13 Ways Of Looking At Self Producing
Did you know that the first use of the word ‘dramatist’ cited in the Oxford English Language is as a metaphor for God? The English philosopher, Ralph Cudworth, in 1678, wrote, “The Evolution of Humane affairs, a kind of Dramatick Poem, and God Almighty the Skilful Dramatist; who always Connecteth that of Ours, which went before, with what of His follows after, into Coherent Sense”. (Apparently Capitalization was all the rage during the Restoration Period in Merrie Old England.)
In this metaphor, we are all the characters acting out the script changes that the Deity keeps churning out with more revision colors on those new pages than Joseph’s Technicolor Dream Coat. The comparison to God or any supernatural being in the rhetorical device must feel unfamiliar to many fellow dramatists who feel more in their lives more like the marionette than the marionette master. But we do create worlds out of nothing more than our memories, notions, and imagination. Those worlds, however, fail too often to lift off of our pages because our plays go unproduced.
The Dramatists Guild (henceforth given the OED reference to be known as the Union of Theatrical Divinities) pledges that, “…a vibrant, vital, and provocative theatre is an essential element of the ongoing cultural debate which informs the citizens of a free society; and that if such a theatre is to survive, the unique, idiosyncratic voices of the men, women, trans and non-binary artists who write for it must be cultivated and protected.” But plays cannot become part of the debate unless they get up on a stage. For over a century, the Guild has reconnoitered the shifting topographies of society as various forces political, technological, and legal threatened that cultivation and protection, but this era seems waaaaaayyyyy different. As Scott Perry recently noted (in of all writings a screed against those against polyamory), we “live in a world choked with ideas, where anything that rises to your consideration has necessarily won a Darwinian battle among hyper-specialized memetic replicators competing for your attention.” Digital media whether in the form of streaming services, TikTok, YouTube, or other means now transforms drastically the environs in which that cultivation must occur and attention attracted. Playwrights, and indeed all artists, now create their work surrounded by aggressive technologies competing for the ‘eyeballs’ (and one hopes other body parts) of potential audience members, a group whose shifting demographics pose yet another challenge to theater’s sustainability. Having plays seen isn’t getting less complicated. Compared to just twenty years ago theater unfurls its work on a much more crowded and noisy horizon.
All The News To Give The Blues
Reflecting that reality, several publications in the summer of 2023 including the New York Times, American Theatre, and the Washington Post carried articles about the threats to regional and other nonprofit theaters. The focus understandably is on the dangers and damages facing our theatrical institutions. Finding similar material in those publications about the difficulties faced by playwrights is rarer; this recent Gothamist article about finding spaces for indie theatre is a VERY welcome exception.
Finding such ‘doom and gloom’ conversations at gatherings with playwrights is impossible to escape no matter what refreshments are served. All consulted agree that the current situation poses both novel and more frequent obstacles to production especially of new work. Those are the circumstances that have led some of us to self-producing, which is certainly not a new phenomenon, but perhaps takes on a different character here and now. At least, self-producing has felt very different than when we did it in the 1980s. But one verity no matter the year or even century is contained in a David Mamet insight: “If there’s no place to put on your play, you can’t learn to write a play, because you learn from the audience.”
Our company, Knowledge Workings Theater, founded in 2019 by playwrights with little idea of what they wanted beyond getting their first play, ALMS, up on a stage has just completed its eighth self-produced show; one of those was an adaptation and another was a co-production with a regional theater. Decompressing from our two most recent experience especially The Jester’s Wife led to these — with apologies to Wallace Stevens — 13 Ways Of Looking At Self-Producing. (Unrolled Version Here will be updated as the series proceeds.)
No claim to novelty or singularity attaches to this list; in fact, an air of uncertainty floats around our observations in the spirit of William Goldman’s verdict about our cousin indistry — Hollywood — “Nobody knows anything.” But reading the Baker’s Dozen of observations may help other playwrights following this path to their own ideas about how to see and hear their work on stage rather than in another reading. Despite that flattering seventeenth century metaphor above comparing God to a dramatist, we non-divine types need help to realize fully our creations whether plays or how-to cookbooks.. The ideas and insights here likely also apply to other creatives: waiting gets old and artists get even older poised for the gallery owner to call about new paintings, the publisher to send a letter that is NOT a rejection, the casting director to actually cast, or the impresario to invite. Indeed, these observations about self-producing might prove useful to anyone trying to coin, conceive, design, devise, and discover.
Since much of what I discovered in self-producing arose from collaboration and conversation as well as others published accounts of their journeys the hope here is that each one of our installments will draw from readers additional accounts, questions, and even contradictions on the subject. Look for a new installment to come out here on Medium, Threads, and Substack every few days and please engage with the topic in whatever way you deem appropriate or even inappropriate. Sometimes that’s what called for.
