I think this will be the first “speech” I have ever given; 56 years old, and I’ve managed to escape giving a speech until now. I suppose I never thought it was my “thing.” I love hearing what I write spoken by others, not myself. But things change; we change.
I remember when I became a father for the first time. Suddenly I found within me an ability to fight for my child in ways that I could never have fought for myself.
A year and a half ago I began teaching young emerging talented playwrights at the Yale School of Drama. Tonight I want to talk about issues that are important to them—and to me and, I believe, to all American playwrights—but mostly to them. I suppose it is because of them, and because of the hundreds of playwrights whose work I now read each year, that I feel the need, the passion, but more importantly the responsibility to discuss the state of our profession with you tonight.
So much has happened to the profession of playwriting since I had my first professional production in 1975. And so much of what has happened has not been good for playwrights.
The profession of playwright, the role of the playwright in today’s American theatre, I believe, is under serious attack. Some who attack are simply greedy; some are ignorant; some can’t understand why theatre isn’t TV or film. But perhaps the greatest threat to the playwright in today’s theatre comes not from the greedy and ignorant, but rather from those who want to “help.”
“Playwrights are in need of help.” This is now almost a maxim in our theatre today. Unquestioned. A given. But where does this mindset—for that is what it is, a mindset—come from? Of course playwrights need things; money, productions, support, encouragement. So do actors, directors, designers, artistic directors. But this mindset is different, because what is meant here is: Playwrights are in need of help—to write their plays. They are in need of help—to do their work. They can’t do their work themselves.
How strange. What other profession is viewed in this way? What other person in the theatre is viewed this way? Imagine hiring, say, a director, with the assumption that he couldn’t do his work himself. Now, I am not saying that a director shouldn’t listen to others, receive notes, be open to discussions and so forth. Quite the opposite, for this is all part of what a director does. And I am not saying a playwright shouldn’t listen to notes, be open to discussions and so forth—because this is what a playwright does. What I am saying is that the given mindset should not be that the playwright cannot be trusted to lead this process, cannot be trusted to know how to work within the collaboration of theatre.
Nor am I talking about mentoring or educating young playwrights. I’m talking about how our professional theatre looks at playwrights and the playwright’s play—about assumptions made, and about the various specific solutions theatres make based on these false assumptions.
What is really being said to the playwright by all the help? From the playwright’s perspective it is this: that what a playwright writes, no matter how much he or she works on it, rewrites it at his or her desk, the play will always not be right—will always need “help.” In other words, writing a play is too big of a job for just the playwright to achieve. This, I believe, is now a prevalent attitude in the American theatre. And this mindset is devastating.
[Playwright and artistic director] Emily Mann told me the other day that in her 17 years running the McCarter Theatre Center, the greatest change has been that now more and more plays are submitted that are obviously unfinished. Writers today recognize that if they wish to participate in a process that perhaps will lead to the production of their work, this will require rewriting and revision, guided and cajoled by others. So why finish anything?
I sit with young writers and hear how they now leave chunks of their plays purposely written badly—hoping that the “help” they receive will concentrate on these areas and not on others that they care about. These are tricks, games that many a screenwriter has learned over time, now finding their way into the writing of plays.
No doubt many of you are thinking: But the plays aren’t finished; they need help; and they do get better.
Again, I’m not saying that a playwright should ignore comments about and reactions to his work—quite the opposite. But I am saying that our mindset toward playwrights should be this: that the playwright knows what he is doing; and that perhaps the play, as presented, is as it should be—so that the onus for change is not on the playwright but on others, on the theatre. And the theatre is there with a full array of tools to support the playwright as he or she attempts to improve upon his or her play. How to improve a play should be the domain of the writer, with the theatre supplying potential tools a reading, say, or a workshop with clearly delineated goals. These are tools that should evolve out of a need, as opposed to being a given.
A culture of “help” breeds a culture of dependence, and this is what I believe we now have in the American theatre: the culture of readings and workshops, which would have been unimaginable when I was a young playwright 30 years ago. A culture of “development.” And this culture—more than being an activity, a process—is a mindset. Having spent a great deal of time in classical theatre, I have watched actors and directors approach classical plays that have massive contradictions, and address those plays not as works to be fixed, but rather to be solved. So I am arguing for a theatre where the mindset is not to fix new plays, but to solve them.
If it is assumed that all plays need to be helped along, then no playwright actually has it in his or her power to complete his or her play. Therefore, can it really be called his or her play? Ah—now we come to the other, trickier sides of the equation, where the “help” given writers also has strings. I’d like to look at just a few—there are many—examples of how this mindset has infiltrated our theatre and what it is doing to my profession.
Let’s get specific. Let’s look at the actors, directors, even audiences who have been taught, or re-educated, by this culture to feel a responsibility to “help” the playwright write his or her play—producers, literary managers and dramaturgs who “help” with rules about what makes a good play; who “help” by mandating readings because they must be “helpful.” Let’s look at managers who “helpfully” organize commissions so that the theatre can encourage (or is the word “enforce”?) changes that are “helpful” to the play. There are contracts that demand remuneration for this “help.” There are foundations that allow their monies to he used in a developmental hell that breeds the loss of confidence and control that every playwright needs—must have—to succeed.
Readings. Mandatory readings of plays for judgment or to “give help.” Be careful. This is dangerous, and has already caused great harm. A play with two people at a table having a conversation—this works in a reading, we get a good sense of what the writer is after. But what about seven people in a room, moving about, talking to two, then three, unheard by a fourth, and so on? This makes no sense in a reading. And so playwrights, practical people that we are—slowly, like a bad evolution—stop writing in forms that don’t work in readings. Again, slowly, our plays begin to look dramaturgically similar. Of course a playwright can benefit from a reading, but one needs to be so very careful about why the play is being read, what one hopes is being gained, and what is being lost. All those reading series out there—careful—in the long run, are they doing much more harm than good?
Workshops: What are they? What is the role of an actor or a director in a workshop? To direct or act in a play requires, I believe, a strong element of confidence in the play; a belief that the answer to one’s questions or confusions can be found in the play. This is what a director or actor does; this is their talent and how they explore. But if the playwright is encouraged—no, celebrated—for rewriting during this process, then where does that put the actor, the director? Not acting or directing, but there “to help.” Isn’t this the wrong mindset for a director or actor to have? Couldn’t their talents be put to better service trying to solve what the writer has written, as opposed to trying to help him fix it?
Audiences: By involving them in readings and discussions and, god forbid, workshops, we are apparently asking for their “help” with the play. But doesn’t this confuse, even warp, the role of the audience? In terms of new work, doesn’t this put an audience’s focus overwhelmingly on “does it work?” as opposed to “what is it about?” or “why was it written?” or “does it matter”? Aren’t these the questions we want discussed? Aren’t these the questions that help generate the sort of substantive discussions we in the theatre wish to have with an audience?
Rules for writing plays: My god! One hears young playwrights being told what a play “must do,” or “how a play works.” One hears writers being told that a character’s “journey” isn’t clear enough, or that the writer needs to determine a character’s “motivation.” One hears how a play has to “build” in a certain way, or how “the conflict” isn’t strong enough. These are terms that seem to suggest a deep understanding of what a play is and how it is put together, but in fact they tell us very little. Perhaps a particular play might he helped by one of these suggestions, but they (and other “rules”) are too generally prescribed. To see how silly this prescription is, one has only to ask: What is the clear motivation of Lear? The playwright doesn’t write out of “motivations” but rather out of truth and reality, out of people and story and worlds he or she wishes or needs to create for us. These terms are perhaps useful to the critic, or the dramaturg in finding a way in for themselves to these plays, but such considerations are not how plays—good plays, great plays—are made.
The word “text”: I may be crazy, but I think I woke up one day and suddenly people were talking about “the text” instead of “the play.” How did this come about? Since when does a playwright only write words? Isn’t that the hidden meaning of this—to make the playwright the “word guy” and leave the theatremaking to others? As if the writer were only a source from which words flowed that others made into plays. As I tell my students endlessly, theatre is the only artistic form that uses the entire live human being as its expression. Playwrights write people, not words. We write words to convey the people. To push us aside, to make us the “text guys” rather than the “play guys,” is a subtle but dangerous change in thinking and betrays a new mindset about the place of the playwright in the making of theatre.
Step commissions: These are fairly prevalent commissions by which the playwright is usually paid in three stages. First, when he agrees to the commission and signs the contract; the second when he submits the play; and the third when he submits the rewrite. Now, what is wrong with this picture? What is the underlying assumption here? That the play the playwright submits will need to be rewritten and that the playwright will only do this rewrite if he or she is paid for it.
Now, as we all know, the playwright still is the owner of the play; he or she owns the copyright. So—say you build a house. You own this house. Suppose a guy comes along and suggests you add a window. Now, if you agree this would improve your house a great deal, you’ll add the window. However, suppose the guy says he thinks you should add a window and you need to be paid to do so. To your own house! How bizarre. This guy must be thinking maybe you don’t want to add a window and you need to be paid to do it. Well, that is very much what these step deals suggest—once again, insidiously, the role of the playwright, or at least the playwright’s judgment and understanding of his own play and what it needs, is being doubted, questioned. In his mind he’s thinking he’s being paid to do what he doesn’t necessarily want to do.
Here’s one that will upset some of you and the one that will take the longest to explain and discuss: the idea of “participation.” You should see my first-year students’ faces when I explain what participation is.
“You mean,” they say, “that I give up a percentage of my play forever? Why?” “Because,” I say, “the theatre has done your play.”
“Why?” they ask again.
I tell them theatres will give two reasons: They have enhanced the play’s value by producing it in an important “market,” and because the theatres have helped the writer with the writing of the play. Ah, there’s this help again, which may have been unwanted, and now we have to pay for it! How did this happen?
A little background that most of you know, I’m sure. Participation has been around a long time in the commercial theatre, but it is a fairly recent development in the nonprofit theatre as a pervasive practice. And it just sort of happened—there was no real debate that I know of. Now, who is to blame for this? Of course, playwrights themselves need to accept a good bit of that blame for not fighting this harder when it began to occur in nonprofit contracts. But—and I would guess that those who now run the Dramatists Guild might even agree—until very recently, our Guild was pretty myopic, and saw theatre only through the lens of Broadway, where participation was a given. So there was no understanding of why it should be stopped in the nonprofit theatre. And so there was little, if any, serious debate or opposition. Only when Gregory Mosher and Bernie Gersten took over Lincoln Center Theater and refused to take any participation from new work was there even the glimmer of discussion—and certainly nothing involving the praise that those two gentlemen deserved.
So, it happened because no one fought it. The playwrights were too weak and disorganized to fight back and understand what was being done to them. So, I suppose it’s our fault. However, as we all know, that’s not how the serious theatre works.
I remember an executive committee meting many years ago at the Guthrie Theater, where I was working, when we were going over salary increases for the next season. When it came to the proposed raise for actors, one new board member said, “But I understand that there are always lots of actors who want to play each part. So why are we now going to pay actors more? We should pay them less and save money.” A few minutes later a couple of more experienced members of the board took this gentleman aside and explained. And what they explained is obvious to all of us in this room: We in the theatre have a responsibility not just to our immediate bottom line, but to the future of our art and profession. You apply principles of hardnosed business to every element of the theatre and you will destroy the theatre. So, yes, we playwrights did not protect or fight for ourselves. Yes, we should have. But that failure does not make us fair game.
We write our play, we own our play, and we should continue to own our play—all of it, at least as long as we stay in the nonprofit theatre, which is a theatre that raises its money often on claims of producing new writing.
Only one argument about this has ever made sense to me: If a playwright has a huge hit, shouldn’t that money come back to the theatre and support other writers and other productions? I have signed many contracts in England stating just that: that should I make a very large amount of money from the play during a given year, then a percentage is owed to the theatre. That makes sense. That is responsible. But I have never seen an American theatre contract with anything like that language. If theatres won’t take it upon themselves to rectify this situation, if playwrights prove as a group too weak and unfocused, then I say let’s turn to the funders themselves, the foundations and donors, and ask: Does this make sense to you? That healthy percentages of future incomes from plays presented in smallish theatres with small royalties, requiring months and months of work and involvement by the playwright—should these theatres now have a right to own part of these plays? What signal does this send to the writers, especially the young ones?
These are a few—there are many more—specific examples of how this mindset toward the playwright has found its way into all reaches of the theatre and therefore how difficult it will be to change.
Empowerment, I suppose, is what this is all about—allowing the playwright to feel that he or she owns the play, in all meanings of that word, to have pride in that ownership. Prescribed “rules”—this does the opposite. A culture with a mindset of “help” does the same. The loss of a percentage of one’s play—the same again. And so it is my hope—and, I believe, my profession’s best hope—to change this mindset and the culture based upon it.
When I was asked to give this sepeech, I was told to speak about anything I wanted. I knew right away that this is what I wished to talk about with all of you. Because it is my great belief and hope that it will be from gatherings like these, gatherings of caring, dedicated theatre professionals, lovers of theatre, that we can change how we think, change the broken ways, and reinvigorate, even re-imagine, our theatre.
Playwright Richard Nelson won Britain’s Olivier Award for Goodnight Children Everywhere and the Tony Award for best book for James Joyce’s The Dead. He is an adjunct professor of playwriting at the Yale School of Drama.
