The Three Ways to Being Produced

It is my firm belief that more and more we live in a society where we have an opportunity because of technology to all be able to do what we are passionate about and to make a living doing it. Technology has opened the gateways of what is possible for any of us to achieve. For artists, the most important gateway to open is the potential to find an audience for just about any kind of expression. I mean, if Rick Astley can find a hallowed place in our culture, there's hope for all of us.

A bypass on the current system is needed if we hope to see new voices have a chance at a career which is what I'm hoping to provide in the weeks to come. I think it's important to understand how things work now before we look at where things will go. After talking for a few months with people in the industry, I gathered a rather bleak picture of how plays enter into the public consciousness. There are essentially three ways at present that plays get widely distributed.

The first way is that a playwright is "established" and has a relationship with one or more theater companies. This is the dream of many playwrights that hope to make a living as a writer. It's the low-risk option for producers and audiences as these are known quantities. It's a lower-risk affair. Your play is guaranteed at least a first run, and if the company is at all reputable and in one of the major cities that the major play catalogs' agents run, it will likely also get seen and picked up in said catalog.

This way requires little outside assistance. Hopefully, the agents will recommend the play to other companies so that it generates more revenues for the playwright, but otherwise, it at least has a chance of being picked up at some point.

The second way is for the playwright to fund a production of the play themselves. The advantage here is that the playwright has nearly unlimited creative control. The disadvantages range from the hundreds or thousands that it can cost to mount most productions that aren't just a one-man show with a stool and street clothes to the possibility of never attracting an agent to see the show, especially if you're off the beaten path in a place like West Virginia. I often wonder how many great playwrights are languishing in places where they won't ever be discovered right now.

The third way is to go to Kinko's, make a few hundred copies, spend a whole lot on postage, and send mostly unsolicited copies across the country to the theater companies you happen to know about or can find in a Google search. Naturally, many major companies won't take unsolicited scripts. How could they? They'd be buried with a decades-long backlog of scripts of extremely varying quality and topic with no way to find what they need. Even the less-known companies that do accept unsolicited material are likely to miss a hidden gem or overlook the perfect script for their season with no real efficient way to manage that process. And I trust I won't ruffle too many feathers when I say that most theater companies are not models of efficiency. Even those companies that accept unsolicited scripts, though, are more likely in the end to go with a playwright they know, a commissioned work, or any number of other submissions that aren't yours that randomly caught someone's attention for unknown reasons.

And the truth of the matter is that there is no shortage of producers producing new plays. A Google search last night for "theater company that produced new plays" brought up 845,000 hits. If even just .1% of those hits are unique companies devoted to new works (and I strongly suspect that it's more than that), that's an incredible wealth of companies needing your show to fill part of their season. They just need a way to find your writing without the current bottlenecks on the system.