The playwright may be among our most endangered species. Consider: cutbacks in funding for individual artists. Theatre literary departments shrinking. Revivals on Broadway. Literary adaptations. Hollywood beckons...
As one San Francisco M.F.A. candidate in playwriting lamented, "There are only so many stages and so much time. Local writers are struggling."
Playwright and teacher Will Dunne, from the perspective of two decades in the San Francisco playwriting scene, told Back Stage West, "I think opportunities have gotten thinner-it's much harder today to get a new play produced than it was 20 years ago. People are afraid to take the risk of doing new plays."
Yet in the Bay Area, new work is still read, stage-read, workshopped, commissioned, and fully mounted by small fringe companies, by presenters, by playwrights' organizations, and by subscription theatres, as well. Some of the theatres in fact sponsor writers' groups and active new play development programs. And the annual multidisciplinary performance festivals-Solo Mio, Afro Solo, Working Women, and San Francisco Fringe-provide a showcase for new material, much of it performed by the creators themselves.
However, sitting alone in your room and sending out scripts and SASEs is a long shot these days. Bay Area playwrights find that they need to do much more than that-they need to interact with the theatre community on an ongoing basis.
Page to Stage
Opportunities with the local LORT theatres are for the favored few; they don't accept unsolicited manuscripts. They do new works, though, and commission playwrights for long-term projects. American Conservatory Theater currently has Tony Kushner, Octavio Solis, David Gordon, Giles Havergal, Mac Wellman, and Robert O'Hara under commission and will world-premiere three plays next season (by Gordon, Havergal, and David Hirson). Berkeley Repertory Theatre's next season includes a world premiere by Mary Zimmerman on the mainstage; Joan Holden, Culture Clash, Philip Kan Gotanda, and David Edgar are currently under commission (commissions include both the mainstage and the school touring program).
San Jos Repertory Theatre has a New America Playwrights Festival, an annual three-week residency in which three to four playwrights are invited to develop their projects collaboratively with actors, a director, and a dramaturg, culminating in a public staged reading. The aim is to develop work for the mainstage. The next festival is scheduled for spring 2000.
Savvy playwrights seek affiliations with the smaller theatres. Theatre Rhinoceros, with a gay and lesbian orientation, mainstages more world premieres-often four or five per season-than any other company in the Bay Area, according to Doug Holsclaw, its resident playwright and associate artistic director. "We find a playwright we like and then we tailor to what their development needs are," he said, "whether it's a series of readings, dramaturgy, a full production."
Some of the other mid-sized and smaller theatres diligently read through slush piles of unsolicited manuscripts, hold staged readings, and mainstage new work. Of course, opportunities for any one playwright are limited by the fact that some of the work that makes it to the mainstage is created by artists who are founding members of their own ensembles; and some new work comes from non-local writers.
The Magic Theatre's monthly Raw Play program of staged readings is a good example of one that favors local playwrights. Literary manager/dramaturg Kent Nicholson said he reads about 600 scripts a year. Scripts are chosen for Raw Play if they show potential for full production. The 30-year-old Magic Theatre has a well-deserved national reputation for developing new plays.
In Palo Alto, TheatreWorks has mounted 30 world premieres in 30 years and is especially partial to musicals. The company is in the process of launching what artistic director Robert Kelley calls a New Works Initiative to promote new music theatre. Among planned activities are a quarterly forum for local composers and playwrights to swap ideas, perform, and form collaborations; artists' seminars, in which playwrights and composers discuss their work, and one to two workshops a year to develop plays with music for the mainstage.
Fest or Famine
One of the best ways for a playwright to get attention and development aid is through the 22-year-old Playwrights Festival. Under the artistic direction of Jayne Wenger, six projects are developed during a summer retreat and a two-week September festival of staged readings. Playwrights are matched with professional directors, dramaturgs, and actors, and get the rare opportunity to rework their plays in between readings. Plays seen at the festival often go on to full productions elsewhere.
With a recent $8,000 NEA grant for new play development, the festival intends to connect with the Bay Area's many other new-plays groups, most of which are operating independently of one another. Wenger envisions interactive websites, master classes taught by such festival alumni as Paula Vogel, and panel discussions. Mused Wenger, "How do we not reinvent the wheel each time?" she asked. "How do we all combine our efforts to honor our mutual goal-to lift up the playwright? I wonder if it's beneficial to have these many spokes on the wheel?"
As far as local emerging playwrights are concerned, the more spokes the better. But Wenger's concerns are real: Organizations compete for new play development funding. And certainly it's only to the playwright's benefit if theatres can figure out a way to share their slush piles (some of that already takes place informally).
Another good avenue for play development is David Dower's Z Space Studio, a highly respected membership organization for theatre artists and an increasingly active participant in the playwriting scene. Z offers extensive resources, plus showcases for a handful of promising playwrights (current commissions are to Amy Freed, Gary Leon Hill, Cherylene Lee, and Charlie Varon). This is a boon for those playwrights who prefer working collaboratively, even at the early stages. A recent Z focus is on developing musical theatre pieces.
Join the Club
Despite the opportunities presented by festivals, staged readings, and playwrights' organizations, local playwrights say they have a tough time, for a number of reasons: 1) The festivals (except for the Playwrights Festival) are more likely to benefit solo writer/performers and/or groups rather than the writers themselves; 2) Plays can languish indefinitely in "development limbo," moving from one producer to another, workshopped to death, never fully realized; 3) As the saying goes, a prophet is without honor in his own country: Such award-winning Bay Area writers as Lynne Kaufman, Robert Alexander, Amy Freed, Prince Gomolvilas, Will Dunne, and others often premiere elsewhere in the country.
So, now more than ever, local playwrights-of which, by one teacher/playwright's estimate, there are hundreds-gravitate to writing and producing groups created and run by like-minded colleagues. There they have opportunities at least to hear their plays read aloud, often by actors, maybe publicly, or even get a workshop performance. Clearly, the day of the solitary playwright is over.
For example, former San Francisco Chronicle theatre critic Bernie Weiner is an active participant in Playwrights' Lab, originally sponsored by Marin Theatre Company but now independent. Weiner and fellow writers meet every other week in one another's homes, sometimes with actors, to read and critique, and they plan to hold staged readings of some of their works in the summer at Marin Theatre Company.
"It feels good that we're doing good play development work," said Weiner, "and the feedback sessions are amazing-supportive, honest, brutal, all that stuff." Member Dyke Garrison's play about writer Pearl Buck recently went on to a New York production with Valerie Harper.
Weiner also helped create a new organization, PlayBrokers, to stage showcase readings every second Monday of the month (scripts chosen strictly by referral) with the goal of piquing the interest of local producers and companies.
Similarly, playwright Will Dunne has been involved for 15 years with the Bay Area Playwrights Association, a group of seven or eight writers, plus actors, who meet weekly for the playwrights to hear their work read. Dunne has been invited to the prestigious and highly competitive O'Neill Playwriting Festival in Connecticut for the past three years in a row and is a finalist this year, as are several other of his Association comrades. The play he took to the O'Neill last summer received a MacArthur fellowship, but, sighed Dunne, "No theatres in the Bay Area are beating down my door to get my plays." With his work produced extensively elsewhere, including Russia and Australia, he blames the "nothing-in-your-backyard-can-be-as-good syndrome."
Dunne added that although he doesn't really like producing his own work, he did so when he was starting out, and he thinks it's a good way to go. "You can have a million readings, but you need to see it rehearsed and done for different audiences," he said. "You keep learning more and more about the play that way." He observed that a lot of theatres are holding staged readings in order to satisfy grant requirements for doing new work, "and it's not that that's not valuable, but it's of limited value." He summed up the playwright's dilemma: "It's hard to write a play, and when you finish it, it's hard to get it out somewhere."
Playwright Octavio Solis, who often juggles multiple commissions, said, "Find the actors you can trust and the companies you can trust." He writes a lot of his Latino-themed material with specific actors in mind, and often works privately with a colleague, monologist Anne Galjour, for mutual support and feedback. "The theatres have to run a season, that's their business," he said. "But the writers need a support system and it behooves us to create it for each other."
Other playwrights' groups include ThroughLine, a seven-member writing group that recently created a nonprofit production unit, First Seen.
Tony Kelly, whose ensemble company, Thick Description, often stages world premieres, advised, "Empower yourself, do those garage productions. Choose the circumstances yourself." He pointed out that downscale beginnings are a Bay Area tradition. Indeed, George Coates, John O'Keefe, Whoopi Goldberg, and Bob Ernst-a.k.a. the Blake St. Hawkeyes-once plied their trade in just such a humble venue in Berkeley, and the rest is history. BSW