outrageous fortune

I just completed reading the comprehensive study conducted by the Theater Developement Fund entitled OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE NEW AMERICAN PLAY. Very illuminating, very distressing. Not a pleasant read. Here are some noteworthy points from the study. My response? Oh boy will I have one. Coming SOON!

A Collaboration in Crisis

- In the US today, it's hard to find theaters defined by a voice and vision of a particular playwright or group of playwrights. Shakespeare, Chekhov, Moliere, O'Neill, Brecht, Churchill, August Wilson... all had theatres they were creatively intwined with.

- Houses for art, but few homes for artists.

- Theaters worry about shrinking audiences

- playwrights and artistic diretors don't see the same things at all.

- The corporate has become pervasive, until the theatre as it is hardly resembles the theatre playwrights imagine for themselves.

- There is a "corporatization of decision-making"

- Where vision is required, there is conservatism; where there should be boldness, there is cautious pragmatism; where there could be adventurous engagement with new kinds of writing, there is timid protection of the status quo.

- The lack of an authentic conversation between producers and creators.

- Boards of theaters have been around longer than the theater's artistic directors. (what does that say? imagine what the means) Theaters used to be run by writers.

- No Board goes to an Artistic Director and goes: Can't you be a little riskier?

- Artistic Directors believe there aren't enough good plays to go around.

- The country is overwhelmed with new play developement workshops, development retreats, public readings... but they lack what is absolutely integral to the growth of a play and the fruition of a playwright. A production.

- Is the audience just afraid of something new? Is that the problem (I think not)

- New York is Las Vegas. It is not the home of new plays. It's is a commerical hub. Off and Off Off Broadway, too.

- In the 1920's, a new play opened on Broadway at the rate of around one every other night; in the new millennium, the rate is closer to one every two months.

- There are more good plays wanting productions than places for them.

- The growth of institutions separates artistic directors from the playwrights themselves, with literary departments often standing as institutional buffers. Plays are chosen with input from so many "departments" that the passionate connection between producer and playwright is short-circuited. Artistic Directors often have to comprimise with those who fork over the money.

- How can non-profit producers give their all to each current project when they're constantly projecting ahead to the next and the next?

- Everything is judged on its future life, based on money coming back to the theater over the life of the play. Every play should not be chosen on whether or not it can have a commerical run. "We're packagers now."

- Playwrights are drawn to the idea of having an artistic Home. (as they should)

- "You can make a killing in the theater, but you can't make a living."

- It is, largely, a picture of precarious personal economies, a lack of continuity in relationships with producing theaters, new play developement that does little to further the development of the playwright, a downward spiral of expectations about opportunity and artistic scale, lags and gaps between output and fruition, the attractions of television, and the loss of the "mid-career" playwright in the US.

- Financially speaking, there is no way to view playwrighting as anything but a profession without an economic base. It's not a romantic notion that playwrights must be prepared to be poor. It's a sad fact.

- The average playwright earns between $25,000 and $39,000 annually, with approximately 62% of playwrights earning under $40,000 and nearly a third making less than $25,000.

- "Most playwrights live on theater at a poverty level. A production every other year if you're lucky, or a commission we can't afford to live on."

- Production doesn't Pay.

- The economics of playwriting are akin to those of a hobby; you might make a bit of cash by buying and selling old comic books, but you don't plan to live off it.

- A middle-class life is unrealistic.

- An MFA track filters out whole classes of people, including workingpoor, immigrants, and anyone for whom elite graduate training is off the radar. Seven schools-- Yale, Columbia, NYU, Brown, U of Iowa, U of Texas/Austin, Julliard-- account for almost nine out of ten (!) of the study playwrights with advanced professional training, or 42% of all 250 playwrihts.

- Too many buzz words: emerging, world premiere, new, etc.

- So many theaters contend for so few writers and plays... It is the ego--the desire to be the theater in your area to produce the most prestigous works. Competition is the great motivator.

- People embarrassedly call commissions "the money they pay me to go away" or "the money they pay me to put me on their brochure until they raise more.

- Many theaters substitute developemental activities for productions.

- The production of new plays adds uncertainty to instability.

- In a competitive marketplace, premieres are currency.

- Only the largest, most visible theaters can earn a play a continued life.

- [culturally specific theaters] beyond their work with specific communities of artists and audiences, they regularly struggle with their place in the overall ecosystem of new play production. they find themselves competing with larger organizations for grants, and especially funds earmarked for multicultural work.

- Major regional theaters will develop the work of African American writers, but, she says, they rarely produce it, a sentiment that echos complaints voiced by writers or color.

- For Artistic Directors, "cast size and composition" is the most severe obstacle to producing a play. "Too expensive" is the closely related, second-greatest obstacle. "We're all being trained how not to write 14 character plays."

- Theaters are producing small quartetes, sonatas, intimiate chamber compositions- while eschewing symphonies.

- Miller's Death of a Salesman - cast size of 13, Raisin in the Sun- 11, You Can't Take it With you- 19, Our Town- 51.

- More and more, the right space means a smaller space.

- Audiences are disappearing, yet population is exploding.

- Claims that theaters don't know how to sell things.

- THE audience is now MANY audiences, divided by generation and interest.

- 30,000 subscribers, but they're actually concerned about the 10 or 20 people who give a lot of money.

- In the current system of new-play development, there are few opportunities for writers to get to know theatergoers over time- productions are too sporadic, and ongoing relationships with theaters (and, by extension, communities and ticket buyers) are rarely sustained.

- Corporate theater = marketing.

- A colored playwright: Everytime I do a play, the first question they ask me is, "How do we market to your audience?" So I have to be a marketer? Yes, it seems. (Like many other black, Asian American, Latio, Native American, and Arab-American playwrights, operating in the field where theater staffs are predominately white, he has learned the ropes of culturally-specific, niche marketing.)

- You can't just invite a black audience for a black play and say good-bye to them. You have to make them part of the community. And invite them to see a white show, that Asian show. The same thing with other people. Every time a production becomes a speciality event, it becomes troublesome. (yes!)

- Do critics still count? (yes and no, mainly no)