Gwydion Suilebhan

NOTE: If you are looking for the most recent version of the Playwrights Wish List, please look here. Thanks!

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UPDATE: As promised, I’ve taken a first pass at everyone’s suggestions — which have come via email, Twitter, and in the comments section below. I’ve also tried to break them up into categories, which is how I think it might make sense to organize them.

Please note that, as I’ve indicated below, I think all of these “wishes” warrant serious discussion and consideration. I sincerely welcome any and all thoughts about any of them.

Submissions: Nuts and Bolts

1. No playwright should ever receive a rejection letter that begins with anything that resembles “Dear [INSERT NAME OF PLAYWRIGHT HERE]” or that’s addressed to the wrong person.
2. No playwright should ever receive a rejection letter that includes a significant misspelling, either of the playwright’s name or the title of the play.
3. Theaters, development programs, and contests should standardize on what constitutes a play sample: 10 pages, 15 pages, 20 pages. Playwrights prefer a longer sample, but standardization is of paramount importance.
4. Theaters, development programs, and contests should abandon any other esoteric submission requirements: demands that several different files be combined into a single PDF, or that an extra title page be created, or that bios be limited to a random number of words. Again, a standard set of requirements should be adopted.
5. No playwright should be asked for a letter of reference in support of an application or submission.
6. Theaters, development programs, and contests everywhere should immediately stop asking for paper submissions; all submissions can and should be handled electronically.
7. No theater, development program, or contest should ask for submission fees of any kind.

Submissions: Selection Criteria

1. All submissions for development programs and contests should be blind submissions; plays should be judged on their own merits, not on any other criteria.
2. All submissions for theaters should also be blind during the first round of review and selection.
3. No theater, development program, or contest should inquire as to the educational status of a playwright, nor should that status ever be used as a criterion for submissions.
4. Theaters should replace the “never before produced scripts only” criteria with a less restrictive “no more than two prior productions” criteria.
5. Playwrights should be allowed to re-submit scripts when substantial revisions have been completed.

Submissions: Transparency

1. All submissions for theaters, development programs, and contests should be as transparent as possible.
2. Theaters, development programs, and contests should publish the names and bios of judges, reviewers, and script readers prior to opening submissions.
3. To whatever extent possible, theaters, development programs, and contests should indicate why a given play has or has not been selected after it has received extensive consideration.

Submissions: Best Practices

1. Theaters, development programs, and contests should respond to every submission. It is not acceptable to let silence stand in for a courteous rejection.
2. Theaters, development programs, and contests should publish a maximum turnaround time for review of submissions and be held accountable to the dates they publish.

Nomenclature

1. No more infantile language should be used to describe play development: no cradles, no incubators, no hatcheries.
2. The term “emerging” (as in “she’s an emerging playwright”) should be eliminated.

General

1. More playwrights should be considered for artistic director positions.
2. A higher percentage of plays produced in any given geographic area should be written by playwrights who live in that geographic area than is currently the case.
3. More theaters nationwide should have playwrights on staff, or at least in long-tenured resident dramatist positions.
4. More theaters nationwide should add playwrights to their artistic advisory boards.
5. There should be gender and racial parity in the authorship of work selected by theaters, development programs, and contests.

Finally: it’s worth noting, for those of us who are Dramatists Guild members, that we already have a Bill of Rights, for what it’s worth.

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When British playwright Duncan MacMillan was visiting the United States recently during the run of his play LUNGS at Studio Theatre in DC, I was very lucky to have the chance to get to know him a bit. We had dinner, met for drinks one night, and attended a party together. Naturally, our conversation drifted to some of the differences between life as a playwright in his country and mine, and one of the stories he told me really caught my attention. Evidently, not long ago, playwrights across the country got together and started a sort of “wish list” — an agglomeration of things large and small they wanted to change about the life of a UK dramatist. I thought this was a smashing idea, to use a British colloquialism, and I thought: why not do it here?

So… this is another one of these deals where I start the list, but y’all get to add to it (either in the comments or by emailing me, if you want to remain anonymous). In this case, however, I’m hoping there’s a way we can really discuss the list, maybe debate the things that are on it, and spend time serious time thinking about what our real top five or seven or ten or whatever wishes are. My hope is that, nationwide, we can start to build focus around a few key things we’d like to accomplish.

Without further preamble, then, a few wishes — presented not in order of importance but in the order they occurred to me:

1. No rejection letter should ever begin with anything that resembles “Dear [INSERT NAME OF PLAYWRIGHT HERE]” or be addressed to the wrong playwright.
2. Theaters across the country should standardize on what constitutes a query or submission packet; no more esoteric requirements or demands that several files be crammed into a single PDF.
3. All submissions for contests and workshops should be blind submissions.
4. No more infantile language should be used to describe play development: no cradles, no incubators, no nothing like that at all.
5. More playwrights should be considered for artistic director positions.
6. Theaters and opportunities that accept general submissions, especially those that accept them by email, should not be allowed to get away with “If you don’t hear from us, you didn’t get accepted.”
7. A higher percentage of plays produced in any given geographic area should be written by playwrights who live in that geographic area than is currently the case.
8. More theaters nationwide should have more playwrights on staff, or at least in long-tenured resident dramatist positions.
9. ???