Eric's blog

I was tipped off to Simon Stephens' keynote speech, and it is interesting, though mostly concerns how UK theatre relates to the rest of European theatre.

To boil it down, he finds:

1) Theatre is a physical medium.
2) Theatre is multi-authored.
3) Theatre is art.
4) Language is noise.
5) The English are polite and arrogant.

Of all his points, I was most interested in what he says about #4:

"Theatre critics in the UK are obsessed with words. Their interpretation of a play seems to concern itself almost wholly with a consideration of the things that characters say to one another. They ignore physical imagery, they ignore structure, they ignore genre or style of either language or physicality. They write reviews which could as easily be reviews of a written text as a piece of physical performance."

I find it a little interesting that critics would focus on dialogue and ignore structure, since that is basically just as textual.  Certainly I don't think the Chicago critics follow this pattern in the sense they usually comment a bit on the set, costumes and such.  On the other hand, they do pretty much expect all work to follow neo-Aristotlean rules as Tony was discussing the other day.  The irony is that, at least according to Stephens, the playwright would have far more control over staging and sets and costumes in the UK than they would here, where only a handful retain such control over their work. 

For me, the dialogue (and structure and brief stage directions) are the core of the play.  And they are what can reasonably said to be under the playwright's control, whereas the rest is out of her or his hands in the U.S. context (and the playwright can't take credit or blame for what is a significant aspect of the show after all). 

In my case, I am particularly interested in plot and structure and, to a somewhat lesser extent, dialogue.  I am far more in the authors' camp than the actors' or directors' camp.  While I can enjoy particularly nice sets and movement, I can't recall a single time when this salvaged a play that I thought was poorly written or inane (well, maybe Hamletmachine which has almost no script to speak of).  The reverse has happened, though rarely.  I do recall the discussion of The Hypocrites' staging of No Exit and thinking that they had gotten so much about the play wrong that I wouldn't even give it a chance -- I knew I would hate the production.

I do agree with Simon when he says that theatre is multi-authored and also agree with his call to learn from other approaches and not to assume that English theatre is the best in the world and cannot learn from people toiling away far from the promised land (i.e. the West End).

I recently attended a fairly successful production of Naomi Wallace's One Flea Spare.  I'm sure there will be some plot "spoilers" in this review, so stop now if that bothers you.

The title comes from a line in John Donne's The Flea, and seems a fairly apt title, given the mingling between the classes that occurs in the play.  Interestingly, this is one of Donne's less overtly religious poems/sonnets.  One thing that may be a bit misleading is that Donne is from an earlier era (1572-1631) than this play, which is set in 1665 (the Great Plague of London).  As I was looking up some material on this year, it turns out that the book that informed me the most about it (Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year) is actually a historical novel.  Defoe did live through the plague and the Great Fire of London, but was only about 7 at the time!  Who knew!?

Anyway, this simply reinforces that I don't have a very good handle on how people thought/acted in that era, but I am not sure Naomi Wallace does either.  (One of the more interesting debates is whether people had a fundamentally different view of what it meant to be an individual or whether they had an "interior life."  While I suspect this is somewhat overblown, there certainly was more collective behavior then.)  I would certainly have expected more references to God throughout, not just occasional asides.  Most of the interactions between the master and the sailor/servant really struck me as how we envision the Georgian Era heading into the Victorian Era and not how it would have been in 1665.  I was also somewhat doubtful that 1) Darcy Snelgrave would bother trying to save a horse from the fire (this strikes me as something more modern where we have elevated horses to the status of companions), 2) that she would possibly have survived her burns in that era, and 3) that had she survived, her husband would have turned away from her so completely (rather than assuming she had been granted God's grace). 

So it is an interesting experiment to try to write so far outside of one's own experiences and time, but it can be very hard to be convincing.  I did not wholy buy into Wallace's choices, but I still thought it was an interesting take on what life would have been like in that era filtered through the author's preconceptions and preoccupations.

Have you ever tried to write so far outside your own era, and did you think you succeeded?  Have you ever been "convinced" by another author tackling this task?

I was discussing the just released (in the US) movie Incendies (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1255953/) which is a film version of Wajdi Mouawad's play Scorched.  Silk Road had an amazing production of this (where I only had one small quibble about one scene).  I mentioned that I would hate for a movie version to push the original out of my mind, although they are fundamentally different.  The movie actually can travel to locations and show things that can only be suggested on stage.  And in many ways, I suspect that the emotional impact (and there is quite a lot here) is more powerful on stage than on film.  However, I don't want this to become a predictable film vs. stage screed.

I am more interested in this notion (perhaps held only by me) that watching one version of a play will somewhat displace another one.  For instance, I've seen Twelfth Night around 5 times and Midsummer Night's Dream 4 or so times.  They have all blended together.  I remember one company that had super bright yellow stockings for Malvolio, but I would be hard pressed to remember which one it was (possibly NJ Shakespeare Fest) and I do remember the outdoor production of Midsummer in NYC's Washington Square Park, but I don't remember anything distinctive about it, like what I thought of the actors playing Lysander or Titania.  To some extent, this comes from being a relatively passive consumer of theatre.  I am not always thinking about how I could do this better or that better.  But it also has to do with the way my mind layers things and multiple productions do tend to start blurring together.  This is particularly true when I now have over 20 years of theatre going (some years much heavier than others).  But maybe some roles are so amazing, they just burn themselves in the brain.  Recently someone was commenting on what a weak job Ben Stiller did in John Guare's House of Blue Leaves compared to John Mahoney 26 years ago!  Well, maybe if I had seen the Steppenwolf crew in their original heyday it would be burned bright in my memory too.  Hard to say.

While I have not called for a complete moratorium on seeing multiple versions of Shakespeare or Chekhov, I do tend to stop seeing shows after seeing a truly great production so that it can be fixed in my mind.  If it is simply a good production or a weak one, then I am more willing to keep exploring different takes.   I imagine some people would find this too limiting or silly, particularly those that are really interested in seeing different interpretations of the play.

As far as shows that I consciously no longer go to, I include Heiner Müller's Hamletmachine (so I skipped the recent Chicago production), Lett's August: Osage County, and Fugard's Sizwe Banzi is Dead (not that there is much chance this will be revived soon).  I am extremely unlikely to ever see Merchant of Venice or Albee's The Goat again (though because I had "issues" with these plays, not that I was blown away by the productions, despite some very strong acting).  I imagine there are more on these lists, but these are fairly representative.

Scorched is a play where I thought Silk Road's production was terrific, and I would simply hate to blur any of it.  However, I suspect that the film is so different from the play that it would be stored in a different lobe, so to speak.

Anyway, I thought I would ask whether others worry about play productions blurring together or if it isn't a major concern.  Or indeed if it is simply an occupational hazzard that cannot be avoided for people very active in the theatre.
 

I think we all have some regrets, though it is important to separate regrets about things one had little or no control over and those one really could control.  There are many jobs I wish I had been offered, or more recently I was disappointed that I did not win a play competition, but as long as one did one's best, it isn't exactly fitting to have "regret" because it was out of one's hands (for the most part).  As far as affairs of the heart, it is a more complicated story and maybe one does spend too much time wondering if something could have been said or done differently to have a different outcome (i.e. the one you wanted).  I will return to this theme in a later post, since my first theatrical exercises are based around romantic regret at least tangentially.  But I can already see past that to (hopefully) more mature work once that is out of my system.

I did decide my last year of college that I would try not to let fear hold me back too much from things I really wanted to do or try.  A big big piece of this meant getting outside my own head.  I would play things a thousand different ways but never act or tell people how I felt (particularly women that I had some interest in).  Well, I did break out to some extent, and no, it rarely worked the way I wanted, but it was still better than lying in bed thinking about what I should have said if I only had the nerve.

So in general I agree with Helen Rowland, who wrote: "“The follies which a man regrets most in his life, are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.”  Regrets of omission, I guess. I do strive to avoid those kind of regrets.

In general, I fared better at getting my way at school and work. I went to grad school. I wanted to move to New York, and within a year I landed a position in New York. I even worked abroad for 18 months.  I've traveled to places I never imagined I would get to, particularly Italy and Japan.  And in my leisure time, I have tried to see the shows that interest me.  Some years that means seeing a lot of shows (at least 30 in 2010).

There are many shows I've missed, but not all that many I thoroughly regret missing.  Either I was not in Chicago at the time, I didn't have the money or tickets were extremely hard to come by (and these don't count as regrets of omission) -- or deep down I wasn't that interested.  Chad Deity falls into that last category.  Part of me says - everyone says it's great, it is about so much more than wrestling, etc., you have to see it.  But fundamentally I hate sports and movies about sports and theatre about sports.  I just wouldn't have gotten past that aspect of it, no matter how great it was.  So I can't regret not going.  Virginia Woolf is the new hot ticket, and yeah, I probably should go for the acting.  And maybe I will if I get a free or severely reduced ticket.  But I don't feel any burning desire to go, and I won't actually regret it if I don't make it.

On the flip side, there are a fair number of things that didn't turn out to be worth my time, and I am sometimes sorry I went, but without knowing this ahead of time, I made the best judgement I could.

Oddly, one of the few "regrets" I have is that I didn't see McNally's A Perfect Ganesh when it was playing in Manhattan in 1993-94.  I was in New York a lot that year (I was actually living in Newark).  I had definitely cut back on theatre-going from my college days, but I still went out occasionally.  In fact, I managed to catch Angels in America (both parts) right before it closed at about the same time.  (And yes, that would have been the much bigger regret to have missed Kushner's opus while I had the chance.)  But, knowing then what I know now, I would have gone. 

Ultimately, it is impossible to live a life without any regrets, but by seizing opportunities when they arise and not regreting things that are truly out of one's control, one can be more at peace with oneself and one's decisions.  I will end by saying I was surprised to be asked to be on the Halcyon Board of Directors, but it was an opportunity that I have seized, and I would have certainly regretted it later had I turned it down.  I'll probably write more on this turning-point later.

Every so often, there arrives a play so troubled that we wonder how it ever could have gotten past the selection process, let alone been green-lighted to go forward after early rehearsals.  Of course, there probably is no play (or specific production of a play) so bad that it doesn't have at least some defenders, but there are still some where the overwhelming consensus is negative.  No point in going down the list in Chicago, though a few companies do seem to have more than their fair share.

Basically, the consensus is that Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is such a turkey.  Of course, there have been a rash of injuries during rehearsals (and previews!) with a very serious one occurring last night: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/performer-is-injured-during-spider-man-performance/.  There has been a fairly persistent murmur of voices asking to shut the show down on artistic grounds, and now 75% or more of the commenters are openly demanding that the show be shut down, with the most persistent saying that they themselves are actors and are trying to force Equity to take action.  It is hard to see how the show can continue, but we shall see what transpires over the next week or so.

It does seem that the trend to skip out of town try-outs is not working well for Broadway productions, so I expect to see a correction in this trend soon.

Still, I was struck by one commenter (who seems to be living on Pluto frankly).  Here is his comment: "Julie Taymor is a visionary and a great artist. I wouldn't count her out just yet. If the show works all this will be forgotten and people will be tripping over each other in an attempt to get in and see it. I've been around the theatre all my life and been with shows that were disasters out of town until suddenly the pieces that didn't work fell away and something beautiful was revealed."

I think this is always the hope, but how often is it the reality that a really troubled show can be salvaged -- by the original director who may be a little too hung up on proving that his or her vision was brilliant?  I would generally think it more likely that a show that did really badly in New York might succeed elsewhere with a completely different director and vision, or on a different scale.  And indeed, only the day before, the NY Times was talking about "Almost, Maine" and how it had flopped on Broadway but succeeded at the regional level, particularly with amateur theatrical companies: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/18/theater/18almost.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=maine&st=cse

One point in this piece seemed really on target: "Could the key to success be that the text can be performed by as few as 4 people or as many as 19?  If you are a professional playwright looking to make it in New York, you write something with the smallest possible cast,” said Doug Rand, chairman of the licensing company Playscripts Inc. “Amateur theater groups want to have as big a cast as possible. New York really hasn’t generated that kind of work in decades. So, when you come across that work, it’s like water in the desert.”"

But of course, what would a piece in the Times be without a backhand swipe at the locals who aren't sophisticated enough to know a bad piece of theatre when it shows up playing in the sticks: "“When shows have a certain sweetness, an absolute lack of guile, they can be very good for regional theaters to do,” Mr. Thomas said."

Well, we do know that The Story of My Life completely bombed on Broadway and hasn't been doing that well in Chicago, so maybe it has to play even smaller cities to find its niche.  Or not.

I have been involved in one seemingly troubled show in college, and I may go into a bit more detail in the comments to one of Christine's post.  In this case, the director wasn't really the problem, but our prima donna lead actor who pulled out of the show at least twice and had to be coaxed back in with some script changes.  Still, we pulled it off for one weekend and actually made a healthy profit.  It was actually a shame that we didn't book a second weekend, but such is life.  Maybe it would have fallen apart after the pressure was off.

Anyone have stories about either 1) troubled shows that stayed troubled (and maybe shouldn't have opened) or 2) shows that did the near miraculous and pulled it all together right before opening night?

When I was wrapping up my MA at the University of Toronto, I found out about a convention they had there that is only sporadically followed at other graduate schools I have been involved with or am aware of. When PhD candidates are in the final phase of their candidacy, they bring in an outside reader/auditor. And outside means not outside the department but from an outside university. This person either reads the dissertation (with fresh eyes) or simply comes with many questions for the oral defense. The problem with insiders is that they become advocates for the candidate and lose objectivity in many cases. The presumption is that if someone has persisted long enough, they are worthy of the degree, since the chair couldn't simply be fooling himself or herself, right? And it can be hard for the second or third committee-member to break bad news to a chair (not in all cases -- some members delight in being brutally honest -- but probably not enough). Thus, someone is brought in with no stake in whether the candidate passes or not.

Perhaps you can guess my drift here. To their credit, Chicago theatres are producing a lot of new work, but they also seem notorious for putting on well-acted productions of half-baked plays. In a few cases, you really wonder how the piece was green-lit. Or it is painfully obvious that it was green-lit with only part of the play written and pulling it would not only cause a mini-scandal but would open a huge hole in the schedule.

In general, I think artistic directors and literary managers need to be more honest with the authors of brand new work, but this can be very hard, particularly when there are long standing relationships, as is the case in some companies. But in some cases, they themselves are so caught up in their closeness to playwrights that they don't see the problems or think they can paper over them on the strength of the cast (I have to wonder if this is the Steppenwolf strategy).

If the play gets as far as rehearsals and problems are still evident, who will speak up? Particularly if it means cutting (and most new plays do need to be cut, even my own). Will any actor voluntarily give up a lot of lines or an entire part to make the play stronger?*

I don't know if having objective** outsider observers around at various stages would help or not, but it is something to consider. It would probably only work if there was early intervention, matched with a playwright who was open to making necessary changes. But at some point, it simply becomes too late in the game to pull a production. Let me know if you have other ideas to avoid some of the train wrecks that have hit Chicago theatre lately.

* I am thinking specifically about an interesting new play called "Under America," which had a strong second act, but really was fairly broken otherwise. I have to agree with the critical consensus that the backstory of the reporter was completely unbelievable and should be completely dropped, which would radically streamline the play and drop a number of secondary characters. It's hard to imagine the ensemble agreeing to this, even though that was what the play needed.

** Pure objectivity is probably impossible in this plane of existence, but finding people with some distance from a company who will give an honest opinion should be possible, shouldn't it?

So I have been thinking over the issue of how much it matters to avoid "spoilers" in reviews or discussing plays. I suppose if anyone doesn't know the ending of Othello or King Lear, it is their own fault. And they should know the ending to Medea, though if they don't, I would be more inclined to blame the school system in such cases.

I think given the generic conventions, as long as one knows whether a play is a comedy or tragedy, then one can pretty much guess the ending (to say nothing of the heavy foreshadowing of Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams, for example). The category "drama" is a little more ambiguous, but will certainly call for some tears or a breakdown or two along the way. The journey is generally more important than the ending anyway. But one could say the same thing about film, but people tend to get far more annoyed about "spoilers" in movie reviews.

When one is analyzing a play in somewhat general terms, then the ending is usually fair game. But not when producing a time-sensitive review of a specific production of a play. Still, it is a fine line and people will probably complain no matter what you do (which is why it is good to develop thicker skin before blogging at all).

I suppose I so rarely find myself "surprised" by a play's ending that I don't worry about it too much. Plays that rely too much on a twist at the end (perhaps DeLillo's Valparaiso) don't often stand up that well. Shakespeare's comedies don't fall into this category (for the most part anyway), since the audience was aware of the role switching, even though the on-stage characters were not.

A different issue is when one is seeing a play for the very first time, should one read the play beforehand? I can think of legitimate arguments in either direction. Certainly in smaller markets I would not hold off from reading a play in case it eventually opened there. However, in Chicago, if one is patient, one can see a huge chunk of the canon each season. I was planning on reading O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night for various reasons, and it turns out that Polarity is going to be doing a production in the next month. I do have a rough idea of how it will turn out (this is O'Neill we're talking about), so it isn't going to be "spoiled" in the most narrow sense if I read it first.

So I can either go with the immediacy of having the lines delivered to me "fresh," or I can focus more on the details, acting, costumes, the way one can on a second or third look at a particular play. I am leaning towards seeing the play without reading it first, but then reading it shortly afterwards to "lock it in." But I reserve the right to change my mind. I still have a few weeks to decide.

A recent mailing from Goodman was the (perhaps too) obvious jumping-off point for this blog.  Just as Candide is oblivious to the fact that today is not the best of all possible days, many people go around acting as if the glory days (of the theatre or the arts in general) are all in the past.  Maybe if you are well-informed enough to be reading this blog and know about Chicago's Off-Loop theatre scene that thought hadn't even crossed your mind.  But let's focus only on the quality of writing.  It can certainly seem that most contemporary playwrights don't really stack up against the giants of the past.

This is probably the wrong comparison.  Not only are we often working through a nostalgia for a past that didn't really exist (see Stephanie Coontz's The Way We Never Were or more popularly Billy Joel's Keeping the Faith), but we cherry pick the best of the past to go up against the average quality shows of today.  Most things from the past only last because they were of higher quality than anything else.  This is particularly true of television from the 1950s and 1960s.  Granted, this analogy will probably break down 40-50 years from now when virtually all television shows from 2000 onward will be available in The Cloud* (ripped from DVDs created in our day).  Actually, an astonishing amount of 1980s and 1990s television has made it out on DVD as well, to the point where we can legitimately say this represented typical TV viewing habits and not just the high-lights (Alf, the Greatest American Hero, Simon and Simon, the Dukes of Hazzard, etc.).

Sturgeon's Revelation comes in handy here.  It is stated that "ninety percent of everything is crud."  While it was specifically coined to prevent comparing the worst of genre fiction to the best of non-genre fiction, it applies equally well to theatre of different eras.  Roughly 90% of contemporary drama is workmanlike, average, marginally insightful, but the same holds true for drama from the 1970s, from the 1950s, and so on.  If anything, I would argue that today's Off-Loop community has so many great actors that they often elevate mediocre scripts well beyond what is deserved.  This probably was not the case in the 1950s and perhaps not even the 1970s (while some companies were definitely tearing up the floorboards, the sheer mass of great acting talent arguably wasn't as strong as today).

While it is a bit of a stretch, I wonder if the same holds true for other regional theatre scenes.  I certainly always hear about how cautious small regional companies are, and yet according to DPS, the most produced works from 2000-2009** across the entire US were almost all contemporary: http://www.dramatists.com/pdf/atPlaySpringSummer10.pdf  I assumed that Streetcar Named Desire, Glass Menagerie, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and perhaps Desire Under the Elms would be the top 5, when in fact only Menagerie is tied for 10th.  Personally I take this as a promising sign.

As I have been reading through some of the obscure plays from the 1950s and 1960s that DPS is keeping in print, it strikes me that most of these are crud (or dross which sounds a bit more elegant).  So what is the point of Anderson's Long Tail, if so much of it isn't very good? 

That's an excellent question, which I will return to in my next blog entry.

* Obviously, this is what the Internet will be called in 2050.  Can I stake my claim to the term now?

** This list presumably is only for paid-rights performances, as Shakespeare comprises approximately half of all contemporary productions.

In my previous blog entry, I looked at 25 plays that DPS was advertising back in the mid 1960s.  After some exploration of the DPS database, I determined that they have kept 24 of the 25 in print, so that's something at any rate.  I was a bit abashed to find that I did not recognize 4 of 5 as being by Harold Pinter, though they are earlier works that are rarely performed.

Turning to the very addictive "page to stage" feature on the DPS website, it turns out that 5 are being performed in the upcoming season (including one High School performance).  DPS probably does have a deeper database that would let me find out when these plays were performed in the last 5 years or so, though I didn't think it quite important enough to go to such lengths.  I suspect that most of the Pinter's are performed from time to time, and the Tennessee Williams' (Milk Train) periodically. I was surprised that two of the more obscure plays on the list (The Family Man and Jo, a musical) are up for production, but that is intriguing in its own way.

DPS seems to be oriented, whether consciously or not, towards the "long tail" model of business (Chris Anderson of Wired has recently popularized this term).  Keep everything in print forever and pick up occasional productions here and there.  (Until fairly recently, this was what the Fantasy record label did, until they were bought out by Concord and their warehouse deemed to be too costly to operate, leading to a purge of their back catalogue.) With the increasing improvements to the quality of print-on-demand services, there really is no reason DPS cannot keep these plays in print.  This does not address whether they might choose to try to market some of the really slow-moving titles with lower performance rights.  Or whether some of these plays have dated too badly to be performed again.

I have picked up a handful that happened to be at the library: Kurtz Gordon's Utopia, Inc. and Howard Moss's The Palace at 4 A.M. (from another ad).  On my next visit, I will try to check out Owen Arno's The Street of Good Friends.  I found Utopia Inc. to be very dated.  The Palace at 4 A.M. is a Pirandello-inspired piece, but perhaps a revival of Pirandello would be better justified than this play (whose main claim to fame is that Christopher Walken was in it when it was on Broadway).  Moss's Folding Green (in the same volume as Palace) seems to hold up a bit better, though it is still not clear to me it would merit a revival.

As a general rule, comedy seems more based in current conditions and dates faster than dramatic or tragic plays, though one can find exceptions of course.  The Arno play is a comedy, and perhaps it will be one of those exceptions.  Most companies aren't that interested in dusting off museum pieces, particularly when the cost to perform is the same as contemporary works.  Perhaps this would have been different in the past, when smaller companies were far more conservative than they are today.  However, in a fascinating piece in the back page of their newsletter, DPS lists the most performed plays across the US from 2000-2009: http://www.dramatists.com/pdf/atPlaySpringSummer10.pdf

The Glass Menagerie is tied for 10th, and the rest are fairly recent plays.  I would argue this does look like much less reliance on the chestnuts than one probably would have seen if looking at a list from the 1980s and perhaps even the 1990s.  How many of these (aside from Menagerie) will stand the test of time and be performed 50 years hence is unclear.  Right now, we seem to be in a period where theatre is attempting to be contemporary and forward-looking, and that may lead to an emphasis on art that is more transitory, less bound to tradition.  On the whole, that is probably not a bad place to be.

As I have been reading through the Tennessee Williams plays not actually collected in the 2-volume Library of America set (to be fair, it only claims to be Plays, not Collected Plays), I first turned to the 8 volumes of The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, which fills in most of the gaps, except for his very earliest and last plays.  Two fairly recent New Directions books (Mr. Paradise and The Traveling Companion) cover these gaps, though his final full-length plays must still be tracked down independently.  There is still one significant omission, namely, 5 very short plays in American Blues put out by Dramatists Play Service.  Fortunately, the library had a copy and I started leafing through the book.  While most of the plays in American Blues are weak (and thus I can't really fault Library of America for omitting them), I was still glad to take a look at them.

I was struck by the ads for other plays available by Dramatists Play Service. Most of them remain terribly obscure and perhaps deservedly so. Some of the ads trumpet "Every play a hit," but here are two more restrained pages.

Under the heading "New plays"

• The Days and Nights of Beebee Fenstermaker
• Whisper Into My Good Ear and Mrs. Dally has a Lover
• Today is Independence Day
• The Room
• A Night Out
• A Slight Ache
• Come on Strong
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
• Breakfast in Bed
• Natural Affection
• The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore

Under "Recent Releases"

• Nobody Loves an Albatross
• The Catch Colt (Musical)
• Semi-Detached
• The Collection
• The Dumb Waiter
• The Lover
• High Cockalorum
• The Family Man
• Interurban
• Jo (Musical)
• Next Time I'll Sing to You
• The Other Player
• The Street of Good Friends
• Utopia, Inc.

Out of 25 plays, 2 that are firmly in the repertoire (Virginia Woolf and The Dumb Waiter) and Milk Train, a rarely produced play but one I'd at least heard of, perhaps solely because it was by Tennessee Williams.

It strikes me that, as hard as it is to get a play produced in the first place (and accepted by Dramatists Play Service), how much harder to get a second production.  Creating a play that actually enters the repertoire is as hard as bottling lightening.  Incidentally, this is essentially the same situation for contemporary composers of music in the classical tradition.

As a quick aside, I just looked at the DPS website for the first time, and they do seem to be keeping all these titles in print, although they are hardly pushing these forgotten plays.  What is somewhat unusual to me is that virtually all full-length plays have a flat fee (for non-professional theatre) of $75 for a full-length and $35 for a one-act play.  While there is a certain simplicity in this, it turns out that it is not uniform.  Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Neil Simon all command $100 for a full-length play and $40 for a one-act (interestingly Eugene O'Neill is in the lower price bracket).  I'm sure contracts prevent it, but I would find it an interesting experiment if DPS took 20 or 30 plays that haven't been produced anywhere in the last 10-20 years and dropped the performance rights to $50 to see if they did re-enter circulation.

In future blogs, I will explore whether it is indeed such a bad thing that these plays are unproduced, whether theatre should focus on new productions (rather than remounts), the implications of the "star system" that means even mediocre work by well-known playwrights circulates while worthy plays by unknowns essentially vanish, and perhaps some reflections on today's canon and which members are likely to remain and which will be forced out.