 I don't know many people in the theatre that I could pick up the phone and call and pose a simple question about a playwright or a trend in new play development or the practice of a producer or a theatre or some sort of project that's going to happen in the future and receive the smartest, most thoughtful, sensitive and perceptive answer based on years and years and years of doing what's right for playwrights, what's good for playwrights, what history has shown us is good for playwrights, what prevailing wisdom will warn us about but if I need to make that call, I would call Todd London. Todd London is the Executive Director of New Dramatist and in doing so he has championed hundreds of playwrights across his 15 year time there but his collective love for playwrights as I think most of you know doesn't just stop with New Dramatist, it found its way into that seminal study Outrageous Fortune, The Life and Times of the New American Play which began this really long, long overdue conversation between theatres and producers, literary managers and dramatists the world over that book has become the starting point for so many important conversations that affect every single one of you sitting in this room so not only is he a friend of mine, he is truly a friend to every one of you, ladies and gentlemen, Todd London as you may have noted from Gary's introduction I'm not a playwright, for the past 15 years though I've made a sort of suckers bet with the theatre staking my ambition and professional happiness, my sense of fulfillment and accomplishment on you I work alongside of playwrights, keep their company, I run with them, fight their fights, celebrate their accomplishments witness and pay tribute to their growing bodies of work two and a half weeks ago I married a playwright it sounds like the title of a 1960s sitcom I know and as you all probably realize living with a playwright is a lot like the 1960s I contribute to a column called HowlRound the new online journal that Pauli Carl edits out of Arena Stages New Play Institute the column is called A Lovers Guide to the American Playwright I'm not a playwright but I've come out publicly now as a lover of playwrights and so I was elated and profoundly honored when Gary asked me to speak at your first conference I want to tell you what it means to live and work as I do surrounded by you I want to give you this Lovers Guide to American Playwrights to let you see some of what I see when we were researching outrageous fortune, Amy Freed who makes a reckless habit of writing large cast plays confessed that she enjoyed the feeling of being an anachronism I feel like I'm making the last buggy whip in America we are maybe a room full of anachronisms our wagons hitched to an aching old horse birching the poor beast on with the whips you've made we are maybe as blinkered as that old horse in denial of the shiny hybrids and computer driven rigs sipping around us ignoring the fact that our lame clip-clop in real time and space may rely on outdated ideas of space and time when studies show that audiences no longer value liveness and when we experience time moving every rich way all at once with unity overwhelmed by simultaneity at Neutrometis our logo is still a fountain pen there's a vintage Underwood typewriter on the top shelf of our new play library as if that old war horse were the eternal symbol of our profession I noticed there's a similar machine on the brochure for this conference we have entered the tweens of a new century but which century? as many of you know Neutrometis shelters a community of about 50 playwrights in an old Lutheran church in midtown Manhattan the building used to house in addition to the church proper a thrift store and a soup kitchen where hundreds of men mostly were fed throughout the immigrant days and depression years of the early to mid 1900s where their families could find cheap used clothes and presumably spiritual solace it is now only somewhat metaphorically a mission church for playwrights we offer writers laboratory space time and human support for seven years free of charge they grow their work there and their artistic selves and true to the soup kitchen roots this inspired company of writers feeds each other sometimes literally the altar area is now a writing studio with wireless access the sanctuary and thrift store have been turned into workshop theaters the soup kitchen is now a library lined with the unpublished manuscripts of many of the nearly 600 writers who have passed through Neutrometis since its founding in 1949 this library as much as anything tells the story of continuity community and legacy that are at the heart of what Neutrometis does what the guild does and what we are doing here today we have found on these library shelves such hidden gems as type scripts by James Baldwin and Robert Anderson with their penciled marginal notes I pulled the Mimeo of a little known Maria Irene Forney's play called The Red Burning Light of the American Way of Life my favorite find was a stage manager's copy with blocking notes of a full length play by August Wilson it had the unfamiliar title Middle Hands Lunch Bucket checking out the cast list I realized I was holding a first draft of Joe Turner's Come and Gone now the shelves are full of new plays and 40 years from now someone will pick one up an unknown or forgotten play by Nilo Cruz or Lynn Nottage or David Lindsay O'Bear and she will break into a similar sweat her heart will pound and the link will be made again your program says this is called After Outrageous Fortune but I'm calling this speech What a Difference a Play Makes a title I got from the playwright Marcia Norman when I asked if she knew a good song about playwriting it was the spring of 2009 we were 10 days away from Neutromanus major fundraiser our annual luncheon responsible for 20% of our budget the gala takes place in the dazzle of the Broadway ballroom of the Marriott Marquis in Times Square it's attended by much of the Broadway community eager to be seen at a 20 time Neutromanus turned 60 years old that spring so we decided to honor one of its first member playwrights from the early 50s Horton Foote sadly and frighteningly for us Horton died a few months before the gala so we were faced with a double problem one how to celebrate the most humble of writers in such a glitzy space and two how to create an entertaining afternoon while still acknowledging that we had inadvertently staged a memorial service so I went looking for a song Horton's grieving family would be with us we didn't want to do anything to insult his memory or vulgarize his tribute maybe a gospel song from one of his beautiful family plays too maudlin, too christian is there somewhere out there a perfect song about being a playwright? well no Marsha emailed back excitedly suggesting that we write new lyrics to Maria Grieber and Stanley Adams what a difference a play had day makes and call it what a difference a play makes as you may have already guessed we didn't it's a catchy phrase though and it's stuck in my head it worries me in the same way that I was worried when I saw the title of the American Theatre Wing's recent book the play that changed my life of course plays make a difference of course if you round up a couple dozen playwrights or actors they'll be able to single out the play that changed their lives but two plays really make a difference and if so what kind of difference? to whom? do plays really change lives? maybe they once did but do they still? aren't these notions a bit hyperbolic a bit self-satisfied? are they the cliches we live by that allow us to do our fun art making with the sense of importance that comes from actually valuable work? I don't know I love my job I think playwrights are awesome I love reading the hundreds of plays I read a year I like it okay though not with anything like the intensity I had in high school college discovering plays by Edward Albee John Gwear, Sam Shepard, Irene Fornes and Miri Baraka, Lenford Wilson, Tina Howe and yes, Marsha Norman I long instead for good movies long quiet stretches of time with an absorbing novel I'm hungry for music for my iPod but I work in the theatre I'm a rabbi and a church playwright so I constantly question my faith not in the talent of the writers who amaze me day by day but in the enterprise itself this throwback profession whose innate old-fashionedness pricks me every time I say I work for a company with the word dramatist in the name new dramatists underwoods buggy whips no, I didn't find a song for our gala instead we have playwrights read short scenes by other playwrights alumni of new dramatists who had like Hortonfoot died recently our vibrant and very much alive writers celebrate the dead senior writers Horton, Robert Anderson, William Gibson and also their peer writers who had in the previous couple of years died painfully young August Wilson, Lin Alvarez John Beluso, Oni Fayed Alambley would we feel the difference a play makes does the difference a play makes pass like a current from writer to writer one era to another and so electrify a whole continuous lineage of human endeavor how appropriate that these questions bubbled up around Hortonfoot it is hard to imagine a playwright more out of step with his times than he is there is no body of work in the American theater to compare with his no one has written for so long about so few square miles the concentrated plot of land in Horton, Texas that is the land of his family for nearly 70 years he tried to stop time by remembering Horton was a very merciful God he sought to possess an entire world by loving it ceaselessly he dared to bring the dead back to life it is a vanishing world he writes the world of these plays no not a vanishing world but a vanished world I think sometimes that Randall Gerald speaks for me in his poem thinking of the lost world all of them are gone except for me and for me nothing is gone nothing is ever gone nothing can be proved as long as there are people to remember to write it down nothing can be lost as long as there are artists brave enough and persistent enough to try and capture the ephemeral grace of our lives but is it true that nothing is ever gone is it possible that plays themselves are disappearing the dramatic literature itself will go the way of the satyr play or burlesque or the living newspaper and if we need to keep on keeping on what are we doing in form what are we preserving Robert Anderson author of tea and sympathy and I never sang for my father also died that year throughout his five decade writing life he kept a note taped to his typewriter that said nobody asked you to be a playwright how do you respond to that cold water truth the same way Bob Anderson did and Horton and hundreds of other playwrights have you respond by becoming impossible of the thing that nobody asked you to be you respond by writing those plays nobody asked you to write that no one may ever produce you respond with the crazy obsessive beautiful bravery of the artist cultivating a garden that no one may see and that no one may ever want to walk with you you find your faith where you can you hope the world will meet you where you live this is by any stretch the world in the most consistent and practical ways has no intention of meeting playwrights where they live I don't have to tell anybody in this room where the energy of our culture and the attentions of our young are directed we have good cause to worry the marginalization of theater and playwriting even the American theater doesn't care to meet playwrights where they live for the past 40 years our theaters have spent considerable money, energy and personal hours on the cultivation and production of new plays they've hired large administrative staffs built monumental buildings for all their organizational energy however these theaters have proven unable to create sustainable structures for supporting writers over time for what Molly Smith yesterday called a dignified life for playwrights bodies of work like Horton foots are almost inconceivable today from 2005 to 2010 as Gary told you we started the theater development study that became outrageous fortune Tori Bailey, Ben Pesner, Zanni Volos and I gathered data from 250 playwrights across the career spectrum working professional playwrights who by all industry indicators were among the most successful writers at their stage of development we extensively surveyed nearly 100 theaters about their work in new plays with new plays in the field in general we then tested this hard data by traveling to cities across the country holding meetings with playwrights artistic directors and leaders in the field of new play and playwright development followed by interviews with agents commercial producers, playwright, educators and others we published our findings a year and a half ago in the book Ben and I wrote and spent another six months traveling the country presenting the conclusion stimulating local conversations and brainstorming solutions please excuse me if you've heard this before but I want to briefly highlight some of the findings as you playwrights describe it the American non-profit theater our art theater is corporate, board driven, risk averse and formally conservative it lacks old artistic leaders and is overly even obsessively concerned with pleasing a subscription audience that is much older than the theater's artists way more conservative and may not even be an audience audience may be the convenient term artistic directors use when they're really talking about a handful of large donors or keyboard members or as one artistic administrator put it the theater's assets and the bad news is that within this climate our research shows that the economics of playwriting are impossible it is a profession without an economic base and all the practice within it must be prepared to be a otherwise employed or being poor the typical successful playwright earns between $25 and $40,000 when averaged over a five year period with nearly a third earning under $25,000 annually slightly more than half of that income comes from sources unrelated to playwriting to day job of the approximately 49% of a playwright's total income that comes from playwriting related activities including teaching, TV and film writing only 15% of the study's playwright's total income comes from production related activities i.e. licensing publishing, grants, awards commissions, royalties in other words an average working professional playwright whose resume you'd look at and say that's a successful early career or emerging or mid-career or even established playwright is making between about $3,800 and $5,800 a year as a playwright only about 3% of a playwright's meager income comes from royalties the foundation of the playwright's compensation that 3% means $750 to less than $1,200 a year on average over five years unless you think this is about young bohemians our average study playwright is 35 to 44 years old and the sampling includes winners of Obies, Tonys and Pulitzers all this to say despite implicit promises of MFA recruitment brochures there is no career track for playwrights no lifelong path hardly any career there of course you live this and know it you've probably been following last weeks blog postings about Tony Kushner's assertions in time out in New York that he can't make a living as a playwright that probably no one can you want to sustain middle class income you want to earn on par with senior staff to reduce you you want healthcare playwriting is not the answer in short the mechanism of the theater I'm glad you can still laugh in short the mechanism of theater has cast playwrights out of the in their workings of the theaters themselves the economics of theater the economics of theater has not just marginalized but impoverished them are the leaders of American theaters where they live no for that we would have to give up our health insurance and head for the poverty line or at least the temp agency we'd have to do the math in accordance with our so called values and we'd have to live by it I include myself even as the head of a small non-profit very small I earn more than most of the playwrights that I serve and what about audiences are they willing to meet playwrights where they live we know that the culture in general the theater as a form but even the theater going population within that culture is to beat a dead idiom staying away in droves according to a December 2008 study by the National Endowment for the Arts the percentage of US adults who attended a non-musical play over a 12 month period fell from 13.5% or 25 million people to 9.4% or 21 million people over 20 years the playgoing audience has been dwindling by slightly more than 1% a year for nearly 20 years the figures for Broadway may be even more disheartening the decline in attendance at plays new to Broadway during the same 20 years is 41.6% so what are we doing here MFA programs are pumping out more playwrights than at any time in America's history saddling them with debt they will as playwrights never be able to repay you meanwhile are playwrights are condemned to an economic environment that is impossible within an ecosystem that is at least broken and at worst profoundly hostile to the artist and the individual creativity within which it is inconceivable to either build a body of work alone or as part of a theater company experiment and sustain growth are for playwrights as much a thing of the past as well maybe American drama think about O'Neill for a moment the rest of uneven brilliance of his early works the way he tried everything see plays, mask plays classical tragedy, expressionism the great messy churning of his nascent theatrical genius and think about how that would have played out today without a province town players or theater guild or Broadway that produces new American work how could he have wrestled with scale with non-naturalistic techniques with all the chaff you have to sort through to get to the wheat how could he have brought the years of internal struggle and external quietude that separated his early productivity and his later master works or Clifford Odette's where would he have come from if not the group theater or all being without the sensational attention garnered by his earlier plays how will he have survived how would he have survived his long time in the theatrical wilderness the time that made his renaissance over the past dozen years possible or again, Hortonfoot how can you sustain a loving body of work in a field that won't sustain you that won't excuse me but I have to say it love you so we find ourselves in a strange land the people in this room make their lives in a world that is if not leaving them in the dust at least pushing them to the side paying them on the cheap and voting against their relevance with fleeting feet the name of the song I take my title from was originally what a difference a day made past tense singers changed the song and so it comes to us in the present is it possible that the difference of play makes is also past tense that plays made a difference in the days of Miller and Williams the early primes of Hansbury and Albee those years of off-off Broadway but that the present is too imperfect that the present of playwriting is a thing of the past for me personally this is all a challenge first and foremost to idealism to those idealistic impulses that got me and I suspect most of us into the theater in the first place yes Shaw warns against idealists yes O'Neill shows us people nursing their pipe dreams like desperate drunks with only a few drops left in the bottle still the ideals are there desperate, delusional or even destructive as they might be the ideal of individual voice the ideal of imagination the ideal of creative freedom the ideal of the artist as the soul in the machine of the institutional capitalist culture the ideal of theatrical communion and sacred exchange the ideal of a world if only on stage where mind, heart, spirit and body work together to get us through the confused drama or pathetic comedy that is life the ideal which pumps in the blood of every writer I know that insists we take the world ways of the world personally that we respond to it wholly that the world we have inherited is ours to recreate rewrite and revise happily as Molly so passionately argued last night some of the findings of outrageous fortune are undergoing revision we knew when we were working on it that we were part of a moment of change David Dower was researching what he called the new works sector on a grant from the Mellon Foundation funders like Mellon were reevaluating their priorities long-term efforts were starting to pay off it is now an explicit imperative in our field to improve conditions for playwrights that is my way of saying what Molly said last night when she described a moment of great energy and intention around playwriting we have together made this happen the Guild's multi-year push for theaters to give up subsidiary rights participation has swayed the center theater group in LA and recently New York City's Roundabout and public theaters breaking the ice on a previously frozen situation what your former president, John Wyman describes as a weird seismic shift tomorrow you'll hear from Julia tomorrow you'll hear from Julia Jordan who casually called a meeting of women playwright friends and wound up leading the charge for gender parity on American stages with immediate results Julia with Martian Norman and Teresa Rebeck created a new award the lilies which has in two years honored dozens of women some overlooked in the theater the Guild has agreed to permanently fund it you've heard about I hope I'm right or now I guess even now you've heard about arena stage one of our first regional theaters embracing its historical responsibility to lead five playwright residencies for three years with salary, health benefits housing, budgets of their own the commitment of at least one production a thriving new play institute hosting five national convenings each leading to actions of their own as a result of one of these convenings two separate black play festivals were launched by playwrights in a single year small theaters like New York's new playwrights realm are offering other theaters money to incentivize second productions and maybe as an indication of the reality of this changed landscape and the power of your collective voice theater communications group has spent the past year doing something that has not done in its 50 year history holding national conversations across the field that focus not on institutional health but on the individual artists within the nonprofit theater the ground on which you stand is shifting these are just a few of the many sides the ground on which you stand the phrase makes me think of the late August Wilson the magnificent example of his purpose full of the seriousness with which he took his task your task how grandiose the young Wilson must have sounded a fellow playwright asks what are you working on Wilson responds I'm writing a 10 place cycle one for each decade of the 20th century it will encompass slavery the African diaspora the migration of 5 million blacks to the north and the lives of Africans in America against the backdrop of our evolving culture one character is as old as slavery she'll die at 287 they're meant to be performed in every theater in the country and then on Broadway what do you say to that ambition who dares dismiss it will a troubled profession trample it will statistics of a dwindling audience keep it down attention must be paid you bet your ass and so 10 plays later we have something no American playwright has managed before we have the sweep and magnitude of Wilson's epic century cycle we have this panoramic collage of holocaust horror and celebration of strength joy and resilience what he calls the highest possibility of human life where do we look for inspiration where do we look to pump up our ideals in hard times because the fates marked me down as a theater geek I look to playwrights because we know as every child knows that when you stare at a thing it grows larger a flower, a face, a play we are among those people who stare at plays and when we do the machine of the culture quiets and the soul in the machine speaks the institutions that were once the hope of the American theater and that are now its well intention to 800 pound gorillas shrink in importance individual talent sizes up the institutional theater isn't evil at all it's misguided, it created important new paths and then inevitably got lost on some of them it too often treats the individual artist with a sort of proprietary neglect I own your opportunities I neglect you you and the guild know precisely how to respond assert individual voice and vision and organize your strength your magnificent example is in each of you alone and in all of you together that great swelling oxymoron a community of writers I live with playwrights for seven years watch them grow bodies of work it's my way of staring and when I write about them when I celebrate the living or eulogize the dead I touch something even if I can't completely understand it something is the difference their plays make this something has to do with freedom it's the only word I have for it it's the thing about which playwrights have taught me the most I've learned about it from the size of august's people the things they carry the selves they carry despite the constriction they labor under I've learned about it from less well known playwrights from adventurers like Carlisle Brown and Liz Duffy Adams the great maximalist Glenn Berger and the architectural minimalist Melissa James Gibson from Octavio Solis Diana San Eric N Stephen Giergis Marcus Gardley Daniel Alexander Jones and Annie Baker all exquisitely adamantly themselves Lynn Nottage's refusal to write in a single voice David Grimm's refusal to tame sexuality David Greenspan's refusal to be anyone but David Greenspan you are slippery free-thinking beings you playwrights Houdini's in a corporate culture escapists from the boxes critics put you in keepers of ecstasy and empathy speaking on voice and in tongues simultaneously holding fast to your point of view and suspending it utterly so that the populace of your plays reveals a vision you are slippery because you strive after freedom knowing and this I have learned from you that freedom is a practice you can aspire to it but never attain it personally, artistically politically and historically freedom is fleeting we glimpse it in the holy material of our ordinary lives art makes us happy because it gives us a glance at our potential for freedom you are slippery and you teach me freedom but not because you are free you are not you are like all writers plagued by bitterness which is the real enemy and which threatens even the most talented and enthusiastic among you the poet Robert Kelly put it perfectly bitterness has killed more poets than neglect and poverty combined I wish you release from bitterness you aren't free because you're forced to spend so much time thinking about money you aren't free because of the double whammy of neglect and lack of resources that breeds envy an envy that fuels that killing bitterness I wish you release from envy you aren't free when you remain passive blaming the faults of the theater on everyone else instead of asserting your natural role as leaders in the field the rights have historically been leaders of theaters and capital T theater and I pray you make it so again no I don't pray it I exhort it you have the facts in front of you the economic facts you generally and genuinely share a critique of your field you know which way the wind is blowing and you know what's getting lost in the wind on the other hand you have before you examples of do-it-yourself of playwrights from Escalus to Young Jean Lee Richard Maxwell and a pair of Chicago 20-somethings Chelsea Markintel and Laura Jackman you have before you examples of playwright leadership from Shakespeare and Moliere to Emily Mann, George Wolfe and now Che You you have examples of playwrights' generosity to other writers from Edward Albee's foundation to the teaching devotions to Smith, Naomi Azuka and Marcia Norman excuse me you have examples of the collective power of playwrights from the playwrights company on Broadway in the 30s to 13p in the workhouse collective today you know playwrights working on ensembles Kirk Linn of the Rude Max and playwrights who work in communities like Allison Carey and the dozens of cornerstone playwrights who followed her you have playwright bloggers shaping the field's debates you have your playwright idols mentors and go's you have each other and you have power you just have to use it passivity and blame defaults of the creative life in a market economy are irresponsible they are the swandering of gifts which to me is the unholiest of holies New Dramatists was founded 62 years ago by a disgruntled playwright after a frustrating meeting at the Dramatist Guild this unknown playwright rallied the guild leadership Howard Lindsay and Russell Krauss Moss Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein Maxwell Anderson Elmer Rice, Robert Shrewwood and others her name was Michael O'Hara you don't know her plays but her founding visions has served more playwrights more lastingly than anyone theater history what will you do with the gifts of this weekend what will you begin what will you make happen one of my favorite playwright troopers was written from a living playwright to a dead one from John Guare to the visionary Thornton Wilder Guare goes in search of the essential Wilder and finds two of them Guare writes Wilder reminds me not of one but of two great American poets William Carlos Williams found the problem that confronted them in their youth was where to go for experience to feed their art Williams stayed in New Jersey as a doctor and found his source of experience there Hound fled to Europe to leap into world's culture like a man who contains the spirit of his lost twin Guare tells us Wilder found in his life and art quote a way to live in his bifurcated world in his own home and roaming the world Guare finds the distinction of Wilder the doubleness of his way of seeing maybe this is the kind of difference we make when we stare at plays when we stare at bodies of work difference in the sense of differentiation difference then the assertion of individual voice and vision becomes the leading edge of a life or death struggle against homogeneity institutionalization against monoculture difference guides us to the abundance and profusion to the glorious diversity of all living things but here's the really beautiful part of Guare's tribute having located Thornton Wilder's distinction, his double distinction Guare follows Wilder's own example and connects him to all the playwrights before and since remember the philosophers Guare again take the image of the parade of philosophers from Pullman Car Hiawatha and the skin of our teeth and imagine that parade not of philosophers but of playwrights from Escalus on down through Plautus and across Vitha and Calderon and Marlowe and Webster and Dryden and Bain and Stringberg and Shaw and Wild and Pinheiro and O'Neill and Hellman and Orton and Albee and Hansberry and Shepard and Mammet and McNally and Wilson and Kushner to every member of the drama skill and to the next class of playwrights leaving Yale or NYU or Juilliard or whatever drama school or no drama school here each generation saying finish my work finish what I started these are the questions I leave behind what a brilliant gesture a playwright's gesture we find difference the distinctions of voice and being and then we join them in a grand parade trumpeting connection and continuity lineage and legacy the unfinished work the dead bequeaths the living all those playwrights all those plays those that will be forgotten those that will be remembered and those that will lie and wait to be discovered