Hal Brooks Responds to David Dower #newplay

By Isaac Butler

Back in July, David Dower wrote a post for HowlRound attemptin to answer a question Hal Brooks asked him at a panel they served on.  The question was "how"-- given that Arena was closing their doors to submissions (including from agents and other theaters)-- could "we get our plays to you?"

I was a fan of the post. I didn't necessarily agree with it, but I felt that David (full disclosure: a friend who has occasionally hired me to do writing work for Arena) was doing something very unusual for an institutional player of his level: He was actually trying to concretely articulate why a theater was making the decision it was making and how it was supposed to work, rather than getting indignant that he had been questioned at all.

Well, now Hal Brooks has written a response that I am personally sympathetic to (and, full disclosure, read and commented on an earlier draft of).  I highly recommend you read this piece, where Hal raises some good questions both about the reading policies and about the new residency program that Arena has devised.  Here' s a little snippet to whet your appetite:

By doing away with reading submissions, Arena Stage seems to be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. At the symposium, David recollected that he was troubled the last time he’d visited PlayPenn in 2009. There, he met a playwright, who rewrote her play based on notes received from Arena’s literary office, ostensibly from David. The playwright asked David if Arena would re-read the play. David didn’t recall reading the play or signing the letter, so those notes must have come from someone on his staff who read the play. It was this incident that incited David to re-evaluate Arena’s submission policy.

It sounds like that incident highlights two distinct internal organizational matters at Arena: how pass letters were sent out, as well as what the artistic staff did with evaluations once plays were read — it need not call into question the merit of an open submission policy.  On his blog, when speaking about the old system, David says the scripts use to go to “a corps of non-staff readers with no real avenue to impact planning decisions.” It begs the question: is there a way of organizing the literary office so that coverage provided by volunteers, interns, or part-time staff can be read and valued by the artistic staff. Many theaters have a more functioning system in place—vetting plays in such a way that if one gets enough high praise, the artistic leaders of the company can read it.

You can RTWT here. 

One thing I want to note in passing, that this whole conversation is pretty much the realization of the dream I had when I first started blogging. Here we have an artist and a high level theater administrator groping towards authentic dialogue about important issues having a civil but substantive conversation about something they are both passionate about and are in disagreement about. And they're doing it on the internet. In public. With a complete lack of ad hominem attacks and flaming of each other.  And not only that, but the conversation about this post basically lit up twitter over the weekend and dragged in people all over the country and other high ranking people at Arena.

Oh yeah, and it's happening on Arena's website. Which makes it even more astounding. Again, my sympathies lie largely with Hal here, but I think the fact that this conversation is happening and happening in this way is really startling and is something to be celebrated.

Comments

[Scott Walters]

"With a complete lack of ad hominem attacks and flaming of each other."

I take this personally...

[Isaac]

Ha!

[Louise Penberthy]

is there a way of organizing the literary office so that coverage provided by volunteers, interns, or part-time staff can be read and valued by the artistic staff.

I offered to help out in the literary department of one of the big theaters here. But they have a literary intern, and the literary manager says it takes her a long time to train readers on what she and the artistic director like and want. So maybe the answer is yes, but also "it would take a lot of time on the part of already over-worked literary managers."

[Marisela]

Isaac, do you the Bush Theatre in London? http://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/ They have an open submission policy, playwrights can submit plays online. Per their website they receive around 3,000 plays a year (read this last night, initial Lit. page says 1,000, but digging deeper in to a submission FAQ got 3,000 figure) and they read every one. So it's possible, that is it is possible to have an open submission policy and somehow read all the plays that come in. I'm sure it just isn't easy. But if they're able to do it, then perhaps we can take a look at what they are doing right to help them accomplish their mission of discovering and championing playwrights.

[David Dower]

Isaac-- what's the baby we're trying to save here? Is it really the open submission itself? Or is it authentic access to opportunity? At Arena, we have chosen to put our shoulders to the wheel of creating greater access for more people to the #newplay conversation itself. Our purpose is the production, presentation, development, and study of American theater. We're only going to produce 5-7 plays each year and they are going have to span the range of American work past, present, and future. So, we've chosen to focus on opening channels of engagement for the whole #newplay sector WITH ITSELF and WITH US.

The reason the unsolicited manuscripts weren't getting to the stage at Arena is because we already had more work and relationships than we could handle. We were already having to pass on work we had commissioned, to leave things mid-development because we couldn't get them into production in time. So the reading wasn't about getting plays into production. If it was about anything it was about knowing what was out there and who was writing it. And we're doing WAY better on that front by actually BEING out there and by creating channels of engagement with the playwrights. The added benefit, though, of what we're doing, is that now the playwrights and many other companies all over the country are able to see each other and talk with each other as well as us.

So, no. The baby has not been thrown out with the bathwater. The baby is actually growing up and talking to, for, and with itself. And when we hear something we want to know more about, we invite them to say more.

[Isaac]

Hey David,

Again, I think we might be talking past each other here a little bit. I am not going to defend open submissions policies. I'm actually mildly against them. But there's a big difference between not having an open submission policy and not talking submissions period even from agents, or artistic directors of development festivals, or other people in the industry. Clamping down on both open and unsolicited submissions puts Arena in the same boat as very, very few comparable theaters. I mean, the Guthrie takes no submissions too, but they don't have a new play mission.

I understand and admire all the work you are doing to improve the new play sector and rethink these issues, I hope that's been crystal clear in all the blogging I've done about this over the past couple of years. But I do think Hal is onto something when he talks about this particular solution being perhaps a bit drastic. You can read a lot more plays than you can see, and it replaces a somewhat formalized system with a largely amorphous and social one. Perhaps that's more authentic- perhaps in reality the system is more amorphous and social than we'd like to admit- but I'm sympathetic to why people are worried about this.

Does that make sense? I have less of a problem with Arena aiming its new play support towards mid-career writers. Mid-career writers are actually underserved when it comes to support, according to Outrageous Fortune. That's a problem you're trying to address. Someone has to! That part I'm cool with. It's making it harder for a new generation to become mid-career that I worry about.

[David Dower]

I'm not sure how to get this point across, Isaac. Perhaps you can help me. We are still reading plays-- hundreds and hundreds every year. But we are no longer reading unsolicited manuscripts, period.

So, is there a big difference between a system that solicits scripts based on the recommendations of colleagues around the country, on direct experience of engaging playwrights in person and on line, and from serving on funding panels and awards committees-- where the number of plays read is ultimately in the hundreds each year, though there are no opportunities to produce them-- and a system that accepts submissions only from agents, artistic directors, and play labs?

Leave aside the other work we are doing about the whole #newplay conversation. Take that out of the equation entirely (though it also introduces us to many voices who would not otherwise have entered the mix via the agent/artistic director route) and focus only on the submission question for a moment if you would.

Is there, in your mind, a difference of consequence between that first system, which is the one we currently use, and the latter one which as you say is used by so many other theaters.

I'm totally sympathetic to why people are worried, and the discussion is really important. Instructive, for sure. And I even get the flat-out venting where it pops up-- and I join your celebration that so much of this is happening without it.

[web design melbourne]

The baby is actually growing up and talking to, for, and with itself. And when we hear something we want to know more about, we invite them to say more.