Ideas

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 with

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 major re

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 objective

I need help. From someone who really, really cares about playwrights. I made something, and I need to give it away. To someone who will care for it better than I have. A few years ago, I started collecting playwrights on Twitter. I created the IFollowPWs Twitter account, then went about madly finding playwrights to follow. It’s not that hard, really: you search for the term “playwright” on Twitter and follow anyone who claims to be a playwright in their Twitter bio; you spend time on the #2amt and #newplay and #playwrights hashtags and you follow the people who participate; most of all, you (carefully) follow back anyone who follows you. I give it maybe an hour a month of maintenance at most. I’m up to about 2,000 people so far, and about that many people follow me back. That’s not a bad list. I don’t know of any bigger than that, though they might exist. Here’s the thing, though: the list is really only a list right now. Useful, perhaps, for p

I was invited to give a keynote address to the Association of Performing Arts Service Organizations. My subject: how technology is transforming the relationships between artists, audiences, and arts institutions. You can listen to the talk The Arts and the Practice of Technology. The transcript follows. I need to start my talk by asking what I think is a very important foundational question: what do we think technology IS? Because I think we all get it completely wrong. The first big mistake we make is that we tend to think of technology in concrete terms. We think of it as a collection of material things. Objects, mostly made of molded plastic and advanced alloys and micro-engineered components. Newfangled gadgets made in labs or factories by engineers and scientists. The iPhone 6; 3D printers; DNA sequencers; the Large Hadron Collider: that’s what we all think of. But the root of the word technology is techne, which happens to be the Greek word for art. And the whole word, with the –