Glacial play development, playing the odds

The gestation period of a play is most often a number of years. Playwrights tend to take their sweet time. Plays get workshopped ad nauseam. Theaters program their seasons a year or more in advance. When a new play finally opens, it plays for a few weeks, gets reviewed, then closes never to be seen or heard from again.

Does a lengthy, precious process produce better plays?

Plays might as well take years to hit the boards - no one's in a hurry. The demand for new plays is at an all time low. A glacial development process is filling the gap. Playwrighting these days means hitting the workshop circuit, being a re-writer in residence.

If today's long journey from idea to opening night is intended to be a way for theaters to reduce risk and consistently produce plays of value, it's a failure. Fewer plays means fewer good plays. Theater has always been a numbers game. Even the best playwrights miss now and then. We like to think we know a hit when we read one. The fact is, only an audience knows a hit when it sees one.

Most theaters are set up to produce four to six plays a season. Given the same resources, why not produce twelve or twenty-four plays or more? No sets, less rehearsal, an ensemble, more plays - it's been done and it worked out reasonably well (see: English Renaissance Theater). 14/48 proves that audiences love theater on the edge. Maybe high gloss is less appealing than high risk, rough hewn and flawed.

Theater has always been a numbers game.

Going the way of the Poet

A recent Theater Development Fund study, Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play, found that theater in general and new plays in particular are in a long, relentless decline toward cultural oblivion.

The Playwright is going the way of the Poet, laboring for love, taking pride in token rewards, competing with the dead, and serving a shrinking, increasingly uniform audience.

People who work in industries facing oblivion are often the last to see the ax. The only people surprised by the speed and scope of the newspaper industry slaughter were the people who worked for newspapers.

If you work in the theater, for love or profit, consider the ax. All signs point to its razor edge.

Do you see it?

What great plays have in common

The great plays of the Elizabethan theater have a few things in common:

Serious themes

Simple sets (a dressed stage)

Great costumes

Heightened language

Complicated plots

Big casts

Murder or marriage

The best of the Elizabethan plays were, in their time, popular and profitable. Even the unpopular plays were, most of the time, break even due to supper low overhead and savvy risk management practices.

Modern plays have in common:

Serious theses

Extravagant sets

Great costumes

Prose

Relatively simple plots

Small casts

Few murders or marriages

The best of the modern plays are not popular and are subsidized.

If I could change any one modern convention, it would be our use, or abuse, of language. Verse is the natural language of theater and plays to its strengths. Audiences love wordplay.

Take Eminem. Over eighty million albums sold.  More than Bob Dylan. I love Bob Dylan. I love Eminem.

Writing a good play is hard. Writing a good play in verse is only slightly harder, in the beginning, and then it's easier. You can learn how write verse. I can teach you how in one day. Getting good at it will take longer, but you can get good at it. Don't rule out writing in verse just because Shakespeare wrote in verse and everyone think he's so dreamy. If you're a playwright, he's your biggest competitor.

Beat him at his own game.