‘Big Weekend’ for Budding Playwrights

On Saturday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, the watchword was new .

New plays. New playwrights. And, possibly, new ways of improving the process for plays traveling the often rough road from printed page to full production.

At least that was the promise implicit in the title of an LATC-sponsored symposium, “Developed to Death: Creative Alternatives for Developing New Playwrights,” part of the theater’s “Big Weekend” festival that featured staged readings of 10 new, unproduced plays.

The staged reading--when actors perform a play’s scenes with script in hand, sometimes on a stage, sometimes not--is one of the centerpieces in the development process, and it came in for some disparaging criticism from panel participants.

They included playwrights Steven Dietz, Marlane Meyer (whose “Etta Jenks” is in production at LATC and whose “Kingfish” received a staged reading just before the symposium) and Samm-Art Williams (his “Women of the Town” also had two LATC staged readings); artistic directors Bill Bushnell (LATC) and Gordon Davidson (Mark Taper Forum); and South Coast Repertory literary manager John Glore.

Moderator and New York theatrical agent Robert A. Freedman asked the panel whether a staged reading of a play projects a distorted impression of what the play really is.

Dietz, a critic of the traditional process for developing new plays, responded, noting the predominance of readings over productions: “There are too many readings, and there’s a danger in going to too many. I remember asking a young playwright how his new piece was coming along. He said, ‘I don’t know if it’ll make a good staged reading.’ ”

Both Davidson and Meyer added that, in Davidson’s words, “The system in place doesn’t respond well to a play that truly challenges standard form and content.”

That system includes not only readings (both staged and less formal sit-downs), but round-table discussions (usually the playwright with a theater’s dramaturgical department), workshops and, once the theater commits to a full-scale production, rehearsals. Ironically, it was Bushnell, also a stage director, who took to task directors who “box the writer out of rehearsals, and impose their own interpretation on the material.”

The process doesn’t end there. Bushnell and Freedman noted the growing trend of regional, nonprofit theaters that take a particular play from theater to theater with new productions, such as William Mastrosimone’s “Cat’s-Paw,” previously staged at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre and now in rehearsal at LATC.

Dietz strongly disagreed that such a trend is even afoot: “It’s just not the case that a new play gets to be done again and again. That’s a key part of a play’s development, and I don’t see it happening.” Davidson uttered the director’s lament that he “seldom gets to do a ‘second draft’ production of a play. Writers can rewrite and improve the work, but then that work only gets one major production.”

Addressing audience members, some of whom were local playwrights, Glore said, “You might ask, why develop plays at all? Why not just do them? With Broadway’s decline, regional theater had to fill the gap (of where to do new plays). But (regional houses) only have four to five weeks to put a play on, and that’s not enough time to hone a play. So this process is the one we’ve come up with. It’s flawed, because it’s done by human beings.”

“But,” Dietz asked rhetorically, “are we getting the plays we deserve? The playwright is not integrated into our culture. Look at the theaters who always say that they’re committed to new plays and playwrights. You can count on one hand the number of American theaters who have playwrights on staff. I can’t think of an industry in this country whose workers, if they were as poorly paid as playwrights are, would think that their employer was really committed to them.”

Giving playwrights a living wage was something that only one theater represented on the panel (Glore’s South Coast) could lay claim to. That theater’s monetary outlays (garnered largely through corporate grants) to individual playwrights was, for Bushnell, “the object of my envy.”

Meyer, responding to a query about the risks of development for the young writer, looked at the larger issue of a writer’s survival and a theater’s policy. “(Theaters have to) develop playwrights, not plays. If you do the first, good plays will follow.”

Williams also worried for the playwright’s well-being: “There’s such a long line at a theater’s door just to get a reading. My fear is that a new playwright will get so discouraged that they’ll stop writing.”

In addition to giving playwrights better wages and staff positions, another alternative to the in-house development process mentioned was a playwright-founded and operated base for nurturing writers. Example? The Minneapolis-based Playwrights’ Center, of which Dietz is director and is home to such playwrights as Lee Blessing and August Wilson.