This is the second entry in a continuing series of guest posts. Our contributor is Donna Hoke, my fellow playwright and Dramatists Guild representative from western New York. Her post was inspired, as she explains below, by the seemingly endless discussion about open submission policies (or the lack thereof). Donna is a keen thinker with some practical suggestions and I’m very glad to share them. You can follow her on Twitter @donnahoke.
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Recent conversations on Twitter have brought to light the truth about the seeming void into which we playwrights submit our work. In short, what we hoped was true actually is: literary managers are not, in fact, lining their cats’ litter boxes with our plays; they are merely tremendously overworked and have little time to read and respond to submissions.
We playwrights—who spend inordinate amounts of time discussing the seeming futility of the open submission process—were happy to hear that a lack of response didn’t always indicate a lack of attention. But does it matter if, in the end, the result is the same? Too many unread plays, too much rejection by silence, and next to no productions: results fostered, at least in part, by a broken system.
I’d like to suggest that the system can be fixed in ways that will promote better communication between playwrights and the people to whom we submit our work, improvements that just might increase those needle-in-a-haystack odds of production through submission, even slightly. Because while open submission can work, I believe it can work better. Here’s how:
1) Narrow your submission window. Instead of allowing plays to come in year-round, create a short window of no more than two months and commit to reading and responding to every play received during that window within a year’s time. I know, that could mean that Playwright X might miss the window, and Playwright X might have written the Next Great Play—but if Playwright X’s play isn’t going to get read because there’s mold growing on it, then the argument is moot. And maybe if Playwright X misses the window, she’ll try harder to make it next time.
2) Narrow the number of submissions you accept. If you don’t want to narrow the window, how about shortening the list? Change your submission guidelines to state something like the following: “We begin accepting submissions for any given year on January 1; when we reach 200, submissions are closed for the year.†Then, if it just so happens that you’re all caught up on your play reading before the year is out, you can keep reading what’s been submitted after that first 200. Nobody’s going to know if you let that list slide to 250 or 300. The bottom line: don’t accept more plays than you can read and respond to.
And the responding—in any form—is important. I know that theaters don’t always like to respond because some playwrights push back, but responding does several things: 1) It shows respect for the work we’ve done and our efforts to share it with you 2) It encourages a playwright whose work intrigued you to submit again, so that 3) You can start developing a relationship that might actually lead to something productive. Responding helps to grow fruitful associations that are so important, but if you’ve got more plays lying around then you can possibly attend to, the fruit dies on the vine.
3) Reward your ten-minute playwrights. If you have a ten-minute play festival and several of the plays really connect to you and/or your audience, invite the playwrights to submit full-length plays and give them special-pile privileges. If you decide to produce one, you can remind your audience how much they liked the short play they saw by the same author and voila!—you have name recognition. Many playwrights participate in ten-minute play festivals in order to make connections and realize some success. It’s good juju to reward them for this, particularly if any of the following are true:
- Your festival charges a fee.
- The festival does not pay royalties.
- The festival makes money for your theater.
- Your theater accepts agent-only submissions.
4) Reward your reading participants. We all know there is money available to theaters that do new work—and also that for too many theaters, a reading series is the only new work they do. If this is you, don’t promise production of one of the scripts the following year if that isn’t going to happen. And, as with the short play festivals, if a script really resonates, see what you can do to help it get before the eyes of someone who might actually produce it. Maybe even recommend it to an agent you have a relationship with. Then let us know you’ve done that, so that we can follow up, and the script doesn’t get lost in yet another stack.
5) Tell the truth. If your theater has no intention of producing a brand new play by an unknown—either to the whole world or just to you—close your open submissions. It might come off as elitist, but at least it’s honest. The way things are now, in the practical corners of our hearts, we know that we don’t stand a chance against established names or someone you have a great relationship with, but as long as you have open submissions, we hold out hope. And waste time that could be spent writing.
I read a blog post not too long ago that also suggested the system is broken, and further suggested that “There’s a small cadre of playwrights whose works, like salmon, swim along national byways through New York City and around the regions. They are The Selected, receiving a kind of Good Housekeeping seal of approval from sundry dramaturgs, most of whom graduated from the Yale School of Drama and other institutions of its ilk. And suddenly, their plays are being developed in the New Play fortresses such as the Sundance Theatre Institute and at South Coast Repertory’s Pacific Playwrights Festival and the Alley Theatre’s New Play Initiative in Houson.†Neither the author of that post nor I are suggesting that these playwrights are not good or worthy, just that they are not the only ones who are, and that there must be a better way to ensure that a select group does not get the lion’s share of attention just because it’s easier to do it that way.
For many of us, it’s not even about the money; we just want to get our work in front of audiences. So away from the issues presented in this blog post, I believe many of the above suggestions can help. We don’t want a slice of the big green cheese—just some realistic opportunity. To be fair, there are theaters that employ some of these practices, but not nearly enough. If every theater that doesn’t adopted one or two of these ideas, maybe change would begin. And if that’s not possible, please help us understand why.
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The ideas expressed above are a contribution to the ongoing intellectual discourse about theater. Though I’m honored to share them, they represent the thinking of their author, not necessarily my own. If you’d like to make a contribution, too, just let me know. Provocative, smart, and even dangerous discourse is always welcome.
Regarding no. 1. I don’t think some theaters, especially new play development theaters, would be interested in narrowing the submission window. They receive a lot of $$$$ keeping the submission window wide open. Narrowing it = less $$$$
I’m curious. Can you explain that? I’d not heard that before.
I think Babel is saying that as long as there is the illusion that open submissions lead to production, if a world premiere comes about a different way, nobody is the wiser and the money still gets paid. But I don’t see now a narrower window would result in less money if the “intent” is the same.
My question was actually for the original comment, not for Babelwright…
That being the case, I wonder then if *real* change will come not from theatres changing their open submission policy, but from grant-giving institutions changing their reward policy – encouraging theatres to adopt the changes Donna listed by changing what gets them paid. (E.g. submissions leading to productions = money, not receiving endless submissions without result.)
I think the answer is going to be more local productions that don’t cost tens of thousands of dollars. Barebones productions are great showcases of the script.
Absolutely right, and many theaters have a de facto policy of using this $ to produce plays written by themselves or friends and prodigies; their “open submission” policy is “open” in name only. I once submitted a play to a major Louisiana theater that sent an email to everyone thanking us for participating in their open blind submission process, and announcing the winners, which consisted of a musical written by one of the theater’s staff members, a play written by the protege of a visiting director, a play written by a theater professor at a nearby university, and pieces written by that theater’s playwriting group. This was for a NATIONAL “blind submission” process. At first I thought they were being sarcastic, but then realized the email was written for the benefit of their grantors. The hypocrisy behind this was as upsetting as their cynicism. Grant organizations need to change their standards for giving funds to such groups, or throw in the towel about open submissions.
I don’t think the system is broken so much as clogged. There’s a lot of hair in the drain. Playwrights have to take responsibility for stepping up and doing the hard work of figuring out if their play really is a good fit for a particular theater. Way to many take the “scatter it far and wide” approach.
I think this might be the equivalent of one or two hairs. In truth, though I can’t back it up, I think the trend toward very narrowly defined missions probably helps in this regard, though not as much as we would hope.
How glad I am to see this discussed. It is something I have thought about for many years.
The system is broken, but it is broken for the best of reasons. There has been an explosion of playwriting, and theaters, in the last decades. But the hundred-year-old system of bringing plays to the commercial market is still in place. And that hundred-year-old system is called New York Theater.
Every regional theater in the country does one new play a year. (Those that do more, I so applaud you!) And that one new play is a new play that was produced last year in New York, and did all right. New York is the bottle neck through which all productions have to go, and there are just not enough theaters in New York to keep up.
New York snobbery assumes that if you are from Wyoming, or from Nebraska, you are just not capable of writing a play as good as one by a New York playwright. So New York playwrights are more likely to be produced in New York. (Regional bias is perfectly reasonable; the problem is that New York currently has a monopoly on U.S theatrical legitimacy.
If you doubt Theater’s view of the importance of New York productions over all others, you have only to look at the Dramatist Guild magazine, that lists the productions of member playwrights in the back: Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-off-Broadway . . . a full production in a top “regional” theater outside of New York ranks below a play put up by a bunch of friends in the basement of a church — in New York. And look at the term “regional” theater. Which means, not in New Yorkl.
I do have a solution. It’s The Great Western Playwriting Contest. Every year there should be a playwriting contest for productions of plays written by playwrights living west of the Rockies (check out my regional bias showing). The prizes should be huge (why be reasonable when you’re fantasizing). A $50 prize should be split between the producing theater, and the playwright. Once a year theaters should send their new play productions to the Great Western Playwriting Contest, and the plays should be presented in a Fringe-like atmosphere, of theater productions every day/all day/night for a week. There should be an audience prize, a critic’s prize, a Best Drama, a Best Comedy, Best Production, Best Script — at least five or six prizes. And then, winning plays will tour through all the theaters who produced a new play the previous year.
So, this would galvanize theaters to find and develop and produce local plays by local playwrights, by entering this contest they get a crack at the $25K prize, and then they also get five or six productions which they don’t have to produce, but from which they will draw revenue. The advertising value of “Winner of the Great Western Playwriting Contest for XXX” for each of the plays will help generate more audiences.
Plays by local authors, about local places — not one more god-help-us play set in a New York apartment about New York culture and New York concerns with New York characters and New York language (yes, my bias is leaking out all over here) — will help generate more audiences in local theaters.
More productions of local plays will help develop better local playwrights, because nothing teaches playwriting like the hammer and anvil of the rehearsal and production process.
Now, together with the Great Western Playwriting Contest, there should be the Great Southern, the Great Northern, the Great Central playwriting contests. And then New York can come shopping for plays to us.
Meanwhile!
Playwrights, stop sitting around waiting to be granted readings and productions. Band together! Read each others’ work. Choose plays and produce staged readings! Create your own audiences, produce your own work. You’ll be improving your work as you wait, and creating community at the same time.
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