In a lot of professions, it's Who You Know. For playwrights, it's Who You Develop Your Script With. In the American theatre today, the play development process is the prevailing method of giving a script a life and getting it up on the nation's mainstages. And for the foreseeable future, this process will loom large in the careers of most playwrights, involving them at times in an extended writing process and roundabout series of collaborations with directors, actors, dramaturges, and even designers. Theatres have increasingly made the process a condition for the playwright's participation, and the value of their methods and input has been much debated in recent years.
What happens in this process? What kind of assistance do playwrights get from play development workshops? The answers may depend on Who You Ask. What follows is a series of portraits of theatre artists involved in play development and a look at that process through the prism of their various experiences.
SUB: Development Ghetto
The Playwrights' Center is an organization in Minneapolis, founded in 1971 to nurture member and nonmember playwrights with various types of developmental assistance such as readings, workshops, and fellowships. Member Karl Gajdusek, in the January-February 1997 issue of the Center's newsletter Subtext, published an article that attracted some notice. In "Fear and Loathing in the Development Process," he wrote: "Good playwrights hate development. Come on, someone had to say it. Development has become a sort of weird playwright ghetto."
He zeroed in on the limitations of readings as play development tools. "Reading" generally means a script-in-hand presentation of the play that actors rehearse for only an afternoon, or perhaps a day. It is usually followed by a question-and-answer session, when the audience gives the playwright feedback.
"The best moment in a play," Gajdusek told Back Stage, "will by definition not work in a reading"; it is structured into a piece that must be brought to life through weeks of rehearsal, when actors plumb and wrestle with their roles for the sake of a full production. Such "best moments," characterized by their richness and leaps of insight, get winnowed from a script, he says, after falling flat in the skimpy rehearsal.
Far more common than full productions, readings are yielding plays that work in, well, readings--but not necessarily on mainstages before paying audiences. "As a theatre community," states Gajdusek, "we all recognize a sort of taming and lessening" in the work of writers being developed through readings.
Feedback sessions have generally overturned their original intent: "The way a bad play is treated," he laments, "rather than the way a good play is treated, has become the model for the reading." People tend to question why this or that happened in the play, at the back of which is the assumption "that the playwright is semi-thick and the play semi-stupid."
Gajdusek received a Jerome Playwright-in-Residence Fellowship to work at the Center, and he declares that he learned his own craft through development. "There is a sort of development that's as alive and 10,000-volt energizing to a work as anything," he acknowledges in his article. "If readings can become more celebratory in approach," he says, "we'd be a long way toward healing the process."
SUB: Monday-Night Madness
Agent Robert Freedman still represents only writers of dramatic works for stage and screen. "When I got into the business in 1962," he recounts, "a play was developed by giving it to a producer, like Robert Whitehead, who'd talk to the author. The author might make revisions, and they'd get a director, and they might make some more revisons. And then Whitehead would produce the play. They'd change it some more during out-of-town tryouts."
But that system and that sort of producer are rare these days. Costs are prohibitive. But the reading-and-workshop process that has evolved to nurture new plays for the mainstage has him "dismayed": "During the development of the regional theatre movement, in part because of grants for those purposes, in part because of the desire to give subscribers something extra, in part induced by a feeling that since the theatres could only produce so many plays they would give other playwrights something, a number of theatres developed Monday-night reading series." Freedman describes several problems:
First, the results depend on the energy level the actors bring to the reading. "You don't get a real sense of the play. And yet it has this aura because it's in front of an audience and takes on a life."
Second, directors who are going to do a reading and nothing but a reading have lengthy conversations with the author about what is wrong with the play and what should be done with it. There's no commitment to a production in front of an audience, so these directors are essentially doing it for their own view of what the playwright should be writing.
Third, playwrights end up paying "intense attention" to comments from the readings' audience members. "As an agent I've had to spend a great deal of time defusing absolutely irrelevant comments that the playwright has listened to."
The result of much development, Freedman says, echoing Gajdusek, is that the play is fashioned to play beautifully before an audience of 99. But it may well not work in a 1,200-seat house: "What the playwrights see is how something plays in a very intimate space. As a result of this kind of development process they learn to write for this size theatre. Then they wonder why their careers never really progress. And everybody wants to know, where are the big Broadway plays?"
"Intimate scale doesn't make the theatre less valid, mind you. And none of this is done with bad intent," he adds. "A lot of it is done because they're unsure of what they've got. I think people to a large extent have lost the art of reading plays. More and more, everyone in the theatre has been encouraged to know what you have in a play by seeing it, rather than reading it."
Freedman cautions playwrights in development situations to rewrite their plays for only two reasons: Because based on what they have heard, and after taking a few weeks away from the situation to think, they really feel that something was suggested that will make their play better. And second, because the director or producer asks them to do something for a full production--"at least try it and see how it works."
"It's very hard to say that play development is unequivocally a bad thing for the theatre," he concludes, "but in terms of creating a body of writers who really are capable of writing plays that manage to make it to Broadway and succeed--there I don't think it's helpful. We have too few of those writers."
SUB: The Dangled Carrot
New Dramatists is a New York City-based playwrights' development center, founded in 1949 by emerging playwrights in consultation with leading figures like Elmer Rice and Moss Hart. "They needed a place to try out and hear their work, make mistakes and learn their craft," explains Todd London, director of artistic programs for the organization. "They were looking for what every artist looks for, the space and time to develop their work outside of what was then the only theatre," the win-or-lose commercial theatre.
There is no fixed process at New Dramatists; the member playwrights, who have seven-year terms, initiate the readings and workshops they feel they need and decide who will collaborate with them, what kind of feedback, if any, they want, and so on. "They have first and final say in everything," London says. The organization simply supports their efforts.
"In the theatre, playwrights don't get to set the rules, and often, development is a carrot, in a way, that is dangled--that there might be a production down the road--to get the writer to make the play more what the artistic director or literary manager thinks it should be.
"There are a handful of theatres across this country that are very respectful in terms of development. They only develop work they're seriously looking at, and they do it generously. It can be hard to keep alive the distinctions between worthwhile and burdensome development," London remarks. "It's not that play development has devolved into something horrible. There are a lot of distinctions to be made."
SUB: Writing for Actors on Stools
"Development," says playwright Doug Wright, "is an attempt to follow a map and reach the author's destination. A workshop essentially exists to test the veracity and reliability of the map." He is a member of New Dramatists whose "Quills," a play about the French Revolution, was produced by New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) in the fall of 1995. It has since been steadily produced, in Los Angeles, Washington, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia. Not surprisingly, Wright has found satisfaction in the development arena.
His work on "Quills" as a full-length play (it was first a long one-act) began with a staged reading by NYTW in 1994. Extensive workshopping of the play occurred at Dartmouth College, where NYTW artists do a summer residency. While one of the directors, Beth Schachter, worked with a cast of actors on Wright's new draft for a week, the playwright observed and revised.
Weekend readings were done before an audience. The director had the actors sitting on stools, entering, and exiting. Stage lighting was trained upon them, and there was even some harpsichord music woven in. The sense of a theatrical event, the playwright felt, was supplied by the presence of the audience: "The reading folds them into the mix."
Having watched actors and then an audience engaging with his work, Wright had most of the information he needed, he says. Only rarely is the question-and-answer session with the audience "especially useful." The next step was talking with the director, actors, and a few others about dramaturgey--discussions that "confirmed and amplified" what he'd already learned about the shape of his scenes and whether or not the script's objectives were clear.
A year passed, and joining NYTW again at its workshop, Wright had the company's commitment to a production of "Quills" in the fall. At that point, a typical pre-production period began.
Wright characterizes the NYTW process as "extraordinarily generous. Jim Nicola, artistic director of NYTW, understands that the function of development is to accommodate the playwright." Elsewhere, however, "too often the process is like being in a giant hamster wheel. Young writers just on the cusp of their careers can spend all their time in development--having, say, three workshops, but no production of a play." Wright pronounces himself "extremely lucky" not to have developed a play that only returned to the script pile.
He agrees with others who have noted a scaling-down effect: "Too many writers develop the play according to a workshop aesthetic. This leads to less ambitious work, writing for actors on stools." During a two-hour rehearsal for a reading, "an actor may question writing which is richly detailed but which works least well in that setting--writing for which the actors really need five weeks of rehearsal." A sort of generalized doubt creeps in. "A workshop creates the fiction that everyone is there to fix the play, whereas everyone is there really to achieve the play."
SUB: Where Madness Lies
Elizabeth Egloff doesn't spend a lot of time wondering why theatres have developed and then not produced works of hers. "That way madness lies," she says. On May 2, her play "The Devils"--based on the novel by Dostoevsky--opened at New York Theatre Workshop after seven years of wandering in development land. It had begun as a commission by Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum in 1990. Over the seven years, as a member of New Dramatists, Egloff initiated three different readings of the play at the group's home in a former Lutheran church, on West 44th Street in Manhattan.
Pursuing her ambition "to do a big piece," she wrote a script that took a cast of 35 four hours to perform. By the time the Taper did a reading, the people who had commissioned the work had changed jobs. The continuity was lost, and the Taper dropped Egloff's play. A co-production by the Public Theater, in New York, and A.C.T., in San Francisco, also did not come to fruition.
In the spring of 1994, "The Devils" was workshopped at New York University by director Robert Woodruff, working with students at Tisch School of the Arts. Egloff says she valued learning from Woodruff how as a director he saw the piece, but they proved to have "opposing aesthetics" and amicably went their separate ways.
Enter James Nicola, whose staff obtained a Kennedy Center grant to mount NYTW's production of the large-scale play. Egloff wrote five or six more drafts, developing "The Devils" with director Garland Wright. Their talks led her to make radical changes. She found new act breaks, whittled the 35 characters to 15, scuttled the device of a narrator, and let go of a poetic approach in favor of the telling of a murder story.
Egloff has "made her peace" with the developmental process, though it can be frustrating as a play is abandoned after one cold reading--or developed, produced, and then never picked up by another theatre. In any given year, she explains, even a meagerly funded theatre will have dozens of plays in development. Out of all this activity only one or two plays may be selected for a full production in a season. More workshops with fewer productions is the trend for the future. Competition is intense for the production slots. "But for a playwright," Egloff says, "this is how things are."
SUB: A Place to Nestle
Playwright Leslie Lee is a firm believer in having a "home-base" theatre where he can develop new work. But he knows that economic reasons keep theatres from giving many playwrights "a place to nestle, experiment, and not fear failing." New York's Negro Ensemble Company spawned his career, and in recent years he has experimented Off-Off-Broadway at La MaMa and found a home "both spiritually and aesthetically" at Crossroads Theatre Company, in New Brunswick, N.J. On Jan. 17, '98, his new play, "Spirit North," will become the fifth of Lee's works that Crossroads has produced.
He began the play, about the conflict between ethical action and "protecting your own," two years ago. After a private reading in a lab theatre at New York University's Dramatic Writing Program, where he teaches, he rewrote the play. Both Crossroads and the McCarter Theatre, in Princeton, N.J., ended up sharing in its further development.
After talking privately with Emily Mann, McCarter's artistic director, and Janice Paran, its literary manager, Lee rewrote the play again. He was concerned with his point of view. "I had a stacked deck at first," he says. "My point was almost too clear and was made many times over. I wanted to wean the play away from my own particular hard line and make it fairer for the opposing point of view."
At the McCarter, director Harold Scott and a cast of four actors rehearsed for two days. "I was making changes right on the spot, cutting, pruning, and juxtaposing dialogue," Lee recalls, "and each of us realized that this is what good theatre is about."
The audience at a reading liked the play, but the playwright saw that he was "still hammering them over the head. I hadn't done all the work I needed to do balancing my thesis with its antithesis."
More rewriting, followed by rehearsals for another reading in May '97, this time at Crossroads. Scott was directing, and two of the actors were on board from the previous reading. This time Lee felt that only "some few changes" were required, and Crossroads scheduled the play in its upcoming season.
Now the development process pursued him: the McCarter invited him to work on "Spirit North" in its developmental lab series of four plays in June. "The process is not always this involved," Lee says. "I wish it could be!"
In the lab series, there were no question-and-answer periods. And Leslie Lee has stopped rewriting--for the time being.
SUB: Work That's as Hard as You Make It
After "think time" filling a notebook for six months with ideas, playwright Michle Raper Rittenhouse, who teaches playwriting at Rutgers University, wrote several outlines for a new play. She spent two weeks doing a rough handwritten draft. Later, staying at a bed-and-breakfast inn in Seattle, for a couple of weeks, she wrote her first real draft of "Angel on My Shoulder," a play about a Vietnam veteran.
After two major revisions, she submitted the play to the O'Neill Theater Center in the hopes of being selected for the 1997 National Playwrights Conference (NPC). In February, she learned she had been chosen as a finalist from some 1,400 playwrights who submitted work. In April, she got the exciting news that she would be going to the Conference, in Waterbury, Conn., in June. "I'd been trying for seven years to get in," she says. Since 1968, the NPC, under its artistic director, Lloyd Richards, has existed solely to support the playwright's process in preparing staged readings of 12 to 15 new scripts each summer--the text, not the directing or acting, is the focus at all times.
Rittenhouse hadn't stopped working on the play, and she had another draft ready when the conference asked her for six copies of her script. Then, on the basis of an early meeting in New York with Casey Childs and Max Wilk--the director and the dramaturge, respectively, with whom she'd be working--Rittenhouse wrote another draft.
At the four-day-long "Pre-Conference" in Waterford, all the playwrights, directors, dramaturges, and designers met Lloyd Richards. In solo before the assembly, each of the 15 writers read his/her play aloud in the order they would be presented in the coming weeks. Following this marathon, the month-long conference officially started, with 44 actors also in residence.
Playwrights received comments from their directors and dramaturges right away and went to work on rewrites. They wrote in their dorm called Seaside, about four miles away; on the lawn fanned by ocean breezes; or in the library of the main house under an elephantine beech tree--anywhere. Some plays immediately went into rehearsal; others were scheduled to do so later. Directors, actors, and dramaturges, going from one project to another, turned their attention to the plays as their time became available. And once a week, the writers met with Lloyd Richards to go over any problems or to discuss what they needed to be looking for.
Not yet in the rehearsal phase when interviewed, Rittenhouse said, "I've had my wheels spinning working on rewrites. It's hard work, but it's as hard as you make it. When we do have some time on our hands, we're encouraged to sit in on the work of other writers and watch the work in development, see the different styles the directors are using, how they're approaching things. When I go back to my computer to do my rewrites, I get an energy that feeds into the work I do alone in my room."
In the four days of rehearsal, questions would arise, from actors, director, or dramaturge. They either would discover the answers in the play as they worked, or the playwright would chose to address them in rewrites--or not.
On the fourth day, an audience that included the public and visiting theatre folk would attend the staged reading. As a rule, more revisions would result from the experience of observing both performers and spectators, and the audience at a second reading the next day would see a changed play. At neither reading was the audience invited to offer comments afterward.
A critique session would again summon all the artists at the conference, usually on the next morning. Here, wearing sunglasses (a tradition, reports Rittenhouse) and maintaining an expressionless face, the writer would silently listen "to what the others saw or didn't see--how they perceived what the play was about, whether it was what he or she was trying to do." The main thrust of their comments, Rittenhouse says, "are positive, and people back up their statements with examples of what they perceived and why they feel that way." Lloyd Richards, she continues, is an "iron fist in a velvet glove" when it comes to laying the ground rules, so "there is a conscious focus on making the work the best possible.
"Everyone is a sounding board" in discussions on the porch, in the pub, or over coffee. However, "no one ever says, 'I think you need to do this ' to your play. Instead, it's, 'What if ?' and it's always left to the writer to make the choice."
SUB: Creating a Whole World
"If I were to stop right now, I would be so far ahead of what I would have done on my own," says Erik Brogger, having just done rewrites for the next day's initial read-through of his play by actors. An associate professor of creative writing at Hofstra University, he came to the O'Neill to work on "Strangers' Ground," a drama about the yellow fever epidemic that hit Philadelphia in 1783.
Brogger salutes the role of designers--"an incredibly important component" of a play's realization. He got a lot out of discussing his play with NPC designer G.W. Mercier--learning Mercier's "impressions and images" and how they meshed with his own intentions. "There's an intuitive sense to any play that resists linear construction," Brogger says. "It's what you feel. But out of that comes something very concrete with a physical shape, a whole world." Postulating an unlimited budget, Mercier and the lighting designer, Tina Charney, asked Brogger, "What do you see for this play?"
"At every turn I've found people here trying their best to realize what the playwright sees. They've helped me to see the play with the incorporation of someone else's imagination. So we're now moving the play from intuitive image to something that's three-dimensional."
He talked about process: "Whether I'll solve every problem, I don't know, but it'll be addressed. It's like walking into a haunted house here. You don't know what's going to jump out at you. But the unexpected will ultimately be beneficial--it's going to be something wonderful that you may have known about on some level, or something completely baffling to everyone, and you'll get depressed. But at least you'll know that's the problem you have to address."
SUB: Sharpening the Focus
Will Dunne was at the NPC this summer, working on his play "Love and Drowning." In San Francisco, he is a co-founder of a writers' collective, the Bay Area Playwrights Association. "The opportunity to do nothing but work on your play for a month doesn't happen on the outside world for most people. Everything is taken care of for us; our meals are cooked, our sheets washed, so we can really concentrate on our work."
At the Conference, Dunne met right away with his director and dramaturge to decide what he'd try to accomplish on his already heavily reworked script. He decided on "sharpening the focus--not changing the overall story, what the events are, or who the characters are--but finding areas where I can bring out that focus. A lot of the work I'm doing is conceptual," he says, "trying to figure out what this play is really about, so that I can edit and add as needed."
Whatever work gets done at the NPC, Dunne said, "no one can take the play away from you, so the whole idea is to take the risk of exploring the material, opening it up again. It might be hard for some writers, but you have such a wealth of talent here for that purpose that it wouldn't make sense not to jump off the edge and see what you can find out--knowing that if it doesn't work, you can always go back to what you had. You do get a lot of feedback here, and sometimes you have to pull back and say, 'Wait a minute. What was the play I wanted to be writing?' "
His take on the development process? "It's who you're dealing with," Dunne says. "That makes all the difference in the world."
SUB: What's on the Page?
Max Wilk, a writer with many plays, teleplays, and books to his credit, has been a dramaturge at the conference for the last 17 years. He has seen writers who "use the process for everything it's worth, engorging it"; others "who get swamped by it"; and still others "who resist it." After Wilk and the director for a project confer on some kind of "ground plan" of what they want to do, they give the playwright their thoughts. After that, "you get a pretty good idea of whether the playwright is going to work on what you think needs work."
"And it's his play, or hers," he adds, "not mine or the director's."
He remarks that he'd just lunched with a playwright who'd said, "I don't know where my second act is going. What do I do?" There is some aspect of the material that is chosen to be worked on that the writer has not yet grasped, and it takes someone outside the writer's subjectivity to identify what that is. "When you're immersed in a script for six or seven months," Wilk says, "you lose perspective on what you've written. Then a stranger such as I can help you with two questions: What is your play about? And what is the story you're telling? It's amazing how often what the playwright tells me is not what's on the page. And I say, 'What you told me is interesting, but it has nothing to do with what you wrote. You got lost somewhere.' I guess we're sort of like traffic cops who pull you over and say, 'Did you know you were going 80?' "
But then, Wilk stresses, "the process is about more than somebody pointing that out. It's proving it. Do you know how many people can tell you what's wrong with your play? Sure, they're being friendly and helpful, but how do you know who's right? In the end, audiences are the only judge. Sometimes they're wrong, but very often they're right."
SUB: Developing the Playwright
Paula Vogel's work has become increasingly well-known since her play "The Baltimore Waltz" won the 1992 Obie Award. Her acclaimed play "How I Learned to Drive," produced Off-Broadway by the Vineyard Theatre, has been running since March. Asked about that play's development, she seemed to enjoy stating that she did not develop it--she wrote it.
But, Vogel declares, she'd "been through the mill" herself in that early phase of her career "when a young playwright doesn't know how to say 'no' and doesn't have the opportunity and luxury" to find productions as she does today.
"I have had some wonderful readings and workshops," Vogel affirms, citing her work with New York City's Circle Repertory and Vineyard theatres, and Juneau, Alaska's Perseverance Theatre. The latter has produced seven of her plays and gave her the chance to write two plays in residence. The second of these was "How I Learned to Drive," which the theatre gave a cold reading, and Vogel estimates that she revised about 10% of the play after that.
What she greatly appreciates about her experience with Perseverance is that "they developed me as a playwright, not the plays. They said: 'Here are the resources of this theatre company. Please use them as you need. We believe in you.' "
"The greatest development opportunity is to give time and respect to the playwright," observes Vogel. "We'll discover everything we need to know--if we're professional--given a director and actors to work with." The best development is "playwright-driven."
She doesn't characterize much of development that way. Too many workshops put the writer in a weak position. At its worst, "it infantilizes the playwright, who is expected to satisfy the whims of others" in order to get the work on.
Writers, however, have come to know "they're going to be played with a lot. It sounds cynical," Vogel says, "but it's come to the point where writers will put in a scene they know doesn't work so they can later cut it out when it's requested. It's a game we play to get our work into production. I call it 'Pleasing the King.' "
The current situation, she states, signals a loss of respect for the writer. "We're modeling playwriting after the Hollywood studio system, where the writer is a hired hand." Consequently, the writer's "originality and strong vision are lost." The theatre is "supposedly a place where the playwright writes the script."
According to Vogel, another factor is the conception of the director as auteur, a consequence of a swing toward experimental theatre in the 1960s that showed "an absolute lack of respect for the text." In the university and intellectual community, there is a loss of respect for the theatre: "It's felt that if you're a real writer, you'd be doing novels or nonfiction essays or, ironically, screenplays--not writing for the stage."
The theatre has fallen into an in-between state, she explains, where "it's not part of the intelligentsia anymore, and it's not pop culture. We're conflicted about what theatre is--literary art or entertainment." The perplexity about playwrights is that "they're condemned for being intelligent--that makes them eggheads." It's as if we're only comfortable when "the intelligent playwright is considered an idiot savant who works by instinct. No wonder the theatre is a target of the enemies of the National Endowment for the Arts--we're not defending it."
The diminished respect for intelligence and literary art is perhaps related to the erosion in script-reading know-how, Vogel continues. "Some artistic directors just don't know how to read a play. Artistic directors ask for a lot of development to enable them to understand a play that may work just fine as it is." These horror shows are well-intentioned, she says--"and they hurt playwrights and the theatre."
SUB: No Other Way
Buzz McLaughlin is the former artistic director of Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey, a company he founded in 1986 as a developmental home for new plays. He teaches playwriting at Drew University and is the author of a new how-to manual, "The Playwright's Process" (Watson-Guptill Publications). To write the book he interviewed prominent playwrights and reflected on his own experience as an artistic director and writer. In his concluding chapter, he fully explains what playwrights can expect from the process as theatres adopt their scripts for development.
McLaughlin's own play "Sister Calling My Name" won the National Play Award from the National Repertory Theatre Foundation in July, and he has been all over the developmental map himself. He tries to look at the big picture: "When all is said and done, new-play development is here to stay, and playwrights have to find a way to work with the multifaceted opportunities that are out there. Let's face it, the theatre is all about collaboration, and when your play is ready you can't be afraid to drop it into the chute and see what happens. There's no other way to launch a new work."
Dale Ramsey is a playwright and editor of books on the arts. He was the dramaturge of the classical-repertory Pearl Theatre Company, for more than 12 years. His new play Thoreau in Love may or may not turn up soon in a workshop near you.