State of Play

AMERICAN THEATRE: A little over 17 years ago, Todd London, then the artistic director of New Dramatists, began work on a study for the Theatre Development Fund (TDF) on the state of the field for new plays and the people who write them. This kind of intensive research “wasn’t really something they did,” he recalled, but there were major questions about the lives of playwrights that had never been answered with real data. How much money did playwrights actually make?