The Value of the Slow

My first professional production started rehearsing a week after I finished grad school. Yes, this was incredibly lucky, but at the time it didn’t feel unnatural. For me, that’s how theater worked. I became interested in writing through improvisational acting in Chicago. Basically, I thought of myself as writer who just happened to be performing as I wrote. After Chicago, I spent a few years in Ireland where I co-founded a theater company, just so I could see my plays on stage. The creative process for these projects was always short. For one site-specific production in the Galway Arts Festival our company selected a parking garage and a cast for the performance before I even started the script. I loved the excitement of a production looming a few months away as I walked through the neon lit cars searching for characters and story lines.

I went on to grad school at the University of California, San Diego. Every year, we’d start a play over the summer that would get a full production the following spring. For me, theater was something that happened fast. You wrote about something that you found interesting and showed it to an audience while it still felt relevant. My first production in New York was part of the Uptown Series at Second Stage. I didn’t know much about the theater or the people who worked there when we started rehearsals, but the production was a blast. It was also well received, extended and eventually got published—everything I could have asked for—but it left me with a pretty unrealistic expectation as to the trajectory of my career.

By that time I was used to having a play produced every year and I assumed that the next production would come easily. I wasn’t expecting the lull that followed. Graduate programs aren’t designed to prepare you for the harsher realities of a playwriting career. No one would give them any money if they were. Their job—and it is an important job—is to advance your creative work, give you a chance to see it on stage, and give you the opportunity to collaborate with other theater artists. You pay graduate programs to give you the experience of being a successful playwright. The experience of being a struggling playwright you get for free.

Around the same time as my Second Stage production, I was a finalist in the Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Competition at the Alliance Theatre. As a finalist they didn’t produce my play, but I did get a reading and a chance to visit the theater. I got to know the folks in Atlanta well enough to keep in touch over the next few years and sent other plays their way for feedback. One day in November I got a call asking if they could do a student production of one of my plays with their education department. It didn’t sound too glamorous, but they invited me to come to Atlanta to talk to the students during the rehearsal process and, what the hell, it was cold in New York. During this visit, they also hired professional actors to do a reading of a new play of mine called Spoon Lake Blues. The reading went well, they asked for a rewrite, and a few months later, while I was leaving Wall Drug in South Dakota, I got a call asking if they could produce the play.

Theaters that have the resources to get to know emerging writers, and the commitment to nurture those relationships, have the chance to shape the world of contemporary theater rather than just reflect it.

Once the Alliance production became a reality, I was able to look back on the slow years as part of a process. While having a play produced quickly has obvious advantages, there are a couple of things that I’ve come to appreciate about taking it slow. For one thing, the Alliance and I have gotten to know each other pretty well. They not only know the play that they are producing, they have a broader knowledge of what’s important to me as a playwright. This familiarity brings us closer to a common language when discussing the production and clarifies what it needs to succeed. During a workshop in Atlanta last fall it was helpful to have a creative team that could keep me focused on the strengths of my storytelling style. When I stumbled into the rehearsal room with new pages written late the night before, I found it comforting to sit next to someone who could say with some authority, “that idea feels like a Josh Tobiessen play.”

I’ve also learned to appreciate how a slower road to production can mitigate the risk involved in producing an unknown playwright. Usually, regional theaters pick the same few new plays that were hits in New York the season before. With all the unknown factors in producing new(ish) plays, it’s understandable that theaters would feel more comfortable producing a play with some name recognition. In this way, many regional theaters primarily reflect the work produced in New York. The other possibility for taking some of the unknown out of the equation is for a theater to produce a playwright that they know. I may not have the name recognition to ensure large crowds, but the Alliance knows my work well, they trust that I’m a good collaborator, they’ve tested my plays on their audience at small readings, and they’re comfortable taking a chance. Their job now becomes selling the audience on the idea that the Alliance can pick a good play.

Theaters that have the resources to get to know emerging writers, and the commitment to nurture those relationships, have the chance to shape the world of contemporary theater rather than just reflect it. These are the innovative theaters that audiences are going to be excited about supporting. Taking it slow improves the quality of the work and expands the diversity of programming offered by theaters. This is clearly a good thing for theaters, but for playwrights it’s more of a mixed bag. Increasing the quality of the work obviously helps playwrights as well as theaters, and the possibility of getting produced at a theater that wouldn’t normally consider an emerging playwright is a great opportunity.

But this lengthy process is a financial hardship for any playwright needing to make money. Ideally we would all have several such connections with theaters across the country, but with hundreds of playwrights emerging at any given moment in this country, these opportunities are hard to come by. I’m hoping that my experience at the Alliance will help foster relationships with other theaters, but I’ll have to wait to see. I still wish things happened faster. There’s vitality about creativity that happens fast and a confidence gained in the continuity of moving from one project to the next. But I’m learning the value of the slow as well and beginning to understand that there’s a balance between the two that’s worth waiting for.