Theater as a Collective Experience by Dominic Orlando

HowlRound: When Polly Carl asked me to write an article about The Workhaus Playwrights Collective for HowlRound, it started me thinking about the essential collective nature of all theater. Polly suggested I write about the origin and history of the Collective as we enter our fifth season as company-in-residence at The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. So, to start: what exactly is a collective? In the course of nurturing and producing more than a dozen plays, Workhaus has become a true community of artists, but somehow just focusing on that seemed incomplete. Part and parcel of Workhaus’ mission is bringing new work to our audiences straight from the playwright—no administrative infrastructure chooses the plays or plans the seasons. The idea is to create a more direct and immediate conversation between the writer and audience. So any discussion of Workhaus is actually a discussion of two communities: the playwrights who make up the collective, and the audience that actually comes to see our plays.