The Playwrights' Center Blog

Soapbox: Jamie Pachino

2008-06-25T10:50:00.001-05:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

Writing for a small theater, specifically one that you know, is interesting because it's about writing for voices that you know, as well as the actors and the space and its limitations, and that forces you to be creative in a really interesting way. In my mind, limitations should force you to be more creative, not vice versa, and there we found interesting ways to do things in a small space many people didn’t think were possible. The limitation is simply budget; you can’t do anything visually theatrical in a broad way the bigger theaters can. There, the designers simply have more toys to play with and more crayons to color with. But the trick of the bigger theaters is they want fewer actors. So in smaller theaters you can put 22 actors onstage (because they’re not paying any of them and they’ll all come help build the set for you, bring their costumes from home, and get their friends and family to populate the audience), while a bigger theatre often has a built-in subscription crowd. I remember showing up to the first preview of my play Waving Goodbye at Steppenwolf and seeing all of these people getting off an elevator (which they didn’t have in any theater I had ever worked at before) -- hundreds of them coming to a first preview. I remember, literally the year before, begging people, comp-ing people, and handing out flyers on the street trying to entice people to come see a preview of a play that I had written at a smaller venue. That’s a huge difference.

Soapbox: Elizabeth Wong

2008-06-20T16:46:00.002-05:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

I think the advice I would offer to a young playwright has nothing to do with the modern day challenges of getting your work into the theater. My advice is pretty age-old and I would be saying it to anyone in any era: keep writing, and don’t be discouraged. Have faith that your vision of the world—your cock-eyed vision of the world—will find an audience. So in other words, it’s the old adage of believe in yourself and don’t give up. I followed my own advice and I think it works.

Soapbox: Catherine Filloux

2008-06-19T15:39:00.001-05:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

I write plays about issues that are facing our world today. When I write plays I am interested in focusing on what I need; for example, if was going to die tomorrow, what is it I would need to write? At this point in my life, I am focused on trying to look at the problems in the world that I think are unacceptable.

Soapbox: Margaret Baldwin

2008-06-18T14:06:00.001-05:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

I think I would offer two main challenges to a young playwright today. First is to learn the craft of playwriting and to really learn the tools. I think a lot of young playwrights (and I was certainly was guilty of this) tend to want to eschew tradition and eschew form without really knowing what those things are doing. So as one of my favorite teachers, Naomi Izuki, told me, I think one of the most important things is to figure out your tools in your tool box and how they work. With that said, I think the second challenge I would offer to young playwrights is to commit, and this has two parts to it: First is to have a point of view or to acknowledge that you have a point of view, and to figure out what you want to communicate to your audience -- to make the shift from me to not me. Moving from a place of “I need to express myself” to “I need to communicate something,” and to realize that being a part of a community and a part of a citizenry involves actively communicating a point of view through your art -- which is not the same thing as to lambaste someone or to be didactic about it, that you do need to acknowledge, you need to commit to something. And finally, I would challenge them to get out there and make work, that the best way to learn how to write is to actually learn by doing and to not wait for opportunities to come to them but to take the initiative to self-produce and to get their work in the world because you can learn more about it from doing that than from anything else.

Soapbox: Catherine Filloux

2008-06-17T17:01:00.001-05:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

Look at playwriting in the following manner: pretend that you go to the top of a mountain and you look down on the world and look at it carefully and feel it carefully and write about what is utterly essential and nothing more. The world when you look at it from the top of a mountain can be spectacularly beautiful. It is also horrifically vulnerable and in deep trouble and how can you put that in your play?

Soapbox: Rosanna Staffa

2008-06-16T12:45:00.000-05:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

As far as I’m concerned, especially for new work, the main issue is the audience. I believe that people don’t go to new work because of the “I don’t know what I’m getting” feeling. The price of the theater is a deterrent, but to my knowledge doesn’t keep anybody away from baseball games. At a game that know what they get: fun, hot dogs, and they go home the way they came. I think the theater is sticky business, with the possibility of feeling fear, love, unnamed desire. The internet doesn’t help at all because it’s offering the utter control of environment. Movies are a comfortable hybrid: you know the actors aren’t talking to you really, they’re not even there. Mac Wellman asked a great question once to a group of playwrights: “Did you grow up with theater?” “Not at all!” we all groaned, but we all did: a grandmother with her night cream, a dad with his tantrums about sugar cookies, and even a secret room with ancient mold oozing out of the walls. So we all have known theater all along, and this separation of theater from its audience is a great loss. We’ve been together all along on this journey.

Soapbox: Mark Steven Jensen

2008-06-11T10:40:00.000-05:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

We’re soon in the world of total on-demand media of. It won’t be too much further down the road where people will log on to a website and pull down a movie or a TV program they want to watch whenever and wherever they want it. Just look at the success of YouTube and music downloads. So the theater needs to learn how to compete with this technology. The audience of the future will definitely be harder to maintain and grow. This art form must come up with creative ways to continue bringing people into the theater.

Theaters can do that by creating new plays, which in turn can foster a culture of creativity that invigorates both artists and audiences. Theaters need to stop doing as many of the older “chestnut” plays that they tend to mount again and again. Over time, audiences for these works will grow smaller, it’s inevitable. Instead, theatre organizations need to bring in new voices and new energy, supporting playwrights who speak for a current generation and even a future generation. I understand that, right now, known works are the economic product that keeps the ticket sales rolling, such as they are. I wish, though, that the leaders of our theatre organizations would think about ways that they could get people excited about new plays. What if new work was, instead of a side program that is good to do, like sour medicine, a main, fruitful focus of a mission? Audiences go to new movies all the time, so they should have the same capacity to go to new plays all the time as well.

Soapbox: Michele Lowe

2008-06-03T14:24:00.001-05:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

What I would offer as advice to a young writer, especially a young playwright, would be not to read your reviews. There’s nothing you could gain from them at this stage in your career. I was lucky enough to have a wonderful mentor named Neil Bell who cautioned me not to read my own reviews and he was right. As my career progressed, I’ve been able to read them little by little in snips as my plays get produced. I now find the most devastating ones quite hilarious.

I would tell a young playwright to take a risk every day: do something chancy, do something scary, make a phone call, make a connection to some one in the theater every day. In that way you can augment those people in your circle.

I would tell a young playwright never to take no as an answer. I would tell a young playwright to be kind to themselves, and seek out other people in theater who like the kind of work they like (not necessarily the kind of work they do, but the kind of work they like).

I would tell them to go see everything they can—everything they can afford to see—and to read everything they possibly can. I was under-educated, I am undereducated as a playwright. I went to Playwrights’ Horizons theater school, I don’t have a Masters Degree, I don’t have a PhD, and I sometimes feel a little outclassed by my peers who have such an education. I would tell a young playwright that it might be good to get that kind of an education, or it might not.

I would tell a young playwright to be careful in the world and take as much of care of it as they possibly can. And then I would tell a young playwright to read everything in the New York Times; that’s where I get most of my ideas (skip the Arts & Leisure section). I would tell a young playwright to surround themselves with as many people as they can for support—not to give their plays out to those people to read, but to surround him or herself with people who think they have something to say about the world, be that world big or small. Surround yourself with people who give you a sense of wonder about the world. One of the greatest thing I‘ve ever done in my life was to have a child, and when I had my daughter it opened up (in the most cliché way possible) an entirely new take on the world for me. I’m not saying go out and have a kid, but go out and do something you never thought possible.

Soapbox: Melanie Marnich

2008-05-20T11:40:00.000-05:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

What I would do if I ran the world, is I would do my best to remove some of the challenges that face young playwrights. We have so many obstacles in creating new work that I think I would try and clear the way for someone to have time to write.

Advice I would give to someone starting out in theater would be for them to sit down and figure out how they can make writing a priority in their lives in a world that doesn’t make the creation of new work a priority for anyone. I think we all have to really struggle to carve out ways and means and time for ourselves to write. One thing I would tell writers, and I do tell writers right off the bat, is that no one is going to hand you time to create on a silver platter--you carve it out of your own existence and you have to treat it like something precious, and if you don’t you won’t write. I believe that the difference between people who write and people who want to be writers is people who write actually make time to write a priority. So many people say, “I wish I could be a writer but I don’t have the time.” I don’t know one professional writer who actually has the time to write, we all make the time. I would coach people on how to manage their schedule, how to look at their time objectively, and how to make writing priority one.

I would advise them to truly take care of their bodies and souls because they are the only machine they have. I see too many people thinking, that to lead a writer’s life they have to do so many things that are unhealthy. I would encourage young writers to value their bodies and souls because that is the source of their creativity, the machine that they run. I would also tell them to be very rational and sane and learn how to support themselves in a way that doesn’t necessarily involve writing, so that they have something to always fall back on, something that can relieve the pressure, take the financial pressure off of theater. Especially when you’re starting out you need to always write what matters most to you, which doesn’t necessarily mean writing something that has a commercial sensibility. If someone’s depending on a play to make them money, they’re going to be thoroughly disappointed, and I would counsel them to figure out how to feed themselves, take care of their well being financially so they can truly write from their hearts and not worry about something selling but whether or not it’s true to them, because that is an investment in their career in the long run.

I’d advise them to always, even when they don’t feel like it, act from a place of kindness and generosity. I think in this art, in this business where we’re so aware of scarcity, it’s really important that we maintain some attitude of abundance, and the thing we can have in abundance is good spirit. I think it’s important to support our friends, to support every theater we can, it’s important to contribute time and energy to this art that we call home, and that’s something that will feed you indefinitely. It’s really easy to start operating from a perspective of fear and to feel like you’re not making any in-roads, but we always have to see the long view and say, “This month wasn’t good for me, but it was good for so-and-so and so-and-so. That’s great and I need to celebrate these other peoples’ success because it means this art is alive and kicking and I need to rejoice in that.”

Soapbox: Dan Dietz

2008-05-19T16:15:00.001-05:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

The greatest issue facing theater today is the fact that it slowly but surely seems that the audiences are getting older and older and that theaters are having a harder and harder time drawing young people (say, people in their 20s and 30s even) into the seats. It seems to me that the more established the theater is, the larger it is, and the closer it is to what one might call the “regional theater model,” the harder a time they’re having convincing young people that they’re even relevant to young peoples’ lives.

It’s scary that as television and cable TV have grown—not only in the number of options that people have, but also, frankly, the quality of television has gone way up—I think people are becoming harder and harder to convince to leave their homes, go out, and pay a lot of money for a single night of entertainment of live theater. They don’t know why they should. That’s something that we as theater people have to address, and it starts with the plays that theaters are producing.

Whether they’re comfortable with it or not, theater companies need to start producing plays written by younger writers. It’s kind of shocking to me how old you can be and still be considered a young writer: you could be 40 years old and still be considered a young playwright, and I think that’s a little bit crazy. Speaking as a 35 year old playwright, I’m shocked I’m still considered a “young playwright.” I think that theaters need to start producing the work of playwrights in their mid-30s, playwrights in their early 30s, playwrights in their mid-20s, playwrights in their early 20s, playwrights who are doing incredible, dynamic work, but maybe aren’t proven yet. Theaters need to take a risk on these younger voices if they’re going to remain relevant, because if the play itself speaks to a younger audience, the younger audience won’t have to be convinced to go see the theater with some kind of trickery. Things like, “We’re going to try to have relevant talkbacks to your generation.” I heard one theater that was planning on having a separate entrance for the younger crowd, and I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. This was an established regional theater and they were saying, “They can come around the back and they’ll feel really special.” I thought, that’s not how to get young people to feel special! Stop talking down to them and start doing work that actually engages them and is written by people who aren’t 30 years older than them. It’s sad, but true.

Relevancy starts with the material and moves out from there.

Soapbox: Julie Jensen

2008-05-15T15:27:00.000-05:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

I think the issue always with playwrights is to see a lot of theater, see tons of theater, see so much theater that you can be an expert on the thing that you should be an expert about. Young playwrights, in my experience, tend to write for themselves and their colleagues and tend not to see enough theater, so they’re fairly insular and not broad big enough. See lots of theater!

Do with the stage something different. Don’t settle for the kinds of plays that we’ve seen before. Try to think about new ways the theater can be used. New ways the stage and its technology (which is fairly limited if you compare it to film) can be used so that theater can become separate from film- different, not a small shadow of it, but a big thing in and of itself.

Soapbox: C. Denby Swanson

2008-05-14T17:06:00.002-05:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

In my creation of a theatrical world, I use a lot of puppets and I use a lot of inconsistent and skewed chronology so things frequently don’t happen in the chronological order in which they probably occurred in the story. I use a lot of ghosts and the idea of the spectacle. To a great extent, those things come from the influences of Naomi Iizuka, Erik Ehn, Adrienne Kennedy, and Lisa D’amour. I try to read a lot of people and keep the images in my head of people who explore theatricality in an interesting way. I think Naomi has a stage direction in one of her plays where something—maybe a piece of cloth--turns into a butterfly, and it’s a beautiful image. It’s very evocative, and very “how can we do this in a stage magic kind of way,” such as the suspension of disbelief, and using the stage for what it does well, which are these slights of hand.

I had a big issue with a play of mine this summer over how people approach the reading of a script. Because I tend to use poetic imagery and theatrical imagery, I feel encouraged on some level to make those choices but I also feel like I get punished for that on some level too, because it can be hard for people to read or understand. I don’t necessarily tell people how these pieces might be produced and I ask them to go along with me in a certain kind of way, and it takes maybe a little bit of belief or faith in following my direction or vision. It’s something that I struggle with; trying to encourage extraordinary worlds and waiting for somebody to buy into it and produce those worlds. How to write theatrical imagery in a certain kind of way so that’s it’s compelling and it engages the imaginations of directors without being perceived as heavy-handed. Those are issues that are always on my mind.

Soapbox: Jamie Pachino

2008-05-12T16:26:00.001-05:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

To me, the challenge for young playwrights is to be bold. To stick to your guns. If you have something to say, find a theatrical, intelligent and bold way to say it. And my only piece of advice beyond that is to persevere, because honestly of all the playwrights I know, the only way anyone has gotten anywhere is by keeping their head down, doing the work, doing more work, pursuing opportunities, learning about the business of the business—and never giving up.

Soapbox: Lonnie Carter

2008-05-06T11:09:00.001-05:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

We as writers for the theater have to get away from the quick-cut realism that is television and focus on things that are more surreal. That’s what theater does best, through language and imagery. I read that in Italy they are trying to do 90 minute operas that are pared-down versions of the 19th Century classics, trying to get young people to go to the opera, and apparently they are very popular. I would like to see us get to that point where we are writing these fast-paced dramas but not relying on television techniques, but relying on those things that have kept the theater energetic for 2500 years. There’s some way that we can tap into that energy and get people coming back to the theater. For example, the Signature Theater in New York focuses on one writer per season, and they’ve now gotten a corporation to subsidize tickets so that every ticket is $20, but if you go to Broadway you’re paying hundreds of dollars. There’s got to be a way to entice young people into the theater, and I think it’s through ticket prices, and through dramas which are really theatrical. If they’re just television, I’d rather stay home and watch the Tube.

Soapbox: Vincent Delaney

2008-05-01T09:18:00.004-05:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

For me personally as a playwright, the reason I’m doing this is because I’m part of a community. Theater is a community; it is the most communal of art forms, certainly more so than film or anything else. I think it’s particularly easy for playwrights to forget that – that it’s all about community. We need to draw strength from each other and remember that we are part of something. A playwright sits at home and he or she works on their own, submitting, and they’re isolated. Even in rehearsal in some ways they’re isolated. One thing I got from the PWC that I’m keeping with me is the sense of belonging and community. I feel overall that it’s so vital and such a challenge for all of us as artists to maintain the focus on that. That’s what this is about, why we’re doing this. There’s a million reasons why we would stop doing this, there’s a million reasons why we would get selfish, or self-absorbed, or petty or frustrated and I see that theaters (don’t communicate with each other) and we have to continue to guard against that.

Soapbox: Dominic Orlando

2008-04-16T15:17:00.002-05:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

The theater is not doing badly. There’s no way to solve the programming problem because it’s a question of money, and it’s a question of needing to fill the seats. Regional theaters have become very commercial-minded. The regional movement was started in response to Broadway and New York which had a monopoly on theater and it was very commercial oriented, but now the regionals which were created in response to that have become very commercial and that makes it very difficult to find a place for new work. For all the problems of Broadway in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, you also had Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams premiering their work on Broadway, so the commercial theater had some adventurism that I find less and less in the regional movement which is now focused on audience and attendance and I don’t know any way around that. There’s nothing we can do to get butts in seats; theaters have to do it. Theaters have to learn how to get behind playwrights. The hard truth is that except for a very small core of playwrights the theater audiences don’t really know one new playwright from another; they know what they’re told. In a certain way, the theater industry press and the theaters themselves have a tremendous amount of power to create interest in new writers. If you look at American Theatre, when they do their “This is what’s going on in the year” segment, you’ll see half a dozen new plays being done everywhere. So everyone is doing the same new plays instead of theaters trying to create an audience for their own playwrights that they’ve gotten behind. I don’t know that playwrights can do anything. We can create our own work, which 13 P is doing in New York and Workhaus is doing here in Minneapolis. That’s about all we can do to affect this kind of equation.

Soapbox: Elizabeth Wong

2008-04-11T15:34:00.001-05:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

Audiences are being distracted by so many other types of amusing media and other forms of communication with the advent of interactive video games and multi-city sporting events, for example. Most importantly, the lack of relevance to the theatrical experience is not delivering reflections of the community and I think that this has been an ongoing problem: I think that there is a wide audience out there hungry for stories and hungry for theatrical experience. It’s part of our DNA to want to sit together in the dark together and want to experience something collective and spiritual, but I think that much of our theater lacks relevance and doesn’t reflect the community, how we interact in it, or how people live together.

Many theaters have abandoned all of their multicultural development opportunities and they’ve stopped attending to the makeup of the general population of the community. I find it to be a travesty that many large institutional organizations do not feel a need to respond to the diverse nature of our community and the way we live. Theaters seem to get discouraged when they do make offerings and the community of a particular race, for instance, doesn’t come to the theater, or they only come for that offering, and what I have to remind artistic directors is that when you try to introduce yourself into a community you need to do it on a consistent and regular basis, because that way they see that you are committed and care about reflecting that particular community. But if you just do it as a matter of tokenism, you are going to have drop-off after you offer a play written by a playwright of color or a play dealing with or having people in that reflect the broader community.

I know that theaters get frustrated because they think, “We offered one thing and no one came.” Well, people are very smart and society is very smart and they see these productions as pandering to them, and theaters need to recognize that audiences are very attune to when they are being pandered to and that the only way to subvert that feeling of distrust amongst an audience is to continue to offer consistent reflections of the community that the theater is trying to serve (or says it’s trying to serve). This is not a recent problem, this has been an ongoing problem ever since I’ve been in the theater (for more than 15 years).

I see the aging of the audience is as a big concern and I don’t see that young people are being enticed into the joys of the theater for all the reasons that I’ve been talking about. We have to become more relevant and we can’t be so behind the times. I think that often times theater is really slow to respond to what’s going on. That’s another one of the big problems, we’re always 5 years behind what people are really thinking and doing, which is a shame because I know that as writers and as playwrights we’re not behind, but the theaters, institutionally, are behind.

Soapbox: Deborah Stein

2008-04-08T23:06:00.003-05:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

There’s something about the live event of going to the theater that I think is unbeatable and which I’ve been excited by since I was 3 years old, and you just don’t get that same feeling from anything else. Some elements of it come from reading a good book, some elements of it come from going to see some really great live music, but the total experience of going to the theater and sharing the experience with an audience and the performers onstage is totally unique and can only happen in the moment. That experience is unbelievable and transcendent and thrilling.

Soapbox: Dominic Orlando

2008-02-21T23:32:00.002-06:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

If a young playwright asked me for advice, I would say go to graduate school. The field has become extremely academic in my time, so my advice to somebody is really serious about playwriting would be to get your MFA. Creatively, I would say write as much as you can and don’t listen to everybody who talks to you about your writing. Trust yourself or trust one or two people and try to find your own voice. The only real contribution you have to make is your own voice, so don’t try to write in a particular style or a particular way except as an experiment or an exercise on your way to finding out what your voice really is.

Soapbox: Elaine Romero

2008-01-28T12:26:00.003-06:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

The greatest issue facing theater has to do with a lack of funding leading to a lack of vision or a restriction of vision. In many ways, we playwrights find ourselves challenged to shrink our canvas, and we don’t always ask the questions that we need to ask or explore in the ways that we need to explore because we fear the economics of our art. The people that I admire the most in the theater are those who trust their own judgment. There is a lot of duplication of interest in terms of specific plays nowadays. I long for the presence of people who trust that when they read a play, they can know it’s good, even if they don’t know who wrote it. When I find that in an artistic director I have found someone I deeply admire. To me, they are the visionaries among us. Some of the vision problem is economic: the co-production leads to duplication, but the co-production also keeps theatre alive, and helps to keep us afloat. It’s a double-edged sword. Yet, it’s really refreshing when someone can just read a play and know they like it and stand behind it without scores of other theaters being behind that play. There’s something really pure about that.

Atomic Farmgirl

2007-12-11T16:00:00.000-06:00

C. Denby Swanson's play Atomic Farmgirl just finished a run in New York. In an interview with The Playwrights' Center, she talks about where she finds her inspiration.

click here to listen

Viet Rock

2007-11-15T18:10:00.000-06:00

someone was writing about horses and tractors on stage and someone else was saying YOU CAN'T DO THAT. Well, of course, you can. In 1966 at the Yale Rep the Open Theater of Joe Chaikin and Shami Chaikin and several others including James Ragney and ? Rado, did VIET ROCK and the seven or so actors landed a helicopter in the fields of the Mekong Delta; that is, the actors on the stage whirled around and "created" (that shouldn't even have quotation marks) that chopper. Incidentally, Ragney and Rado were soon to do HAIR. It was fantastic.

Years later when the production of ANGELS IN AMERICA was postponed b/c of technical problems with the arrival of the Angel at the cost of gazillions of dollars, the Grad Acting Program at NYU was doing the second part of ANGELS and brought the Angel onstage atop an old painter's ladder they had found backstage and now pushed on by an actor in black. It cost nada and was mysterious and wonderful.

Also years ago (making me sound ancient, but hey, am trying to learn from my own experience), a designer, the same who did HAIR, told me "If you give me a million dollars, I'll give you a set; if you give me $100, I'll give you a set."

Enough set/said.

cheer(io)s,

Lonnie

Soapbox: Julie Jensen

2007-11-15T16:15:00.000-06:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

What’s the greatest issue facing theater today? That’s easy: audiences, getting audiences--young audiences. We’re not appealing to them in the ways that we should. And we don’t have a good education system in the public schools, so the arts have gone out. Young people don’t come up with the notion of either going to the theater or being a part of it and we’re losing them or have lost them. Our audiences are gray and we’ve known this for years, and still, it’s getting worse. I think the writing is better than it’s ever been in this country, and I think the production values are better and theaters themselves are much better than they ever were. The audience is the issue: the numbers, the butts in the seats.

Soapbox: Michele Lowe

2007-11-13T13:18:00.000-06:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

Because I live in New York, I see and hear a lot about kids going to the theater, especially now with the rise of shows like Wicked and Hairspray. They are going to see these shows because they speak to kids, they resonate with them. For me, one of the ways to get kids interested in theater has been through reading - to keep them reading as much as possible, and to expose them not just to theater but to ballet. Schlep a kid to the ballet, schlep a kid to the symphony, and you will be astonished to see their reaction to some of this stuff. Bribe them if you have to, but get a kid to something that is happening in front of them and they will never forget it.

I remember as a child (a New Yorker) being taken to see the original production of Jewels, the George Balanchine ballet. I was quite young when it premiered and to this day, there are moments in that ballet that have stayed with me. I remember those when I want to create something beautiful on stage. There are moments in my plays that I want to make beautiful and breathtaking and I think, “Is it going to be like Jewels? Is it going to be like Follies?” When I saw the original production of Follies, when I saw those women coming down the staircase—the ghosts—with those magnificent headdresses on, OH MY GOD I still remember how that made me feel! I remember whatever revival of Man of La Mancha with the big staircase. These were pure visual moments, pure musical moments in my childhood that became the building blocks for not only who I am but one kind of writer I am.

Watch a clip from George Balanchine's Jewels:

Soapbox: Melanie Marnich

2007-10-30T16:21:00.000-05:00

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

What I see myself and so many of my fellow theater artists up against is that we develop work for a long time, we work so hard on it with so many collaborators, we finally connect with a theater through work-shopping or premier opportunities, and I think increasingly the market seems more and more hostile to new work, and we find ourselves up against a critical environment that hinders rather than supports the creation of new work. I’m not sure why that is--I’m not sure if it’s something new, if it’s something that’s changed in the air, in the artistic atmosphere. I can speak to this, and I’ve seen it happen to friends: we launch a new work, and are so eviscerated for it in the press, and the work dies before it really finds its legs. That’s been really difficult and theaters have to respond to it, we have to respond to it, all of us are responding to it. But the result is that it tempers experimentation and it tempers, perhaps, theaters’ willingness to take risks on new writers. It really scares me seeing something out there in the press that destroys a play you know that that play basically has to be retired.

I wish there was a way for us to make a more generous, more supportive network out there. I think critics have a really hard job--I couldn’t do what they do. I’m personally curious to see if there’s something we can find out there that’s a balance between theater criticism and theater support. It’s something that’s been weighing on my mind; it’s a really tough time out there for all of us trying to find opportunities for theaters to have the wherewithal to take risks, and for audiences to be able to trust that even if something is taking a risk, there’s going to be something really worthwhile supporting the artistic process and the creative product.