 reading what you want, or what you're doing, or what's coming up, or what you have coming up next. And that goes hand in hand with something that's off topic from your question, but not from the panel. Just thinking about theater smarts ahead of it. Be polite, be nice, be aware that you're not going to be the only creative person collaborating on this project when you're working on it. And in the life of your play, as it goes to other theaters and other places, remember that each production is not going to be exactly the same as the first one. It's not going to be exactly the same as the next one. We're all going to be different. Let it go. You know, if you go from place to place and say, oh, I like most of this production of my play that you've done, but these two things have to change immediately because you've got them wrong. That's going to turn that theater off and those people off from ever working with your script again, or anything else you do. Be aware that other people are going to bring things to the table, and maybe they're going to make your play better. But again, be strong but flexible, as you said. Let them change it come, like if it really works, if it sounds better. If it doesn't, tell them. But don't just be insistent that it's exactly the same everywhere it goes. Because as someone who produces and plays other than my own drives me crazy. When someone says, hey, hey, hey, that's supposed to be a horse with red spots on it. Why did you use a stallion? Because it's the only horse we could get. It's imagination. Thank you. Now I'd like to take some questions, because I know we all have questions. Or don't we? If we don't, tell me that. I have a very good thing on the other side of it. When you send a play or a query letter about a play to a theater in Canada or a theater in Britain, you get back a letter. It might be a rejection letter, but you get back relatively soon. When you send to most theaters, which includes City Theater, you'll never hear back. You won't even hear a rejection. And I'm sorry, in this day of email, it is possible to do a little form letter and send it back to play. I've talked to several playwrights, and this is true of many theaters here in town, but it's something true of American theaters. I understand that in Britain and in Canada, theaters are subsidized, and they can pay readers and have an easier situation that way. But I still think just the simple acknowledgement of receipt, let alone rejection, is owed to any playwright who sends you a query letter or a script. I'd like to respond to that. I think you're wrong. Okay. I've sent plays to theaters or agents, and I would say it's a really good play for you, and I've never heard anything. And I've sent plays to the Royal Court, the National Theater, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and I've contacted them ahead of time, and said, I have this play, and I think it's a writer you'd really like to know about, and I'd like to send that to you. And five years later, I never heard. So it's not just all theaters are that way, and the problem is getting anybody to read it. Well, also, my day job is I'm the executive director of the South Florida Theater League, and I receive play submissions, which boggles my mind. And I'm generally good about saying, hey, I'm not a producing theater company. So one of my advice would be to do your homework and figure out who you're submitting to and make sure they're actually, I'm sure what you were sending was a place that was accepting submissions. I've been there. There are plays in mind that I have not heard back from, so I understand that frustration. My little theater, and I founded the Gloucester Stage Company 32 years ago. It's been going on for 32 years. In one year, we did a created, right after Beckett died, I created a Beckett Fellowship for a playwright to come to Gloucester Stage, and we put it in the drama still quarterly. And we had 3,000 plays sent to us, and we didn't have a reader, let alone too few. We just, it was, you know what 3,000 plays look like? And that was in the nature of they were hard copy, right? Oh, absolutely, yeah. It filled the room, and so many of them didn't have return envelopes. And we did a form saying, I'm sorry, we can't read your play. And the ones that had return envelopes got the form. But see, you did that. But wait, I'm going to respond to you, Kim. Yeah. Because when we founded City Theater 16 years ago, it was because I was that playwright. And I did want to write those letters. And so those letters were written, everything was acknowledged, everything, whether it was read, whether it was not read, 16 years ago, yes, sitting in the Ring Theater offices. And what happened was, Stephanie Norman says, who's we're going to go broke. If you keep having to do this because you're reading for free, you're responding for free, and you're taking it out of our budget and your own personal budget. So I said, well, what else am I supposed to do? Because I feel hugely guilty about this. I have been that playwright. So honestly, what I've done or how I've had to deal with this, because we too have been sharing responsibilities with Actors Theater of Louisville, which means 1,200 scripts every single year, and a literary office of, one, now two, back there, thank you very much. I have put it in our submission guidelines that we will not be able to respond to you unless we are interested in your play. In that case, you will hear from us, and you'll hear from us about if we are going to be able to do the play that year in a reading, in a festival production, in a tour. It may be that I'll also hold that play for a couple of years until we get our cast right, and we can do that play, and we've done that. But it kills me. I'm a playwright too. I send my stuff out into the universe, and I don't always hear either. And even if I have a relationship, sometimes I don't follow it up, which is my bad. That's my bad. But I understand all of us have that frustration, and the world is going very quickly past us. And when you have electronic submissions too, like later, I mean, I'll get plays. I'll get plays without title pages, without contact information, and I'll think, gee, that was really good. Did I have time to put that play and that email together somewhere? Maybe not. I just downloaded the play. And then later, I kind of went back to look at it. Oh, shit. I wonder who this is. This is brilliant. This is better than I could do. Gosh, I want to do it, and I don't know how. I think more important discussion is... Gloucester Stage is coming in 37 years. In 32 years, it has never produced a play that came through the mail. I mean, it just almost never happens. It's just a waste of time. I mean, I think collectively, the playwrights of the Playwrights Lab over the years have come to the conclusion that theaters produce the plays of playwrights who drop by and say hello. That's an operative fact, we should say. And so the next best thing, if you kind of drop by and say hello to every theater in America, you really hone in on the theaters. You really want to work. You really think your work is appropriate. Steppenwolf does a certain kind of play. You write that certain kind of play. Really approach Steppenwolf with that fact. You really do what's, I suppose, networking. You find out who's involved with that theater so that you're not sending a script in blind. I think you might as well throw it out the window. And if it's electronic, I mean, can you imagine how many plays are sent electronically to Steppenwolf Theater? And if you don't have a powerful New York literary agent working for you, why would you ever think that play is going to get read? Who the hell is going to read it? So I think the most important thing you can do is really analyze which theater is likely to do your work. What kind of play you're writing or you have in your hand that you've just written and which theater is doing that sort of play. And then you have a prayer and then really find some contact. My youngest son just sold a book that he wrote and I was really impressed that he said he wasn't going to send it out until he had an agent. This was him dotting at me. He said nobody's going to read it without an agent. And he analyzed the agents, the powerful agents in New York who had represented books that were in the same basic gene pool as his book. He went out to the agents, he got an agent and then that agent analyzed which publishers were publishing would be likely to be interested in that kind of book. They went out of auction. They had two publishers getting in. He's 25 years old. He sold his book and it's being published. I think everything he did was absolutely logical, not magic at all. And anyway. I was going to say the refreshing thing about submissions is that it's a concrete action. It's something that you can do that you can measure. You know how many submissions you send out, you know how many responses, especially if none came back because it's easy to count. You know different theaters that have said different things or whatever happened. I remember before I was a lawyer, when I was starting in business, the first business that I had, I didn't know how am I going to do this? How am I going to make a living of this? How am I going to tell people that I do this and that they're desirable, they desire to have them do this service for them? And I tried different things. I tried press releases. I tried to eat newsletters. I tried networking. I tried volunteering. I tried all sorts of different things. And I kept track of it. And I could tell you at the time, well every time I do a press release then this much business comes back. So it cost me $200 to get a professional press release done, but I always get business from it. And I usually get about $500 to $600 a month in business. So if I put out a press release every month for $200, let's say only half the time it comes back that I get the business, then I'm still making a good profit. I know that that works because I've seen it. You can do the same thing with submissions. I'm sending out to these 10 theaters. Let's see if anybody nibbles. Yeah, they all do this kind of work. Apparently my writing doesn't appeal to theaters to do that kind of work. And you can keep track of it. It's a science. And just to hammer the point home, it took me about a year in my first business of trying different things before I really got into attraction. That's a lot of fate. To wake up to have 364 days, or 365 days where you push that boulder and it does not budge, and you wake up the next morning without questioning and say, well, if I come to push the boulder at a different angle again, that's a lot of fate in yourself. But it works. So keep up at it and keep track of what you're doing. And notice that never once did I mention that you get a responsive back from all the theaters that didn't produce your work. They're inconsequential to the science of getting produced in my mind. I just want to go back to the dating analogy just for a second. I'm glad that's on my mind. None of us. You know, if you live long enough in this world and you have had a succession in your single at some point in your life, and you have a series of dates that you never hear back from. You've got the first one staying, the second one staying, you know, a number of 10 or 15, it's like, you know, it's not me. It's, I mean, it's, what, you don't know what I'm saying. It's like, or you're doing somebody they drop off the face of the earth or do whatever it happens to be. It's so often it's about them. It's not about you. But you have to look at it in both directions. You have to make sure it's not you first before you look at it down. So it, you have to bounce it back like a basketball. So what am I doing? Am I doing everything right? And even if you don't get a response back from them, sometimes it's just about them. What are you going to do? Another question? Yes? Well, I recently went out on a good, really good date with a company. I did my first world premiere and it went really well. And I'll keep this half hypothetical. Let's say I'm a playwright named David and I just did that particular thing and I wanted to go on a date with master of Israel words, right? If I were to, I would go on to submit this particular play which got good reviews. I got a DVD of it. I have it all together. I could write a great query letter. What's the best way to present it to you where you have this vast knowledge and history of making your play successful? To me or to the Gloucester Stage Company? I can't do a thing for you. Right, right, right. Let's say to the Gloucester Stage, what's the best way, when you were still artistic director or you would receive these queries, what's the best way to give it to you? With reviews and the query? I mean I could answer that dishonestly but the honest answer was that we almost constantly produced plays from the Player Rights Lab that were developed in the Player Rights Lab or plays by Player Rights I knew which brings us back into the category of Player Rights who dropped around and said hello. And I have this really dark suspicion that that's the way most theaters function. So it combines a lot of things that have been said. I mean just really find that theater is appropriate for you. It's in your community or a theater somewhere else in the country or in the world that's really doing the kind of play that you absolutely love. It's happened to me so many times in my life when I've come upon a theater that just does work that really excites me. And Andy said something about in a way go work for that theater. But whatever you do make direct contact with that theater. And then by the way I think that what I'm writing is I'm really excited about what you do and I think that what I write fits your mission. So literally a phone call. Rather than even a query. One of the nice things about the internet is that now you can virtually stop by and say hi. It's not the same as going to person obviously. But you can check theater's websites to see their production histories to really get a sense of them beyond just that they need listing somewhere. You can visit their different social media sites and contact someone directly through Twitter. I mean I've gotten several commissions just from saying hi on Twitter. Which is crazy when you think about it. But it's crazy. It often turns me. Be aware that often times this is going to be a marketing intern or just someone who's tangentially involved in the literary part. But they'll interact with you and they'll be able to tell you who to talk to or who to say here's so-and-so, we've talked to them. Let's introduce you guys. Maybe. And the thing is with those interim people develop relations because those people are going to be interns forever. They're going to be a literary manager in the future and you're going to want to become one of them later on. Yay! We love them. Yeah. Whoever wants to talk about the benefits of going to grad school in terms of getting produced and stuff like that and getting known. That's hilarious. Academics among fighting is so vicious because the states are so small you don't raise the talent. The thing about going to grad school is the reason going to grad school is because you want to get the degrees so you can teach. Unless you're going to a place that is specific for playwrights like the University of Iowa or the playwrights lab or the Yale that makes a difference because of the networking that you encounter through there. Most of the colleges or universities have MFA programs. The reason they're called there is because we want that degree because it's a union card. You can't teach unless you have that degree. I teach a workshop at the University of St. Andrews in Wisconsin. They actually have a Ph.D. a creative writing Ph.D. as well as an M.L.A. I do it essentially because I'm an obsessive golfer. That's a good one. I do a three and a half week workshop and I can honestly say 100 writers I've worked with in their graduate program probably 10 of them I feel will have careers and I've taught at Brandeis I've taught at NYU I've taught all over the place I'm not sure I see the value of going to graduate school it maybe forces the kind of support group that I was talking about that you're in a place where there are other writers and you talk about writing and you look at each other's work and you try to be as helpful as possible of people being helpful to you but you can create that world that less of a cost to have for grad school and you can't compare a nugget or two or three of the system to impart to you the first thing I want to say though is that when we concede of city theater and city rights I was very insistent that we spell it W-R-I-G-H-T-S so that it wasn't W-R-I-T-E-S but we all know what that is and anyone can do that but a play right W-R-I-G-H-T is is the artist where the play begins it is the person who is is in charge of the art and the craft and city rights is about work and play alright come on this is a pretty cool place right? yes? thank you epic hotel everyone who is here today came here for you and it is kind of a remarkable assemblage we pulled together very impressive and you are too so I want to just thank you from me ok so we actually had originated this as the coconuts and bolts of play writing then it sort of turned into theater, smarts and etiquette and I think what has been happening for these last two days is we have gotten smarter and we have certainly learned things we have learned the rules we need to know and we have learned the rules we can break and I think that is an ongoing learning process so what I am going to do is almost kind of get out of the way but not completely but as I have we have put it out to you guys that you can impart I would kind of like to just go down the line a little bit so that you can say something and then we can turn it into some of those questions and answers that I know everybody is dying to get in before we have to conclude so is that ok? is that alright for me on there? ok good actually Gary I am going to start with you what do you have to say to us a playwright and as a playwright and as an advocate I think you should learn how to date a theatre because we often go with our hand out and you know if you ever have had a date somebody who comes at you with their hand out scares you as opposed to coming to the dinner table and saying hi this is who I am who are you and and you know we are so understandably we are so desperate to be produced and of course that is in large part why we do this but wouldn't it be interesting for you to go to a theatre and say what can I do for you first can I help you some way can I work for you some way and of course I know who I am but what can I do for you besides just coming with my hand out so that there is this equitable exchange of energy and gratitude respect and appreciation and that way people don't feel taken advantage of and out of their direction I did David Bow you have I know I have been so extremely cold for the last couple of hours but there must be something that you still have to tell something so safe well I would say that in terms of etiquette keep in mind as a New York lawyer talking about etiquette so but from what I see well when you're developing either physical or mental skill or creative skill business skill whatever it can be it's important to develop both in terms of strength and flexibility and no matter what you do you'll find those two elements in any way you ask the Zen Buddhist master about strength and flexibility he'll know exactly what you're talking about he or she and I think that's the same way of getting that getting your work on stage you want to remain flexible but you want to remain strong and you want to remain balanced in that way you don't want to be so flexible that people walk all over you because we don't have strength but you don't want to be so strong that you're not letting anybody do anything change a comma or change sets because the theater is too small the theater is too big for what you're trying to do so you want to retain strength and flexibility so people that you meet who are the most powerful are also usually the most gracious celebrities and politicians and even royalty for example so strength and flexibility okay Andy what would you tell us as for example the south Florida dramatist skilled rep what you've learned as a playwright as a playwright um say I've learned too much other things as a playwright I would say I love Gary's analysis of dating a theater so much has come to me in this community just because I was excited about it I was in the first 24 hour theater project when they could stage it before anyone down here knew me as a playwright because as I said that's really cool and I'd be a part of that and they said yeah and I'd offered help out with the logistics as I had done one in college and overnight I went from being the local theater administrator to oh right she writes plays so I think if you can be if you're don't fake enthusiasm but if you're genuinely enthusiastic about something don't be afraid to show it don't be afraid to ask for things good Larry what do you have to tell us as the editor of plays do you want to come back the first time I heard about I was supposed to have nuggets was just not so the one thing I'd like to tell you is that you're all playwrights and you submit your work to theaters or wherever you send it um I get hundreds of plays sent to me him in a place full length plays and it's astounding to me how many of them come in without a cover page they don't even have the title or the author's name just the text because I think it has something to do with something about final draft doesn't allow you to put a cover page on or some bullshit like that and so I get these plays now when I enter my file away and it's actually happened where six months later I opened up a file of a ten minute play and I really like that play and I wanted to put it in my book but I had no way to contact the author I didn't know who the author I sent the title you know and I did an internet search to try to find that title I couldn't find it so that author lost out so please when you send your play to anyone what you are sure to do when you send a hard copy submission but if you send it electronically which is what most people do now put a cover page on it with all your contact information so that then we know who to contact and we really like your play and the other thing I wanted to say and this is not so much as adequate as I think it's a hit you know now do you all know about the drama's source book which lists the theaters and it has their provision statements that kind of plays that are interested in it and a lot of those theaters say they want plays that innovative structure unusual use of language and all these other things and what they're basically saying is anything but realism you know if it don't send this your play if it's a traditional realistic play and so what I see happening a lot lately is there's a new dialogue style that writers are writing in that's full free verse it's laid out on the page and it looks like it's free verse but when you see it in the theater what they do is that it's but it's a way to bullshit the theater into thinking that they're doing something with innovative use of language because they see it on the page it's a holy shit it's full free verse innovative use of language so that's a good tip for a realistic play don't lay it out on the page like a realistic play you might have more chance of getting a production thank you Israel what do you have to tell us as a playwright but also as a playwright who directs his own work and has also been an artistic director and is an artistic director can you narrow that down let's talk do you or don't you find it easy or not easy to be the director of your own work if the cast director is like actors everybody kind of direct everything sometimes really famous directors who seem like a great catch for getting a show on but they're really inappropriate for that particular play so I'm appropriate for some of my plays and inappropriate for others I hope I cast the director well when I take on a play I don't direct other people's plays very often it's not a talent that I feel I should inflict on having a lot of trouble one thing I'd like to say to you as a group I said in my writing workshop 37, 38 nearly 40 years ago I started a group called the New York Playwrights Lab and we were for many years a secret kind of secret society we kind of agreed not to do publicity for the group that we don't want to create a kind of competitive situation or really want it to be a work situation and the writers in that group originally were Wendy Wasserstein and Peter Barnell and me and over the years it's been just about everybody you've heard about and in knowledge more recently and Sarah Rue was part of it it's an ever changing group of 15 writers and the mission of the Playwrights Lab when I started it all those years ago was to keep Playwrights running for theater because it seemed to me that everybody's impulse back in the day as soon as it's playing on and you've got a little heat on your particular life a career that you'd run off and do people were just running off and doing television and movies because you know that there's more money and it seemed like the thing to do so the notion of the lab was that we would meet in a good year every Wednesday and sometime in September we'd all start a new play pretty much on the same day and then we'd show up every Wednesday with five pages of our developing plays not four pages not six pages, five pages I figured out back when I was teaching playwriting that if somebody presented 15 or 20 pages we've got a bit of whole play the only thing they wanted to hear was okay we've got the actors, we've got the directors we've got the theater, we're ready to go but with five pages everybody was capable of listening to criticism also the lab sort of functioned like graduate school that if we met on Wednesday on Tuesday night there'd be 15 writers saying oh shit I've got to write five pages for tomorrow and then write there five pages and grain by grain the desert grows and after 20 weeks everybody had a draft of a play cut to the chase in nearly 40 years every single play that's ever been written in the New York playwright's lab has been produced professionally without a single exception period so there's no question in my mind that especially as emerging writers if you get a group, a writer's group together that support groups really, really work but don't create a group in which people bring in a full play that they wrote 13 years ago because it's just not going to work nobody really wants to really use the model a gift from me to you a brand new play that they're fresh pages and you're only looking at five pages a week or maybe five pages every other week I don't go beyond every other week but that sort of kills it every week is the best and you'll see that with five pages people are much more honest when you get larger amounts of pages there's that group of people that says it was great I loved it and they don't mean it or the people who feel obliged to say that was the worst thing I ever heard in my life but somehow with five pages honesty prevails and you won't feel as alone as you do right now as writers it's really something wonderful the other thing I want to say has nothing to do with what I'm supposed to be saying but I couldn't understand what I was saying I realized that the country was larger than New York and the world was larger than the country and everybody comes from somewhere and the most wonderful thing that happened to me in my life is my play started to get produced in other countries and some of my plays are translated and performed in like 40 languages now and I spend a great deal of my life chasing my plays around the world and I kind of think of anything more exciting and if you have friends in Italy who are writers do a trade deal let them translate a play of yours and you translate it even if you have to do it in the dictionary and an Italian trend here but really think outside of that particular box and having a play on in Mexico having a play on in Canada it's amazing, it's so so much fun I've had 40 of my plays maybe 50 of my plays translated and produced in France and I'm directed like that and I've got my own theater company in Italy now and my father was a truck driver and I grew up in Wakefield, Massachusetts son of a truck driver so I don't come from a great deal of privilege and I really think that almost everything is possible so I give you that Thank you David Moore we're going to be talking to you later as an artistic director so what I'd really like to ask you is is there a tip an internet tip that you