Soapbox: C. Denby Swanson

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

In my creation of a theatrical world, I use a lot of puppets and I use a lot of inconsistent and skewed chronology so things frequently don’t happen in the chronological order in which they probably occurred in the story. I use a lot of ghosts and the idea of the spectacle. To a great extent, those things come from the influences of Naomi Iizuka, Erik Ehn, Adrienne Kennedy, and Lisa D’amour. I try to read a lot of people and keep the images in my head of people who explore theatricality in an interesting way. I think Naomi has a stage direction in one of her plays where something—maybe a piece of cloth--turns into a butterfly, and it’s a beautiful image. It’s very evocative, and very “how can we do this in a stage magic kind of way,” such as the suspension of disbelief, and using the stage for what it does well, which are these slights of hand.

I had a big issue with a play of mine this summer over how people approach the reading of a script. Because I tend to use poetic imagery and theatrical imagery, I feel encouraged on some level to make those choices but I also feel like I get punished for that on some level too, because it can be hard for people to read or understand. I don’t necessarily tell people how these pieces might be produced and I ask them to go along with me in a certain kind of way, and it takes maybe a little bit of belief or faith in following my direction or vision. It’s something that I struggle with; trying to encourage extraordinary worlds and waiting for somebody to buy into it and produce those worlds. How to write theatrical imagery in a certain kind of way so that’s it’s compelling and it engages the imaginations of directors without being perceived as heavy-handed. Those are issues that are always on my mind.

Soapbox: Jamie Pachino

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

To me, the challenge for young playwrights is to be bold. To stick to your guns. If you have something to say, find a theatrical, intelligent and bold way to say it. And my only piece of advice beyond that is to persevere, because honestly of all the playwrights I know, the only way anyone has gotten anywhere is by keeping their head down, doing the work, doing more work, pursuing opportunities, learning about the business of the business—and never giving up.

Soapbox: Lonnie Carter

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

We as writers for the theater have to get away from the quick-cut realism that is television and focus on things that are more surreal. That’s what theater does best, through language and imagery. I read that in Italy they are trying to do 90 minute operas that are pared-down versions of the 19th Century classics, trying to get young people to go to the opera, and apparently they are very popular. I would like to see us get to that point where we are writing these fast-paced dramas but not relying on television techniques, but relying on those things that have kept the theater energetic for 2500 years. There’s some way that we can tap into that energy and get people coming back to the theater. For example, the Signature Theater in New York focuses on one writer per season, and they’ve now gotten a corporation to subsidize tickets so that every ticket is $20, but if you go to Broadway you’re paying hundreds of dollars. There’s got to be a way to entice young people into the theater, and I think it’s through ticket prices, and through dramas which are really theatrical. If they’re just television, I’d rather stay home and watch the Tube.

Soapbox: Vincent Delaney

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

For me personally as a playwright, the reason I’m doing this is because I’m part of a community. Theater is a community; it is the most communal of art forms, certainly more so than film or anything else. I think it’s particularly easy for playwrights to forget that – that it’s all about community. We need to draw strength from each other and remember that we are part of something. A playwright sits at home and he or she works on their own, submitting, and they’re isolated. Even in rehearsal in some ways they’re isolated. One thing I got from the PWC that I’m keeping with me is the sense of belonging and community. I feel overall that it’s so vital and such a challenge for all of us as artists to maintain the focus on that. That’s what this is about, why we’re doing this. There’s a million reasons why we would stop doing this, there’s a million reasons why we would get selfish, or self-absorbed, or petty or frustrated and I see that theaters (don’t communicate with each other) and we have to continue to guard against that.

Soapbox: Dominic Orlando

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

The theater is not doing badly. There’s no way to solve the programming problem because it’s a question of money, and it’s a question of needing to fill the seats. Regional theaters have become very commercial-minded. The regional movement was started in response to Broadway and New York which had a monopoly on theater and it was very commercial oriented, but now the regionals which were created in response to that have become very commercial and that makes it very difficult to find a place for new work. For all the problems of Broadway in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, you also had Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams premiering their work on Broadway, so the commercial theater had some adventurism that I find less and less in the regional movement which is now focused on audience and attendance and I don’t know any way around that. There’s nothing we can do to get butts in seats; theaters have to do it. Theaters have to learn how to get behind playwrights. The hard truth is that except for a very small core of playwrights the theater audiences don’t really know one new playwright from another; they know what they’re told. In a certain way, the theater industry press and the theaters themselves have a tremendous amount of power to create interest in new writers. If you look at American Theatre, when they do their “This is what’s going on in the year” segment, you’ll see half a dozen new plays being done everywhere. So everyone is doing the same new plays instead of theaters trying to create an audience for their own playwrights that they’ve gotten behind. I don’t know that playwrights can do anything. We can create our own work, which 13 P is doing in New York and Workhaus is doing here in Minneapolis. That’s about all we can do to affect this kind of equation.

Soapbox: Elizabeth Wong

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

Audiences are being distracted by so many other types of amusing media and other forms of communication with the advent of interactive video games and multi-city sporting events, for example. Most importantly, the lack of relevance to the theatrical experience is not delivering reflections of the community and I think that this has been an ongoing problem: I think that there is a wide audience out there hungry for stories and hungry for theatrical experience. It’s part of our DNA to want to sit together in the dark together and want to experience something collective and spiritual, but I think that much of our theater lacks relevance and doesn’t reflect the community, how we interact in it, or how people live together.

Many theaters have abandoned all of their multicultural development opportunities and they’ve stopped attending to the makeup of the general population of the community. I find it to be a travesty that many large institutional organizations do not feel a need to respond to the diverse nature of our community and the way we live. Theaters seem to get discouraged when they do make offerings and the community of a particular race, for instance, doesn’t come to the theater, or they only come for that offering, and what I have to remind artistic directors is that when you try to introduce yourself into a community you need to do it on a consistent and regular basis, because that way they see that you are committed and care about reflecting that particular community. But if you just do it as a matter of tokenism, you are going to have drop-off after you offer a play written by a playwright of color or a play dealing with or having people in that reflect the broader community.

I know that theaters get frustrated because they think, “We offered one thing and no one came.” Well, people are very smart and society is very smart and they see these productions as pandering to them, and theaters need to recognize that audiences are very attune to when they are being pandered to and that the only way to subvert that feeling of distrust amongst an audience is to continue to offer consistent reflections of the community that the theater is trying to serve (or says it’s trying to serve). This is not a recent problem, this has been an ongoing problem ever since I’ve been in the theater (for more than 15 years).

I see the aging of the audience is as a big concern and I don’t see that young people are being enticed into the joys of the theater for all the reasons that I’ve been talking about. We have to become more relevant and we can’t be so behind the times. I think that often times theater is really slow to respond to what’s going on. That’s another one of the big problems, we’re always 5 years behind what people are really thinking and doing, which is a shame because I know that as writers and as playwrights we’re not behind, but the theaters, institutionally, are behind.

Soapbox: Deborah Stein

(As told to The Playwrights' Center.)

There’s something about the live event of going to the theater that I think is unbeatable and which I’ve been excited by since I was 3 years old, and you just don’t get that same feeling from anything else. Some elements of it come from reading a good book, some elements of it come from going to see some really great live music, but the total experience of going to the theater and sharing the experience with an audience and the performers onstage is totally unique and can only happen in the moment. That experience is unbelievable and transcendent and thrilling.