Big Ideas

About two months ago, during one of the busiest times in my adult life, I decided to shut down one of the many email accounts I maintain. This was an old account, used almost entirely for signing up for things: a place to collect spam, process transactions, and give out to salespeople I don’t care to hear from. Slowly but surely, day after day, I removed myself from all the lists I’d joined, clicking that familiar little “unsubscribe” button in the footer of almost every email, and updated my email address with a few online presences I wanted to stay in touch with. The task became a kind of ritual unplugging, and it brought me great calm during a chaotic thrall of creativity and construction in my writing life. With every click of the delete button, I felt both freer and more powerful. Eventually, when the account started getting no more than an email or two a day—almost all of them spam—I removed the corresponding icon from both my phone and my tablet; checking messages fr

Knowing when to go is hard for anyone… but it’s harder still, I think, for people in leadership positions. Leadership means responsibility, for one thing, and stepping down feels like abdicating that responsibility. Leadership comes with privileges, too, and we all know how hard they are to give up. More subtly, over time, leadership becomes a kind of engine that generates its own momentum: you lead because you lead because you lead. It can be hard to imagine hitting the brakes, even when they need to be hit, or (more to the point) turning over the wheel to someone else. Not long ago, Clayton Lord asked me to co-facilitate a workshop called Handling Transitions Well at the annual convention of Americans for the Arts. The workshop was devoted to helping arts organizations handle their own leadership changes. Here’s the brief introduction I delivered before my co-facilitators and I started the workshop: Greetings. I’m Gwydion Suilebhan, one of the co-founders and t

This morning, the Dramatists Guild distributed electronic ballots for this year’s Guild Council election. Paper ballots are on their way as well, if they haven’t already arrived. (My official ballot statement is below, if you’re interested.) I’m very proud to have added my own name to the list of candidates this year, and I hope you’ll support me. In the last generation or so, we’ve all begun a radical transformation of the very idea of what it means to be a playwright. Even the simplest facts have changed: you don’t have to live in NY any more to write for the stage; in fact, more playwrights live outside the city than inside it. We no longer want our playwrights to be mostly white and male (and straight, and cisgender, and so on); we want gender parity and inclusion, and we want it now. We don’t all want to work in isolation any more (though some of us still do); we like joining collaboratives and devising ensembles and partnering

Hello, artistic directors and literary managers! How are you? It’s season planning time, so if your theater is anything like mine, I know how fraught things can be. Finding the right stories to tell—stories that respond to the present moment, that speak to your audiences, that promise the possibility of tremendous engagement and interest—is never as easy as outsiders think it is. (Especially us playwrights!) So I thought I might make a gentle suggestion, if you don’t mind… What if I told you I knew a play that featured two Muslim characters, two evangelical Christian characters, and one secular Jewish character wrestling their way painfully toward a tentative, collective hope after an act of religious violence? What if I told you this very same play had a hugely successful world premiere under its belt, one that generated significant revenue and yielded reviews with pull-quotes like these: “A play that is so good, I suspect it will be picked up by every maj

People say that if you really want to experience the seedy underbelly of humanity, to uncover our darkest impulses and encounter people at their absolute ugliest, you really need look no further than the comments section on pretty much any article you find anywhere on the internet. But I am here to tell you all today that there is actually one circle of Hell even deeper than that one: tech support. Now, I knew you were going to laugh when I wrote that line, because picking on tech support people is easy. But I am not talking about having to call tech support. I’m talking about having to BE tech support. Because being tech support, I promise you, is MUCH WORSE than calling it. Being tech support means that you pretty much only ever hear from people when they’re tired, cranky, confused, completely at wit’s end, furious, disappointed, or (shudder) all of the above. Being tech support means trying to help those people solve problems you didn’t create while staying even-handed and o