HowlRound: For years I have listened to dialogue surrounding the difficulties of making a living as a professional playwright; about how rare it is for a new play to be produced; about the simple odds working against a new playwright: X number of new writers, and only Y number of theatres in the country that produce new work. We, as an industry, speak all the time about ways to get a new play onto a literary manager’s desk, and about the real struggle for playwrights awaiting their first production.
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I feel like playwriting is one of the concentrations of theater production that is so often overlooked; CMU Drama has one of the top drama schools in the nation, and even we don’t offer a bachelor’s program in playwriting. It’s pretty silly, actually, that playwriting isn’t regarded the same as performance, management, design, directing, or even dramaturgy, because without plays to produce, none of these other specialties hold any purpose! That being said, I am definitely guilty of forgetting about the difficulties and intricacies of playwriting; I can’t even imagine what the difficult process of getting your play produced must be like. I had no idea that large production companies had the mindset that if a “new” play has already been produced by a smaller company, they won’t choose it for their season; while this idea seems ridiculous to me, based on the explanation of the article, I can see why this is. I used to think that playwrights’ goal would be to get their play produced as soon as possible, but I can see now how they would want to be careful in considering who they let produce their work; then again, I suppose this is only a problem for playwrights who are in high-demand, and who are lucky enough to be able to choose.
"The Premiere Effect" is something I had absolutely no knowledge of before reading this article, and I'm glad I know about it now. As designers, we're never really taught to hold back our ideas so the thought of saving our masterpiece for later is such a foreign concept that I'm still wrapping my head around it. I never really thought that the tag line "World Premiere" held that much weight before, coming from theater, but apparently, to the greater audience members, it does. I'm still feeling weird about the fact that once a show is produced, it can't be produced elsewhere (namely New York). Why do larger theaters care about the tag line that much? Once you get up there, do those two little words means everything? Are we so obsessed with the shiny and new that we can't do a play twice? This makes absolutely no sense to me and having this "standard" in theater is not productive to the art as well.
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