Playwriting

Anne G. Morgan sheds insight on the history and impact of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center on the theatrical community. 

Throughout the ONSTAGE journey, we’ve been doing our best to promote each playwright and connect them with the people coming in contact with their work at every stage, be it other playwrights, partner producers, the directors, the actors, or the audience—each and every person coming in contact with these plays has been given tools to help them find out more about the playwrights and learn how to connect with these writers through our project.

How many playwrights have been told to self-produce? It seems like the go-to response anytime someone expresses frustration with the current system of “Development.” It sounds enticing, and the idea definitely feeds the angsty rebellion residing within… But let’s be honest: very few playwrights have access to the resources necessary to mount a full production of their work.

For an American playwright today, where is Mecca? Where does it all come together: actors of high quality who give maximum effort to a new script; directors with a sense of humor to match their ability to move bodies in space and make moments that signify on stage; audiences who not only love going to theater but do so a lot and make it part of their daily lives; and great bars before and after the show? Mecca (for me anyway) is Chicago. And my most recent hajj was to Teatro Vista.

Srila Nayak shares an overview of Pulitzer prize-winning dramatist Ayad Akhtar's career. 

I think, rather, that playwrights readily turn over the fate of their work to these committees and power-players, simply because that is the way it’s been done for so long that anything else feels strange. A playwright wants to get produced, after all— and other writers traditionally aren’t the ones assigning production budgets. But this can change.

Does my play choose the title, or does that first title inform my play? At fourteen pages in, who knows what will happen to these characters? Who knows what will happen in this world? How do you title your plays?

This week's conversation topic is Writing & Producing New Plays for the Indie, High School, College, and Community Theater Markets and will be moderated by Amy Rose Marsh @AmyRoseMarsh, literary manager @MrSamuelFrench—who like all of our moderators, authors, and content producers—self-selected to peer-produce on this commons-based platform! This hour-long Howl will take place on Thursday, May 1 on hashtag #newplay at 11am PDT (San Francisco) / 1pm CDT (Austin) / 2pm EDT (Toronto) / 18:00 GMT / 7pm BST (London). On Thursday, get heard in the conversation by searching for #newplay in Twitter (sort by “all”) and by putting “#newplay” somewhere in your messages. Spread the word!

The neglect of playwriting as a genre in what I’ll lovingly call the creative writing industrial machine—poetry, fiction, and non-fiction/memoir are the ruling three—hasn’t escaped conference organizers. They actively encourage pitches for playwriting panels, which are typically in short supply. This year, this poet and part-time playwriting instructor made a point of attending as many theater-related panels as possible. It was an incredibly heartening experience, mainly due to the emphasis placed on the benefits of incorporating playwriting into creative writing and literature classrooms.

Isn’t boxing just like writing a play? First, you have to train (the muscles in the gym if a boxer, the mind facing the screen if a writer). Then you have to fight! (What we in the Arts call “advocate”). You go out into the world/ring and advocate for your play, and hopefully find other advocates who will advocate your “advocation.” Next, whether you win (get a production) or lose (a reading, and another reading, and another reading), you must nurse your wounds and finally, learn from the experience in hopes that you will come out next time a stronger, smarter, more creative. . .fighter.

HowlRound is working with playwright residency sites around the country to track the impact of what it means to have a playwright on staff. At each of the fourteen theaters we have a Commons Producer—a theater practitioner from the local community working with the theater and the playwright to tell the story of each residency and make the learning from this experiment accessible as it's happening. Periodically we will post these residency updates on HowlRound in the hopes that it will be useful to field-wide learning on the question of what it means to employ playwrights inside of theaters.