Playwriting

Playwright Elaine Ávila illuminates her eye-opening trip to Portugal—wittingly nicknamed Tíaland—as the winner of the DISQUIET International Short Play Competition. There, she is met with historical narratives of overcoming socialized barriers. 

In his essay, Director Evan Caccioppoli explores the future of sex in American theatre.

Most productions are not developmental for the script and that usually means the text being used is effectively final. As is often the case, the playwright is usually not in the room, and so they have no say in the changes being made to their script. As a supporter of playwrights’ rights, I often feel that I must become the de facto voice of the writer, to protect the integrity of their text.

Lou Harry offers insight on balancing the careers of a playwright and arts journalist. 

Yet after reading about staged readings and their role in play development, I hit a roadblock. I couldn’t come up with a definition that addressed every possible scenario. More vexingly, I couldn’t figure out how to negotiate concrete meanings for words like “minimal” and “basic” that are often used when discussing staged reading elements. Despite the many points of agreement found when looking at various discussions, there are too many differences in definition to develop a clear picture of what exactly a staged reading is or how it should look.

The rise of artistic multi-functionalism, and the open, assimilative, and collaborative values it implies, has coincided with the emergence of devising as a major theatrical discipline. Although devising is hardly new the process of developing work through collaboration among a group of artists has gained traction in recent years. It makes sense: both multi-functionalism and devising are solutions to an economic downturn, ways to continue creating complex and multivalent art in a scale-back climate.

Commons Producer Ronee Penoi interviews Robert O’Hara, Playwright-in-Residence at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington, DC.

In this installment, Mike Lew discusses the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, the fraught practice of yellow face, and what equity for people of color actually looks like.

All theater is local. That is what is inspiring and instructive about the National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere, as opposed to the notion of a "national tour.” In the case of "Yankee Tavern", this is a very political play (hidden inside a thriller structure) and so the politics of each city/community were engaged in differing ways. I was most strongly involved in the productions at Florida Stage and Curious Theatre Company—but followed the feedback in the other theaters as well. All of this info was crucial to me when I then directed a subsequent production at ACT Theatre in Seattle.

He fought two guys; beat the crap out of them. And I looked around, and everybody had just stopped training.. And I thought: oh, my god, this is the show. There’s that magnetic presence of the ring.

The nerves about future productions depending entirely on the success of this first one are wiped away. It just pushes all of the anxious noise into the background. A lot of times the idea of taking chances has much more to do with design choices and how things are realized that might seem tiny to other folks, but can really influence the storytelling.

Brighde Mullins provides insight into her journey of becoming a playwright. 

All you have to do, for ten days, is look at beauty and create. If you need to talk your ideas through, you have a teacher available, ready to listen and help. If you want to hear your pages read aloud, supportive comrades will oblige, then drink wine with you at night to a chorus of crickets and cicadas, the only loud nightlife around.

The keynote address delivered by Todd London at the Mellon Playwright Residency Convening on September 7, 2014.

It was instructive to watch the same comedy handled by different casts and directors, each offering different rhythms and approaches to the same comic beats. It is startling how fragile comic material is. It was a tutorial for me in that regard, watching that unfold. Drama is not quite as fragile as comedy is. Something as delicate and important as rhythm/pacing can radically alter everything. Drama can take that change more easily than comedy can.

What I imagine the greatest impact of the National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere was to "End Days" was the buzz, publicity, approval it got before it even started. I do think it's a play with broad appeal, but I can't flatter myself that it would have had over fifty productions world-wide without that kind of launch.

I feel fairly confident that if some sort of census was to be taken from the last decade of American theatermaking, counting up the total number of productions by playwrights who are dead versus playwrights who are alive, The Zombies would outnumber those of us with pulses by a large margin. Which sincerely begs to question: Do artistic directors have a bias against playwrights who are alive? Are they “Life-ist?” “Pulse-Phobic?” Do they hate my heartbeat?

Todd London on playwright Kia Cothron on winning the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize from Yale University.

I wrote this summer, but all channeled through the Lorca lens. Translating when you are sad, I can say, is a very good thing to do. You can experience wild creativity within very safe margins. It’s Lorca’s play. But I get to stand in his skin, and pretend. I get to leave the sad couch of my mind, and go somewhere else. Lorca is my Virgil.

The "Playwrights, Rewrites, Multiple Productions Series" is a weekly series of interviews examining the process of developing a new play through a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere as a part of their Continued Life of New Plays Fund. Visualizations are from HowlRound's community-powered New Play Map.