that potential is limited first by the timeline for getting that work seen. I contend that this timeline causes many playwrights to stop writing about the specific to write about the general; in New York City—which is the scene I am most familiar with—theatres produce many plays that are generally about what it is like to queer, a person of color, etc. but very little about what it is actually like to live in this specific, contemporary moment.

The political environment also limits theatre. I’m a communist trans woman; I’d be surprised if Trump’s government gave me a grant to do anything but kill myself. As Davey Davis has written, the new National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) guidelines effectively bar all trans artists from federal funding. Soon, we could see attempts to withhold federal funding from any company that does trans plays or employs (and respects) trans people. If we extend this thinking, the same could likely go for any work or artist considered too “woke,” which could lead theatre administrators to become even more conservative when it comes to programming. Any politically challenging plays that manage to get through the already broken development process could become political targets for the government and right-wing media. This is also, of course, not new. Senator Jesse Helms began a war against experimental political and queer artists in 1989, which led to huge cuts and attacks on the NEA. That Trump makes Helms look like a moderate just shows how dire the current situation is.

A closet drama removes gatekeepers. If I have access to writing materials, I can write a closet drama. In this sense, the closet drama defies and rises above the pragmatic demands of the theatre industry to focus on the artistic and political demands of the theatrical form.

Existing tools help playwrights have more avenues distribute their closet dramas. New Play Exchange exists as a library for closet dramas. Readers engage with writers’ words without the need for a production to “make it real.” Compare this to the current working model, which takes months—or, likely, years—to get the same play in front of an audience and provide enough outside pressure that likely the most radical pieces of the play would die around the rehearsal room table.

A similar example, though a slightly off-kilter one, is Jeremy O Harris’s Master’s thesis Yell: A Documentary of My Time Here, which was developed as a site-specific piece about and for Yale University. Harris turned the piece into a closet drama through publishing. Indeed, Yell: A Documentary of My Time Here is even dedicated “to every closet drama whispered aloud in a dark dank room.” Following the production of his thesis, Harris made the play available digitally in multiple forms allowing for a wide engagement with his work. Unfortunately, not many artists have followed Harris’s model, and closet dramas continue to be an underutilized theatrical form.

With the new political “normal,” we must be clear-eyed: Major theatre companies and educational institutions will be under immense pressure to toe the line and not do anything to attract unwanted attention. This will happen, as it always does, at the expense of oppressed artists, and theatre will grow even more depoliticized than it is currently. I’ve joked to friends recently that if the Wachowskis released The Matrix today, they would go to federal prison. In that same vein, can we imagine Angels in America, The Normal Heart, anything by Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane, or Bertolt Brecht, or even A Strange Loop making it to Broadway or a major Off-Broadway/regional theatre today if they weren’t by already famous artists? (Michael R. Jackson might have slid in just as the door was closing.) Not that Broadway is where we should look to for the cutting edge of theatre, but we do need to understand Broadway, the major Off-Broadway houses, regional theatres, and educational institutions as being the primary/easiest ways for playwrights to earn a living as playwrights in this country.

I refuse to settle. I refuse to concede the political potential of theatre. I refuse to capitulate to capitalist and reactionary limitations. I refuse to be told that I am less of a playwright because of this. I refuse to stay still. The best plays I’ve heard and experienced are plays that I never got to see. I read or heard them. So let us write plays. Please, write plays.