Report by Sally McKenzie, Churchill Fellow 2017 Churchill Fellowship · 2019-05-02 · screenwriter...

Report by Sally McKenzie, Churchill Fellow2017 Churchill Fellowship

Awarded by The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust

THE WINSTON CHURCHILL MEMORIAL TRUST OF AUSTRALIA

REPORT by SALLY McKENZIEBachelor of Dramatic Art (Acting) National Institute of Dramatic ArtMaster of Fine Arts (Drama) Queensland University of Technology

I understand that the Churchill Trust may publish this Report, either in hard copy or on the internet or both, and consent to such publication.

I indemnify the Churchill Trust against any loss, costs or damages it may suffer arising out of any claim or proceedings made against the Trust in respect of or arising out of the publication of any Report submitted to the Trust and which the Trust places on a website for access over the internet.

I also warrant that my Final Report is original and does not infringe the copyright of any person, or contain anything which is, or the incorporation of which into the Final Report is, actionable for defamation, a breach of any privacy law or obligation, breach of confidence, contempt of court, passing-off or contravention of any other private right or of any law.

Signed:

Dated: April 2019

contentsacknowledgements ............................................................................................................................... 5

introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 6

contact details ....................................................................................................................................... 7

key words .............................................................................................................................................. 7

executive summary ................................................................................................................................ 8

context ...................................................................................................................................... 8

aims ........................................................................................................................................... 8

audience .................................................................................................................................... 8

summary of key findings ........................................................................................................... 9

recommendations ................................................................................................................... 10

my backstory ....................................................................................................................................... 12

itinerary ............................................................................................................................................... 13

developing playwrights and their plays ............................................................................................... 17

glossary ................................................................................................................................... 18

background ............................................................................................................................. 20

questions ................................................................................................................................. 23

methodology ........................................................................................................................... 24

the writers ............................................................................................................................... 25

theatre V theatre, dramaturg V dramaturge ........................................................................... 25

the wisdom of many ................................................................................................................ 26

backgrounds, conferences, dramaturgs, engagement, festivals, residencies, retreats, workshops, writers’ groups ...................................................................... 28

dramaturgy: some thoughts ................................................................................... 76

development: plays need time ............................................................................... 85

playwriting process ................................................................................................. 89

spotlight on New Dramatists: In interview with Emily Morse ............................... 100

name one thing of most benefit to the development of a playwright .................. 112

how playwriting is taught across a selection of institutions ................................. 120

key findings ........................................................................................................................... 138

recommendations ................................................................................................................. 141

spreading the word ............................................................................................................... 143

list of images ......................................................................................................................... 144

references ............................................................................................................................. 146

The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust of Australia | 5

acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge The Winston Churchill Trust for having faith in me and enabling this study. Executive Officer Research Beverley Payne was extremely helpful with questions at application stage and Executive Officer Fellowship Meg Gilmartin has supported me in many ways since embarking on the Fellowship journey. Thanks also to the selection committee chaired by Dr Damien Thomson for recommending my application.

I would like to acknowledge the playwrights, educators, dramaturgs, representatives of theatre companies and playwriting development institutions who so generously found time in their busy schedules to share insights with me on their craft, practices and ideologies. Thanks to the various writers’ agents, their assistants and also the assistants to the various educators. Their persistence in an often protracted process towards securing a meeting time was greatly appreciated.

Acknowledgment must also be given to the thousands of arts workers who I have encountered since my journey in the arts formally began when I was 11 years of age. Their visions, imaginations, opinions, dialogue, direction, insights, actor collegiality, dramaturgical guidance, designs, production support and tutelage; all have contributed and shaped me as an artist.

My decision to transcribe the over-fifty interviews that I gathered during my Churchill Fellowship journey could not have been an attainable goal without my family’s invaluable hands-on support. Thank you to Adelaide McKenzie, Lucy McKenzie and Sean Mee. Also, thanks to my sisters Dr Caroline Crawford and Gilli Emerald for their support and encouragement to pursue the Fellowship at a time when our familial foundations were changing.

Many dramatic forms rely on obstacles to create conflict and in turn, drama. My mother passed away the year my Fellowship was awarded. While this profound change to my life circumstances provided an initial obstacle, like a conceit in a traditionally-shaped narrative this obstacle proved a motivating factor: I knew my mother would be proud of me receiving the honour of a Churchill Fellowship.

I dedicate this report to my mother Sheila McKenzie and my father Douglas ‘Dig’ McKenzie. As a frizzy-haired, red-headed, freckly-faced child I received unwanted peer attention. The arts became my refuge from what would now be identified as bullying. My parents nurtured my creativity from an early age and that support has proved the foundation of my creative practice in the performing, interpreting and the creation of theatre.

‘Theatre is… about playing. You write a play’. Robert Lepage

6 | Sally McKenzie, Churchill Fellow

introductionMy study began as a 2-stranded enquiry then branched into a 3-stranded one with the over-arching topic of international contemporary practice when developing playwrights and their plays.

The initial impetus for my study was related to the writing process. Like many performance writers I have slogged away at feature film drafts. Feature film structure can be described as formulaic. In a 3 or 5 act paradigm attributed to Aristotle screenplays are divided up into acts, which are delineated by turning points: an event that propels the dramatic action in another direction. Mid points, reversals, inciting incidents: the writing of feature film screenplays is populated with interrogated tenets designed to hold up a dramatic narrative that will unfold with rising dramatic tension towards the inevitable climax and resolution.

This line of inquiry is not to suggest all stage plays adopt the screenwriting structural paradigm. Neither does the enquiry imply that stage plays imitate the naturalistic milieu that screen product inhabits. Stage plays are often eclectic in form and embrace theatricality.

Exceptionally experienced dramaturg and Director of the National Theatre School of Canada Playwriting Program Andrea Romaldi believes that ‘A lot of people think that structure is prescriptive but I believe structure is about: how do you set up and fulfil expectations in the audience. Or, how do you set up and not fulfil expectations of the audience in a way that allows you to communicate what you want to communicate’? For Andrea that is the power of structure. There have been many times when Andrea has read plays and believed the narrative was going in one direction but then did not deliver on that promise.

When a screenwriter commits to the writing of a screenplay most often there are a series of documents that they undertake in order to access development funding. These documents include a range of synopses and a treatment: a detailed document that outlines scene by scene the dramatic action of the screenplay without the inclusion of dialogue.

These interrogative steps impel the screenwriter to mine the story of the screenplay before writing a draft. They force the screenwriter to consider concepts such as the end of the story, which has the effect of ensuring every scene will be necessary to the dramatic action.

In consideration of the depth of investigation a screenwriter undertakes coupled with the structural tools they have at their disposal, my original enquiry was: what elements of screenwriting practice can be helpful to the playwright?

The second strand to my study is how playwriting is taught. While setting up interviews for this investigation it became apparent that I should extend this aspect of my study to the development work theatre companies undertake with playwrights either through a commission or via script development initiatives.

This became the third strand to my enquiry: how theatre companies and script-developmental agencies engage with playwrights and develop their plays.

‘It only becomes a play when it is physicalised’. Enda Walsh


contact detailsSally McKenzie [email protected] ‘Production. They can be

low‑scale productions. But good productions. Getting plays up on their feet in front of audiences is critical for the development of writing’. Tony Kushner winner for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama

‘The opportunity for a playwright to see and hear their work with an audience present is probably the most beneficial thing that you can do for a writer’. Pippa Hill Literary Manager Royal Shakespeare Company

‘Putting the playwright in the leading role of how they determine their development and having the agency to do that’. Emily Morse Artistic Director New Dramatists

key words: plays, stage plays, playwriting, playwrights, theatre, theater, play development, dramaturg, dramaturge, writer residencies, writer retreats, dramatic writing, drama, writers’ groups


executive summarySally McKenzie 2019 Developing Playwrights and their Plays [email protected]

investigate how playwriting is taught in a range of selected international institutions.

audiencethis report will be relevant to

funding agencies that service the arts and their advisory bodies, at both a state and federal level

professional theatre companies across Australia

playwrights at all levels of experience

universities, tertiary institutions and organisations that teach playwriting

organisations whose core business is to assist playwrights in the development of their plays

the broader artistic community.

Now that we are entering an era where a significant percentage of Australian plays are being performed on our stages, it is timely to consider a consistent, transparent and strategic approach to the development of Australian playwrights and their plays.

Based on a comprehensive body of international research, Developing Playwrights and their Plays looks at contemporary practice to assist the playwright and the development of their work. It also highlights aspects of playwriting practice and investigates how playwriting is taught in a selection of international universities.

context Historically, our professional theatre companies borrowed heavily from the U.K., both in terms of their structure and the plays that they produce.

In 2019, seasons of the major performing arts companies as listed by the Australia Council for the Arts include a healthy number of Australian plays and collective creations.

Now that we are entering an era where a significant percentage of Australian plays are being performed on our stages, it is timely to consider a consistent, transparent and strategic approach to the development of Australian playwrights and their plays.

aimsfor my Churchill Fellowship, I set out to

ascertain how selected international theatre companies and script-developmental agencies engage with playwrights and develop both the playwright and their plays

interview selected international playwrights who also work as screenwriters to ascertain if their practice in one medium impacts on the other

mailto:sallymaymckenzie%40gmail.com?subject=


executive summary

In 2019, seasons of the major performing arts companies as listed by the Australia Council for the Arts include a healthy number of Australian plays and collective creations.

summary of key findings in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K, the

playwright and their voice are revered

Canada’s Nationalist movement proved the making of Canadian Theatre

in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. the playwright is developed by a range of initiatives, which are delivered by theatre companies, dedicated play-development agencies and festivals. Some are also writer-driven

writers’ groups are a cost-effective, low-maintenance developmental activity, which engender a sense of community, foster collaborations, promote collegiality and provide a framework for critical response

New Dramatists, which was established in 1949, has set the tone for the development of playwrights across the U.S. by empowering them to drive their own development

successful models are those that encompass development of playwrights in the company of fellow playwrights

writer residencies in theatre companies need not impact on the finances of the theatre company. They give the playwright a ‘home’, a sense of community and confidence

the immersion into theatre life afforded by theatre internships is invaluable to the

development of the playwright

one-act play festivals assist the playwright to develop from short form to long form

the role of the dramaturg is respected in Canada but generally not in the U.K.

production is instrumental in developing playwrights

playwrights should be allowed to fail

in the U.S., playwrights drive their own feedback after their play is read

in the U.K., some theatre companies develop playwrights by stepping them through the process of writing for smaller spaces to larger ones

the RSC often immerses a playwright in their company culture before commissioning them

many of the companies and institutions that teach playwriting have affiliations with and are associated to universities. This assists with activities like staging script-development conferences cost-effectively

change comes through passion, a sense of justice and focus

Canada’s Recommender Grants program is successful for both the theatre company and the playwright

the development of playwrights in Toronto rely on theatre companies not tertiary institutions

playwrights in the U.S. are trained to work as both playwrights and TV writers, making a writing career financially viable

playwrights in the U.S. are targeted by TV companies to work in their drama departments


executive summary

in the U.K., there are virtually no tertiary-level playwriting courses and playwrights are either self-developed and/or developed by theatre companies

only 2 students a year are accepted into the NTS of Canada Playwriting Program ensuring individual attention

at Juilliard and NTS of Canada, participants write a number of plays, developing their craft by ‘doing’

the majority of playwrights interviewed noted that aspects of their screenwriting practice impacted on their playwriting practice

In Canada, the U.S. and the U.K, the playwright and their voice are revered

Canada’s Nationalist movement proved the making of Canadian Theatre

recommendationsIn order to create a consistent, transparent and strategic approach to the development of playwrights across Australia, it is recommended that

an on-going, well-resourced development organisation for playwrights be supported in each state and funded by the state arts agencies (this organisation herein called ‘state play-development organisation’)

theatre companies in receipt of federal funding support their state play-development organisation by providing either financial and/or in-kind resources

the state play-development organisation be artist-led, empowering the playwright to lead their own development in the company of fellow playwrights

the state play-development organisation and the theatre companies endorse a charter to serve playwrights at all stages of their careers including but not limited to emerging, mid-career and established playwrights

the state play-development organisation consider long-term residencies modelled on the New Dramatists

the state play-development organisation consider offering a program based on the New Dramatists’ Composer-Librettist Studio initiative to assist the development of musicals

links be established between the state play-development organisation and universities towards resource-sharing for a range of script-development initiatives including state-based playwriting conferences

drawing from the Tarragon Theatre model, theatre companies offer a number of residencies, which provide resources for the playwright-in-residence but without the theatre company bearing hard-costs

further to these residencies, theatre companies offer a 1-yr residency, where the playwright is paid

based on the Royal Court model, theatre companies offer a 1-yr paid attachment/internship for entry-level playwrights where the intern is immersed in the theatre culture, reads submitted scripts, reports on local shows and has access to rehearsals


executive summary

Writers’ groups are a cost‑effective, low‑maintenance developmental activity, which engender a sense of community, foster collaborations, promote collegiality and provide a framework for critical response

theatre companies consider including festivals of one-act plays in their seasons towards providing a stepping-stone for the developing playwright

drawing from the Tarragon Theatre model theatre companies consider developing audiences for plays-in-progress showings towards promoting an understanding of playwriting

drawing from the RSC and Paines Plough models, theatre companies consider a 2 to 3 layer approach to assist the development of playwrights, where playwrights write for a theatre company’s smaller space progressing through to larger ones

drawing from the RSC model, theatre companies consider immersing playwrights in the culture of their theatre before commissioning them as well as developing relationships with playwrights through writers’ groups

drawing from the U.S. model, playwrights become proactive in shaping their own development by forming on-going writers’ groups as well as partnering with venues towards regular readings by local actors of short excerpts of their developing works

in the understanding that play development is a long-term process and the artistic leadership of a theatre company changes, that theatre companies make play development of playwrights including locally-based playwrights, one of their core on-going functions and that this objective is mandated in their company charter.

In order to create career pathways for sustainable careers in playwriting, it is recommended that

Australian universities and organisations that deliver playwriting courses also offer concentrations in writing for TV and screenwriting to broaden the skills base of their graduates

Australian universities and organisations that deliver playwriting courses broker relationships with TV broadcasters towards creating career pathways for their playwriting graduates.

New Dramatists, which was established in 1949, has set the tone for the development of playwrights across the U.S. by empowering them to drive their own development

‘Writers do need a home. The Royal Court was conscious of that’. Terry Johnson


After drama classes from an early age I furthered my acting studies at Flinders University before attending the National Institute of Dramatic Art. Upon graduating from NIDA I worked consistently across Australia for a range of companies including the major state theatre companies and those in the small to medium sectors.

During my early professional acting days, which included some stand-out performances in some stand-out productions, I began to explore my writing voice through character-based comedy. My performance writing continued sporadically.

In 1990 I had my first full-length play read at the Australian National Playwrights’ Conference. The ANPC asked critics to attend the readings of these very nascent works. At the post-read discussions playwrights were publicly subjected to criticism from the audience. There was certainly no censure or the forum conforming to feed-back guidelines set by the organisation.

Throughout my Fellowship journey time and time again I heard from experts that feedback must be filtered and monitored. I wonder how many Australian playwrights’ voices have been silenced by this often traumatic entrée into the field.

Acting was the artistic pursuit that preoccupied me for the first two decades of my career. The lack of agency in this profession steered me from a successful career towards something, I was to discover, even more challenging than performance: filmmaking. During the course of the following two decades I made a number of films, wrote several plays for the secondary-level educational sector and continued acting. During this time I also embarked on the feature-film writing journey.

Finding some success with a particular film project, which was funded for a series of drafts, I wrote drafts, treatments, one-liner scene lists, the one-paragraph synopsis, the one-sentence synopsis, the one-page synopsis, the 5-page synopsis and scene breakdowns. I wrestled with structural paradigms, 2nd act mid-points, inciting incidents and turning points. The positive outcome of this experience was the observance that the screen industry acknowledges the time needed for a script to develop.

With over four decades of experience in the entertainment industry and a career that straddles performance and performance writing for both stage and screen, I arrived at the study that my Churchill Fellowship enabled.

my backstory


DATES 2018 NAME ORGANISATION (IF APPLICABLE)

United States, California, Berkeley

25th September Philip Kan Gotanda University of California, Berkeley

26th September J. Mira Kopell University of California, Berkeley

Los Angeles

30th September Sheila Callaghan

1st October Jason Grote

2nd October Liz Flahive

3rd October Nancy Beverly

4th October Carolyn KrasMark Gooder

5th October Bekah Brunstetter Paramount Pictures

Canada, Ontario, Toronto

7th October Colleen Murphy

9th October Hannah Moscovitch

10th October Charlotte Corbeil-ColemanJoanna FalckBob White

Tarragon TheatreStratford Festival

11th October Judith ThompsonNina Lee Aquino Factory Theatre

12th October Nicolas Billon

itinerary


itinerary


Quebec Montréal

15th October Michel Marc Bouchard

16th October Emma Tibaldo Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal

17th October Andrea RomaldiRobert Lepage

National Theatre School of Canada

18th October Michael MacKenzie

19th October Andy McKim Theatre Passe Muraille

20th October Maureen Labonté

United States, New York, New York City

23rd October Cusi CamLynn Nottage

NYU Tisch School of the Arts Columbia University

24th October Theresa RebeckAnne Washburn

25th October Jean Andzulis Playwrights Horizons Theater School

26th October Emily Morse New Dramatists

29th October Christian ParkerAdam Rapp

Columbia University

30th October Kenneth LonerganCharlie RubinDavid Lindsay-Abaire

NYU Tisch School of the ArtsThe Juilliard School

31st October Terry Curtis FoxLinda Chapman

NYU Tisch School of the ArtsNew York Theatre Workshop

1st November David Henry HwangTony Kushner

Columbia University

2nd November Lizzie SternAbigail Katz

Playwrights HorizonsAtlantic Theater Company


itinerary


United Kingdom, London

6th November Freddie Machin

7th November Lucy Morrison Royal Court Theatre

8th November Enda WalshPippa Hill Royal Shakespeare Company

9th November Terry Johnson

12th November Mike LeighNina Steiger National Theatre Studio

13th November Chris CampbellGeorge Perrin

Royal Court TheatrePaines Plough

14th November Christopher Hampton

15th November Clare SlaterLucy Kirkwood

Donmar Warehouse

16th November Simon Stephens

Stratford-upon-Avon

18th November Dr Richard O’Brien University of Birmingham

19th November Dr Abigail Rokison-Woodall University of Birmingham

20th November Professor Ewan Fernie University of Birmingham


‘I am a member of a writers’ group. That’s the most important part of my process actually’. David Lindsay-Abaire Pulitzer Prize for Drama winner, Co-Director Juilliard School Playwrights Program


glossary

background

questions

methodology

the writers

theatre V theatre, dramaturg V dramaturge

the wisdom of many

– backgrounds, conferences, dramaturgs, engagement, festivals, residencies, retreats, workshops, writers’ groups

– dramaturgy: some thoughts

– development: plays need time

– playwriting process

– spotlight on New Dramatists: in interview with Emily Morse

– name one thing of most benefit to the development of a playwright

– how playwriting is taught across a selection of institutions

key findings

recommendations

spreading the word

WORD/CONCEPT MEANING AND/OR USAGE IN THIS REPORT

blocking movement of actors on stage

box office revenue derived from production ticket sales

collective creations theatrical works devised and co-created by a group of performance artists

commission where a playwright is contracted by a company (festival/theatre company etc) to write a play for remuneration. The commissioning theatre company usually holds the premiere production rights, should they wish to produce the play

development collectively the stages of developing a script from idea to production

dramaturg someone who assists the playwright towards realising their play

extant Australian plays produced Australian plays

improvise the creation of dramatic action without pre-scripted dialogue

multi-disciplinary a work that employs a diverse range of elements including but not limited to spoken text, video projections, dance, soundscape

new work plays that are unproduced and/or their premiere season is imminent and/or plays that have been produced very recently

one-act plays short plays with only one act

DEVELOPING PLAYWRIGHTS AND THEIR PLAYS glossary


glossary

WORD/CONCEPT MEANING AND/OR USAGE IN THIS REPORT

performance writer a writer who writes for performance: radio, screen or stage

readings where a draft of a play is read, either by actors, writers or interested parties, in order that the playwright and other interested parties can hear the work

rehearsed reading where the actors have had time to move past a first reading. A rehearsed reading might include blocking

residencies as it pertains to a company or festival where a playwright ‘has residence’, which may mean sponsored office space on the company premises

retreats where a festival, organisation or other entity provides accommodation for a playwright so they can focus on their script writing. Sometimes the hosting organisation will also provide meals

seed money financial assistance to develop an initial stage of a work

theatre-makers often a term used to describe those who create performance from a range of means, including improvisation

workshops where a draft of a play is put through a process or processes towards evaluating the script

writers’ group a group of playwrights who meet regularly to focus on their play scripts. The group sets their own activities. These might include bringing 20 pages of script, which each group member has written between meets, to the meeting to either read, discuss or both

DEVELOPING PLAYWRIGHTS AND THEIR PLAYS glossary


‘The play’s the thing’… These famous Shakespearean lines spoken by Hamlet when he hopes his play will reveal Claudius to be his father’s murderer have gained another resonance in modern-day usage. The play is the thing. It is the thing that actors, designers and directors bring to life. It is the thing that it is hoped audiences will relate to. It can be presented in a designated-space like a theatre or a non-designated space like a street. It is a living thing that exists moment-to-moment in real time.

When I trained at the National Institute of Dramatic Art as an actor we had an exacting vocal coach. The text book that our lessons were based on originated in England. Our vocal work was directed towards sounding ‘English’. We were criticised for sounding ‘Australian’.

During our 3 years of intense training we only performed 2 Australian plays and these were produced concurrently at the beginning of our 3rd year. NIDA was preparing us for the Australian theatre industry. It was an industry built on the traditions of the English repertory system. Typically Australian audiences were delivered seasons composed of American and English classics and contemporary plays.

When I entered the Australian entertainment industry the winds of change were in the wings. With the success of plays like Ray Lawler’s seminal Summer of the Seventeenth Doll; David Williamson’s Don’s Party and The Removalists and John Romeril’s The Floating World; Australian voices, both the literal voice of the actor and the metaphorical voice of the playwright, were finding their rightful place on Australian stages.

With the uptake of Australian plays came play development. Stage plays are performance vehicles. While the authorial voice of

backgroundDEVELOPING PLAYWRIGHTS AND THEIR PLAYS background


the playwright is enshrined, plays are for performing. Actors, designers and directors can be collaborators along the developmental path of a new work. With the upsurge of new plays and plays ‘in development’; the theatrical community became accustomed to the concept of script workshops and dramaturgs.

The Australian National Playwrights’ Conference was established in 1972 as the peak body to develop plays for Australian theatre. The ANPC had a mandate to promote and develop playwriting by Australians. Another developmental organisation, Playworks was established 13 years later to support women performance writers. The ANPC ceased operating in 2006 and Playworks shut its doors in 2007. The same year Playwriting Australia emerged; an association that amalgamated the 2 organisations. Playwriting Australia receives operational funding from the Australia Council for the Arts.

There are a number of small to medium performing arts companies in Australia that produce Australian work. Also a number of

major performing arts companies, as defined by the Australia Council for the Arts, that I have not referenced in the following equation. Their omission does not diminish their contribution to Australian theatre. Worth noting is that Western Australia’s Black Swan State Theatre Company was established in 1991.

I graduated from NIDA in 1977. The major theatre companies at that time were the Melbourne Theatre Company, the Queensland Theatre Company (now Queensland Theatre) and the State Theatre Company of South Australia. Following the closure of the Old Tote Theatre Company in 1978 the Sydney Theatre Company opened its doors at the end of the same year.

Between the years 1979 to 1983 these 4 major Australian performing arts companies produced in the vicinity of 218 plays in total. This figure is representative of plays produced with fully realised productions on their main and secondary stages. Not included are outcomes like play readings or short seasons in


discrete venues. Remounts of previously staged productions are also not included. Of these 218 productions, 71 or 33% were Australian plays with 29 or 13% of the 218 being new Australian plays.

Jump cut to the years 2015 to 2019 and those same 4 companies produced collectively in the vicinity of 208 plays on their major and secondary stages, with 101 or 48% of these productions being Australian works. Of the 208 plays, 43 or 21% were new Australian plays. Within this focus group across a 36-year timeframe the performance of extant Australian plays has increased by 16% and new Australian works by 8%.

Since Australia’s oldest professional theatre the Melbourne Theatre Company began staging plays in 1953 the majority of works performed on the stages of this focus group have been written by playwrights who are not Australian.

Australia’s theatrical community and the Australian theatre-going public have derived pleasure from plays written by non-Australian playwrights. In return, those non-Australian playwrights have derived a percentage of the box-office from the performance of their plays.

‘It all starts with the script’ is a quote attributed to Steven Spielberg. It is a maxim often voiced among the screen-making community. While acknowledging collective creations, it also all starts with the script for performed plays. A take-away from the screen industry is the understanding that script development is an integral part of production.

In Australia we regularly produce plays from the countries that were part of my Fellowship journey. Indeed, 3 of the playwrights interviewed for this study have their plays produced in Australian theatre company seasons in 2019. Clearly we recognise playwriting talent from the U.K., Canada and

the U.S. This study recognises the expertise and experience of these countries to develop playwrights and their plays.

By investing in the development of our own playwrights we are investing in pathways towards sustainable careers for our playwrights; both current and future. This does not mean that our theatre companies or audiences should not have the opportunity to produce or see the great works of the international repertoire: it’s a question of balance. It is worth noting that Australia’s major festivals can showcase outstanding offshore works. We may even dream of our plays crossing borders to other countries the way we have been producing plays professionally from other countries since 1953.

Australian playwrights tell our stories with our voices.

100 years from the premiere production of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, a generational aspiration might be that the majority of plays produced on all our stages in 2055 be Australian plays with a significant percentage of these being new Australian plays.

‘I can be thinking about a project for 2 or 3 years before I begin to ‘write properly’’. Lucy Kirkwood, Playwright

DEVELOPING PLAYWRIGHTS AND THEIR PLAYS background


Some questions were common to all focus groups as outlined. Other questions were focus-group specific as nominated.

questions asked of all interviewees

– Do you have any formal training? Qualification: the training does not need to directly relate to your chosen field. I am interested in what has paved your journey to where you are now.

– Conferences, dramaturgs, festivals, residencies, retreats, workshops, writers’ groups: in your experience what works for playwrights? Or, if addressing a playwright, in your experience what has worked for you?

questions asked only of playwrights

– If you had formal training in playwriting, how was it taught?

– Can you step out your playwriting process?

– Has your screenwriting practice impacted on your playwriting practice?

questions asked of theatre companies and institutions that develop playwrights and their plays

– On average what is the time needed to develop a new work?

– How does your company engage with playwrights?

questions asked of representatives from universities and organisations that teach playwriting

– How is your playwriting program structured?

questions


This study is interview-based. I chose three countries that were achievable to navigate within the 2-month timeframe, which was the maximum allowable timeframe under the terms of the Fellowship.

My initial strategy was to contact playwrights who also work as screenwriters along with tertiary institutions that have a playwriting program. I also reached out to institutions that are dedicated to developing playwrights and their plays.

As the Fellowship preparation progressed, the development that theatre companies conduct with playwrights became important to the study. Before I left Australia I identified London-based theatre companies.

However it was through interviews once I had begun my Churchill Fellowship journey that my research in this area deepened. I was to discover that Toronto have a number of theatre companies whose mandate is to only develop and produce new work. I found a similar situation in New York.

I undertook 57 interviews for this study. 33 of those interviewees were playwrights, 14 were educators with 8 of those educators also being playwrights, 2 headed up organisations whose core business is to service playwrights and 13 represented theatre companies that develop playwrights and their plays through commissions and other initiatives.

DEVELOPING PLAYWRIGHTS AND THEIR PLAYS methodology


methodology

theatre V theatre, dramaturg V dramaturgeAustralia and the U.K. use ‘theatre’. Generally, although surprisingly not always, in the U.S. common usage is ‘theater’. In this document I have retained the use of ‘theater’ if it occurs in the title of the organisation.

In Australia the term ‘dramaturg’ is generally used without the addition of an ‘e’. For the purposes of this document that is the spelling that is used.

‘I like the relationship where the director is the dramaturg. The rehearsal process is where I do my rewrites’. Nicolas Billon, Playwright and Screenwriter


the writersThe choice of playwrights to interview was determined by whether they wrote for both stage and screen.

‘We were the centre of the theatre. There was reverence for the actors, directors and designers of course. But we were the centre’. Judith Thompson


the wisdom of many

THE WISDOM OF MANY

backgrounds, conferences, dramaturgs, engagement, festivals, residencies, retreats, workshops, writers’ groups

writers/theatre makers by itinerary and alphabetically

theatre companies by itinerary and alphabetically

institutions and individuals that develop playwrights

WRITERS/THEATRE MAKERS LOS ANGELES

Bekah Brunstetter is a playwright, screenwriter and writer-producer of the hit TV drama This Is Us

Bekah cited the Ojai Playwrights Conference and theatre company workshops. She had 2 weeks of rehearsal and table work with the actors followed by a public reading. The event works as a festival, with representatives from theatre companies flying in for the weekend for up to 10 readings. Her current play received 4 different workshops with 4 different companies. Some were shorter than others but for Bekah, the work is at the centre of the process. During these workshops Bekah is engaging with the actors. They are collaborating with her on dialogue and

‘Deadlines, having a sounding board and advocate and just a reading of the play with professional actors. These are 3 activities that in my experience playwrights respond to as regard their development and the development of their work’. Andrea Romaldi


motivation. So ‘By the time a play is on stage it includes every single one of those workshops’. The workshops are organised differently to each other but the ‘most consistent thing and the most important part is that there is time for the playwright to rewrite. Which not all playwrights like to do. Some of them just like to absorb. But I like to actually do work. And hear it. Hear what I’ve changed’.

Bekah referenced the 2 big festivals in N.Y. viz., Williamstown Theatre Festival and New York Stage and Film. ‘Everybody goes there. They also do productions and workshops. And playwrights will go and workshop their plays in the hope of somebody seeing it and wanting to program it in their season’. In coastal Connecticut the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference is the U.S. premier institution for new play development. Every summer 6 - 8 unproduced works are selected for a playwright-driven workshop. Bekah applied 8 times before she was accepted. She had a month-long workshop of her play culminating in a public reading. Often new plays workshopped at the NPC are programmed in N.Y. theatre seasons.

I asked Bekah if these conferences and festivals were linked to theatre companies. Her response: ‘New York Stage and Film is like an institution. They don’t produce, they develop. Oija Playwrights Conference isn’t. Pacific Playwrights Festival is associated with South Coast Repertory. So they look at it as a developmental hub for the shows for their seasons. They do tend to produce 1 or 2 of the plays in their season that went through the festival. So not always but it is common for a festival to be associated with a theatre’.

A number of writers that I spoke to in the U.S. mentioned the concept of Writers’ Groups. This is a concept that I wasn’t familiar with so I asked Bekah to explain them. She referenced

some that exist in N.Y., which have become prestigious to belong to and can open doors. For example The Emerging Writers’ Group, which is associated with the Public Theater. Bekah was a member of Play Group at Ars Nova. The group met up bi-monthly and at the end of your membership they ‘graduate you’. Bekah was the resident playwright in the 2nd year of her membership.

Next she was a member of the Women’s Project Lab, which is now called WP Theater. This is a lab for writers, directors and producers. The ‘Playwrights meet separately, everybody meets in pods, and then you all gather and discuss each other’s plays’. The lab culminates in an immersive short play festival. Bekah was also a member of the Playwrights Realm, which is supported philanthropically. 4 playwrights a year are given a living stipend and have their play workshopped. Every month the playwright attends a meeting, talks about their play and the play is read. Then at the end of the year this organisation stages a supported reading of the work. The Playwrights Realm has a mandate to ‘Support early career playwrights along the journey of playwriting, help them to hone their craft and fully realise their vision’.


DEVELOPING PLAYWRIGHTS AND THEIR PLAYSbackgrounds, conferences, dramaturgs, engagement …

Sheila Callaghan is a playwright, screenwriter, New Dramatist Alumni and winner of the Ted Schmitt Award for the World Premiere of an Outstanding New Play

Sheila has a Masters in Playwriting from the University of California Los Angeles. ‘It’s a two-year program and I chose it because first of all, if you’re a resident in California and you go through the UC system - it’s a lot less expensive. Also the course covered film and TV’. Sheila contends she did her ‘Real training in New York at New Dramatists’.

The training at UCLA included ‘A process with dramaturg Roberta Levitow to simulate a new play production experience, which entailed a lot of working with the director, collaboration and re-writes. It was a practical process to build a play for the stage as opposed to writing one for the stage’.

Sheila is a New Dramatists’ alumni and her works have been developed through Soho Rep,

Playwright’s Horizons, Yale Rep, South Coast Repertory, Clubbed Thumb, The LARK, Actor’s Theatre of Louisville, New Georges, The Flea, Woolly Mammoth, Boston Court and Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre.

Liz Flahive is a playwright, screenwriter and creator-producer of the Netflix series Glow

Williamstown Theatre Festival was the first place that Liz had an official reading of her play. They had a Sundays at 3 initiative: a new play reading program. However it was Ars Nova that deepened Liz’s understanding of development. Ars Nova hosted a reading of Liz’s play, a workshop and a second reading. Ars Nova then committed to developing the play in a deeply meaningful way for the 2 years before it was produced.

Eventually Liz’s play was performed as a co-production between Ars Nova and the Manhattan Theatre Club. Liz was also a member of the Ars Nova Play Group, the first writers’ group that Liz had ever been a part of. Through Play Group Liz formed ongoing creative relationships, for example with Carly Mensch who co-created Glow with Liz. Liz feels that Ars Nova was her graduate school.

The Ars Nova Play Group had twice monthly meetings where the writers in the group read their own work. This meant the meetings provided an incentive to write and that the writers were working towards deadlines. Each Play Group, with members selected by the theatre, ran for 2 years. Liz was in the company of other writers and she felt part of a community. Liz also felt she was part of the theatre. For Liz, the writers’ group kept her connected, engaged in her process and the process of the other writers in her group. ‘It’s not a short process and you need collaborators who are with you for the long haul’.

‘I like the complete ownership over my theatre work. I like being inventive, endlessly inventive, with the form’. Sheila Callaghan


THE WISDOM OF MANYbackgrounds, conferences, dramaturgs, engagement …

Jason Grote is a playwright, screenwriter and New Dramatist alumni

Jason is an alumni of New Dramatists. ‘It’s really a building where you find community and can read each other’s work and there’s all sorts of events’. New Dramatists encapsulates a ‘really broad cross-section of American dramatic work so it’s commercial and non-commercial theatre, uptown and downtown theatre, regional theatre, New York theatre’.

Jason was able to read and listen to plays that were in different stages of development that were still to be produced or published or had recently been produced. ‘I had a new kind of exposure to the different kinds of work that were being done and I think that really helped propel me, more so than actual writing classes at university’.

New Dramatists is a 7-year residency. Also, once a playwright has ‘graduated’ they stay connected to the organisation. For example even though Jason now lives in LA there is a group of New Dramatists that meet in LA on a monthly basis.

The New Dramatists building in New York is located in a former church and within the premises there are rooms set up as bedrooms where current and former New Dramatists

can stay. So Jason can stay there when in New York and reconnect with the people, the culture and the New Dramatists ideology.

‘They have a script library that is really extensive. As many plays as you can write or submit in your seven-year residency, they’ll put in their library’. The plays gradually get rotated out to make room for new ones and eventually go to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

‘And they have a number of residencies that are funded separately from the day-to-day operations of the organisation. The one big project that I worked on repeatedly during my tenure at New Dramatists was a musical. I met the composer through the New Dramatists’ PlayTime development program. We worked together in a New Dramatists’ Composer-Librettist Studio. That musical was produced last year, almost five years after I graduated from New Dramatists’.

‘New Dramatists does not produce. Dramaturgy is really up to the individual writer. Some writers don’t want any feedback at all, they just want a chance to hear the work. Others do want lots of feedback. Some want it from their peers. It’s up to the individual writer. They are driving their own development’.

Ongoing developmental activities and approaches that Jason is actively engaged in include sending out his current play to festivals like the O’Neill Playwrights Conference or Sundance. ‘They have open submission policies. You go to where the festival is located and it’s like a summer theatre camp. Some of them are a little like showcases. You’re showcasing the work to other people. Some of the festivals/conferences are moving the work along to the next level. There might be a presentation involved but that’s not necessarily the point of it. There are various sizes and dozens of them all throughout the country’.



WRITERS/THEATRE MAKERS TORONTO

Nicolas Billon is a playwright, screenwriter and winner of the Canadian Screen Award for Adapted Screenplay

Nicolas likes the relationship of the Director as Dramaturg. The rehearsal process is where he does his rewrites. Nicolas had a small community theatre in Montreal with a friend and they were going to produce Nicolas’ play Elephant Song but Nicolas wanted to find a bigger audience. So he sent the play to various theatre companies and eventually it found its way to the Stratford Festival (Canada) where it was produced.

Nicolas was also in the inaugural Soulpepper Theatre Company ensemble as the resident playwright. For 2 years he was in full-time employment in a company made up of actors, a designer and a director. The takeaway for Nicolas of being part of an ensemble was the networking opportunities that it presented. Nicolas formed the lasting collaborations and creative relationships that he still has today.

Nicolas was also a writer on the Banff Playwrights’ Lab. At the time (2010) the lab was 4 weeks long and the writer could bring someone with them who is involved with the project if they chose to do so. There were 2 dramaturgs on site that were available to the writer if they wanted their assistance. Nicolas loved it. ‘It was half way between a retreat and a structured place to talk with people’. Nicolas’ project was at 1st draft. He went into the retreat with a first draft and essentially came away with a 2nd draft.

Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman is a playwright, screenwriter and winner of the Herman Voaden National Playwriting Award

Charlotte is a graduate of the Playwriting Program at the National Theatre School of Canada. In terms of residencies, Charlotte undertook a residency at Factory Theatre and her first play premiered there during the process. Charlotte also undertook a residency at Tarragon Theatre ‘Canada’s home for new contemporary plays’. Also the Banff Playwrights’ Lab. Last year Charlotte went to Banff with a musical. Charlotte and the composer had at their disposal a studio with a piano.

Charlotte is not a member of a writers’ group but many of her friends are because they like the structure that comes with being part of a group, particularly the deadlines. I asked Charlotte if there was a push to develop musicals and she referenced a small theatre called the Musical Stage Company. Looking on their website the company is committed to ‘the development and production of new Canadian musical works’.

‘I write with the expectation that the audience can see the performers’ faces’.Hannah Moscovitch, Playwright, TV Writer and winner of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize



Hannah Moscovitch is a playwright, librettist, screenwriter and winner of many awards including the U.S. Windham-Campbell Prize for Literature

Hannah graduated from the National Theatre School of Canada not as a writer but as an actor. Hannah found that her training as a performer has given her insights into scene work, dialogue, moving action forward and how structure works within a play. Importantly, since a performer works in front of an audience, she has an understanding of audience responses to structure and character.

In terms of residencies, Hannah is one of about 12 Playwrights-in-Residence at the Tarragon Theatre. Hannah has an office at the theatre. There’s no funding attached to the residency. Just an understanding that Tarragon is Hannah’s ‘home theatre’. This gives Hannah a sense of security.

In a very amicable arrangement with Tarragon Theatre, which has a 100-seat space and a 260-seat space, the company has first right of refusal on Hannah’s plays. This means Hannah offers her new works first to Tarragon for the play’s premiere production. ‘Usually not only do they have first right of refusal of my work but they are also actively commissioning me

as well’. Hannah’s relationship with Tarragon has been in place since 2007.

Hannah has also done residencies at the Shaw Festival, the Stratford Festival and the University of Alberta where she had an office and somewhere to stay for the duration of the residency. Stratford was different in that Hannah was commissioned by the company. That development process came with a director, dramaturg and actors. Anecdotally the play she was working on for Stratford was produced by them in 2016 and Hannah has recently been commissioned by them again.

Colleen Murphy is a playwright, screenwriter and winner of the Governor General’s Award for English-language Drama

Colleen doesn’t have any formal training as a playwright. However, she was a participant of the Playwrights’ Unit at Tarragon Theatre. Then it was a 1-year program. The writers weren’t paid. Rather they had the benefit of working with 6 other playwrights who met every 2 weeks. In the program the writers wrote monologues and developed a play, usually from a monologue. There were readings at the meetings. The Artistic Director always participated and the writers were asked to feedback on the developing works.



Colleen was also a playwright-in-residence at Necessary Angel Theatre Company in a group of 3 playwrights over a 6-year period. This was a very positive experience for Colleen. Colleen felt part of the theatre, part of a community, she saw all the shows the company performed, was intimately across the work of the writers in her group and the best aspect of the residency is that the theatre made a commitment to produce the work of the writers-in-residence. To Colleen this was a sign of respect and gave her confidence.

Instead of writers’ groups Colleen is of the opinion that in Toronto they have playwriting units attached to theatres. ‘Factory Theatre has one, so does Tarragon Theatre. Theatre Passé Muraille. Canadian Stage. Where the writers are attached to the theatre. They meet, say, bi-monthly with the other writers in the group. They brings pages of their scripts. They read scripts. Discuss each other’s scripts. There is a sense of community and connection to the theatre’.

Judith Thompson is a playwright, screenwriter and twice-winner of the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Drama

Judith studied acting at the National Theatre School of Canada. In her final year they were to work on monologues. Judith didn’t like any of the ones that were on offer. So she wrote her own. And that is how her writing career began.

Judith, like Colleen, was a member of the Playwriting Unit at Tarragon Theatre. The Artistic Director of Tarragon at the time, Urjo Kareda, championed Judith’s work. Judith had an office at Tarragon. She would meet with Urjo every week. Judith’s first suite of plays were all performed at Tarragon.

Urjo Kareda was the dramaturg on all of Judith’s works. ‘He was a gentle dramaturg. And all these playwrights would gather and we were made to feel that it was the most important thing in the world. We were the centre of the theatre. There was reverence for the actors, directors and designers of course. But we were the centre. It was what we had to say. We were uncovering the real world under the surface of the world’.



WRITERS/THEATRE MAKERS MONTREAL

Michel Marc Bouchard is a playwright, screen and winner of the Dora Mavo Moore Award for Outstanding New Play

In his final year of a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theatre, when the university learned of Michel interest in playwriting, they created a special course for him. Michel studied with a teacher who introduced him to a range of classic texts. His writing career spiralled from there. Michel explained the political situation in Montreal and the support for the arts ‘The government of the province is totally devoted to arts and culture, because that is power to survive and a way for us to be something outside of Quebec. That is why we consider ourselves as ambassadors of our nation’. To that end Michel has been in receipt of a number of grants towards assisting his playwriting.

In terms of development, Michel seeks assistance from his translator and a ‘really great director’ throughout the rehearsal process. The relationship between the translator and the playwright is unique with the intimate knowledge the translator has with the play creating a springboard for dramaturgical input.

Robert Lepage is a playwright, actor, film and stage director, winner of the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement and Artistic Director of internationally renowned company Ex Machina

Robert studied acting at Quebec City’s Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique. Robert’s training during the 3-year course at the CMADQ was mainly as an actor however he was also interested in set design, lighting design and sound. Robert became very hands-on in these areas and he also spent time during his training stage managing productions. Even though his teachers counselled Robert to concentrate on acting, Robert was interested in creating works and stage directing.

At the time of his training the students were offered paid scholarships to travel to Europe and spend time with the great masters. Robert was very interested in collective creations so during the 3rd year of his degree he went to Alain Knapp’s theatre school. Alain was famous for encouraging improvised theatre. Worth noting is that when Robert attended the CMADQ most of his teachers had trained at Le Coq Mime School so in his training there was ‘Little talking and a lot of movement’.

Robert entered the industry at a political time for Quebec. His training had been focussed



towards outcomes such as street theatre. ‘There was of course the bourgeoise theatres: the National Theatre etc. but then we were encouraged to make theatre that was more political and creative’. Robert and his cohorts were inspired to create a new dramaturgy. In the 1970s there was a lot of playwriting going on that wasn’t written with the pen. It was devised. Robert comes from ‘That moment’.

‘We actually weren’t trained to pick up on the big parts when we came out. It was during that time when there was no internet, no answering machines, no agents. It was very much, you came out of school, you create your group and you played cafés and small theatres. That was the ambition we all had. I did that for quite a long time, at least 10 years; gazillions of small projects, but all creative projects’.

Robert is an internationally renowned exponent of multidisciplinary work and generally most of his theatre-making is outside the remit of the traditional authorial playwriting model. However he often works with script collaborator and dramaturg Peder Bjurman, who brings to Robert’s process a film-script interrogation asking such questions as ‘What’s that about’ or ‘What’s at stake here’? Other consultants also contribute towards the shape of Robert’s work, for example actors that have worked with Robert’s company Ex Machina for a number of years.

Given that Robert ‘writes’ a script through improvisation, I asked him if other groups will ever be able to perform his shows. Robert: ‘We tour a lot. A show can be toured up to 500 shows. And so, at the end of tours, we sit down and say ‘Why don’t we write it down’? So, it’s written at the end. And then we publish it’.

Michael Mackenzie is a playwright, dramaturg, screenwriter, theatre and film director

Michael came into performance writing with a PhD in the History of Science. However he had always been interested in playwriting. His first play, Geometry in Venice was produced by a theatre in Toronto and it was also picked up by a French company. ‘It became a big hit’. Robert Lepage saw it and then asked Michael to work with him on a project.

Michael was invited to Banff Playwrights Lab to work on a play that was later produced. The next time he was invited to Banff the experience involved a director with whom Michael had really good chemistry. Michael: ‘There was a master class for mid-career actors and they wanted them to do new work and they hired me to write a play. That was a very formative experience. I had a strong draft and we were given a really luxurious 6 to 7 weeks, where we could work the material. I did an awful lot of rewrites with the actors’.

‘I think M. Butterfly is a more plotted play than I wrote earlier in my career as a result of understanding how plots work from working in film’. David Henry Hwang, Playwright, Librettist, Screenwriter and Playwriting Concentration Head Columbia University



WRITERS/THEATRE MAKERS NEW YORK

David Henry Hwang is a playwright, screenwriter, Pulitzer prize finalist and also Associate Professor, Concentration Head: Playwriting and Theatre, Columbia University School of the Arts

Stanford University is where David became interested in playwriting. David saw some plays in his freshman year and he thought ‘Well, maybe I can do this’. He started writing in his spare time then found a professor who would assist him in this endeavour and give David advice.

In David’s senior year he wrote a play to be done in his dorm called F.O.B, or Fresh off the Boat. 14 months later the play opened at The Public Theater in New York. The founder of The Public Theater was Joseph Papp and ‘Joe was the person who became interested in my career and produced my first four plays’.

One place where David feels he really learnt to write was actually the summer between his junior and senior year as an undergraduate. David went to something called the Padua Hills Playwrights’ Festival in Southern California. Here David had the opportunity to work

with Sam Shepherd and María Irene Fornés. They taught David to write more from his sub-conscious, to ‘Stop making sense’.

Tony Kushner is playwright, screenwriter, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a Tony award for Best Play and Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play

Tony was originally enrolled in an undergraduate degree at Columbia University studying Medieval Studies. He then changed to English Literature because he wanted to take a ‘Legendary class at Columbia in Shakespeare with Professor Edward Taylor’. He also took a class at Columbia in Directing as part of the Graduate Theatre program and a class in modernist 20th century drama. ‘At that point Bertolt Brecht was the centre of my universe along with Carl Weber’. During this time Tony read Brecht’s political writings and his plays, in particular his ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’.

Tony saw a production of The Threepenny Opera directed by Richard Foreman. ‘It was a rich, complicated and astonishing production’ and Tony saw it 8 times. ‘It was the single most influential production of my entire life’.

Tony took the directing class at Stanford under the tutelage of Carl Weber who had been Bertolt Brecht’s directing assistant as well as a dramaturg and actor at the Berliner Ensemble theatre company in 1952. Tony reflected that Carl Weber ‘Actually taught directing like Brecht wrote plays: a way of constructing simultaneously the narrative spine of a theatrical event and its meaning. What the German’s call ‘inhalt’: at the same time. So, the audience is watching both a story unfold and what the story means – what you are trying to do with it, simultaneously’.

In terms of dramaturgy, there are 2 people whose opinion Tony solicits. One is Oskar



Eustis an old friend and current Artistic Director of The Public Theater in New York and the other is Tony’s friend Antonio, who began as his assistant and is a writer in her own right. Antonio is ‘A brilliant play editor. She asks all the right questions like – ‘I don’t know what this means. Sounds pretty but what the hell are you saying’.

‘And temperamentally. This is why it is such an important thing that you find the people that you can work with rather than take someone who is assigned to you by the theatre’. If he can arrange it, Tony loves to have a workshop or 2 of a new play that he is working on. He recently had 4 days with the entire cast at the National Theatre (U.K.). They didn’t even do a reading at the end of the workshop. ‘As soon as you say there’s an audience coming some part of the brain is focused on that and so people get nervous about how they are going to look and sound’.

David Lindsay-Abaire is a playwright, screenwriter, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play and Co-Director of the Juilliard School’s Playwriting Program

David did a lot of high school plays as an actor then in 10th grade high school it was decided

by his classmates that David should write a play because he was the ‘Funny one’. When David went to Sarah Lawrence College he was still thinking of himself primarily as an actor although he continued to write plays. He submitted these to lots of companies, which staged small productions. David won a playwriting contest in South Carolina and while he was there another playwright asked him if he had heard of the Juilliard program. David applied and was accepted. It was early in the establishment of Juilliard, around the 3rd intake. The program changed David’s life. It legitimised him as a playwright.

While David was at Juilliard he wrote a play called Fuddy Meers. In his second year at Juilliard they did workshop productions of early plays and they produced Fuddy Meers with the acting students. David then submitted the play to Manhattan Theatre Club and they did a reading, a very public reading, with all of their patrons. The following summer the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center held a workshop of Fuddy Meers. It was on the basis of this workshop that the play was produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club.

The workshop at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center was for a month. ‘A lot of that time you are spending rewriting or working on the script or tweaking it before the actors come. And then they have these amazing readings with wonderful actors in front of an audience and there’s a feedback session afterwards’.

I asked David was he a member of a writers’ group. David: ‘That’s the most important part of my process actually. After myself and my colleagues graduated from Juilliard, we all said ‘What do we do now we’re out in the real world’? And one of my classmates said: ‘We should just do what we did at Juilliard. We should meet every week but without our teachers being there’. So we did. We met in



each other’s living rooms. A small group of us. And we are still doing it. We meet every week or two and bring in our plays and give feedback and respond to each other’s work. 20 years later. The same group. We’ve been together for so long we speak the same language and we know how to respond to each other’s work. We know how to be respectful but also a little pushy when we need to be. It’s a smart group of people that understand dramaturgy and how things are built. And they know you as a writer so they can respond specifically to what you have done and what you are doing. It’s so special’.

I asked David about his experience with working with dramaturgs. ‘I’ve nothing against dramaturgy. It depends on who you get. I mean, the greatest dramaturg that I’ve worked with was a director who was not a dramaturg per se: Daniel Sullivan who directed my plays Rabbit Hole and Good People. He just understood how plays are built and what his job was as a director and what all the actors’ jobs were. He could chart a play beat to beat. He would say: ‘Now, there’s a gap here, I don’t know how that woman goes from this to that moment. Can you help me’’?

‘I have fellow playwrights who are friends who have just had nightmare stories. Who hate their dramaturgs or hate the idea of a dramaturg’. David believes good dramaturgy can come from anyone, for example, actors. ‘They will tell you where the character’s not making sense or they are not getting to the point where they need to be. Or they’re not following a through line’.

‘So generally for me, by the time I get to one of these festivals or conferences, I’ve done all the dramaturgical investigation. I’ve had my 12 friends in my writers’ group put it through the wringer already. I’ve also had a couple of readings with smart directors and actors’.

Kenneth Lonergan is a playwright, screenwriter, director of stage and screen, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of several screenwriting awards including an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and a BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay

Kenneth wanted to be a writer from a very young age – about 14 years old. His school had a very good theatre program and he started writing plays with the guidance of his theatre teacher. When he was 18 he was part of the Young Playwrights Festival and he was also in a playwrights’ group sponsored by the Young Playwrights Festival.

‘Anyone under 18 from all over the country was invited to submit a play. They had 100s of applicants. 10 or 12 were invited to participate in a weekly meeting where they would read your work and give feedback. Then from that group they picked 6 or 8 plays to be produced professionally by a popular theatre company of the time called Circle Repertory, which was co-founded by Lanford Wilson. They used real actors and directors and they put on the plays for a few weeks. It was great to get that credit’.

After Wesley College where he studied liberal arts, he took a year off then enrolled in the NYU Dramatic Writing program. NYU sent Kenneth to London for a semester in 2nd year



to intern at the Royal Court Theatre as an adjunct to the literary office. Here Kenneth was exposed to a lot of fringe theatre. Back in New York he was part of Herbert Berghof’s Playwrights Foundation, which was also an acting school where they produced 2 of his one-act plays. There were readings of new plays every week. What Kenneth found was most helpful was being involved in regular readings of plays with other writers as well as actors. ‘And getting to know actors from very early on and integrating them into work so that it was brought to life right away’.

‘Naked Angels put on a full length play every year and did lots of small short play festivals. Without Naked Angels I don’t think I’d be a playwright’. Kenneth Lonergan, Playwright, Screenwriter

Transitioning from NYU into the industry, the main place that Kenneth could make work was a theatre company called Naked Angels. Established by a group of playwrights and actors, someone’s uncle ‘Had a space’ and ‘After a few years if you have 20 or 30 people who want to do theatre you become part of the theatre community’. Naked Angels put on a full length play every year and did lots of small short-play festivals. Kenneth was involved for 10 to 15 years and everything that he did up until about 10 years ago, he read out aloud at a Naked Angels forum. There’s still a reading that goes on every Tuesday. ‘Come in on Tuesdays and read your piece of no more that 10 minutes. It’s easy to run because there is no preparation. Actors show up looking for parts. Writers show up looking to have their stuff read. You can rehearse if

you want but people rarely do. The space is donated. A space that is dark (not being used) on Mondays or Tuesdays. Without Naked Angels I don’t think I’d be a playwright’.

Writers’ groups? ‘After Naked Angels for several years there were 4 to 7 writers who were friends. We’d all meet and read our stuff to each other. We’d write at home between the meetings and then write a short piece in the meeting – go off to different rooms and write and then come back to read what we had written. It wasn’t a critical environment. It was an encouraging environment’.

Lynn Nottage is a playwright, screenwriter, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and also a Professor at the Columbia University School of the Arts

In regard to dramaturgs, Lynn believes it depends on the individual writer. Lynn has worked with dramaturgs and the experience has been incredibly helpful. She has also worked with dramaturgs where the experience has been quite frustrating. Lynn believes that it is a double-edged sword. A master dramaturg could be very good for a young playwright but could also push that young playwright into a direction that they don’t want to go. ‘It’s about finding a balance. I also believe that a really



good director should be a great dramaturg. And that instead of forming relationships with dramaturgs, young playwrights should be finding directors who are both good at dramaturgy and direction’.

What would the ideal number of workshops from draft to draft? Lynn believes that it is really hard to know what you have until you hear it and that there are plays that are wonderful pieces of literature but the moment they are read it becomes clear that they are not drama. ‘So, it is really important to hear how it plays in front of an audience. How the language lives in the mouths of actors’.

The workshops should ideally be spread over a period of time and over a series of drafts. Workshops can help track the evolution of a play so that by the time it is produced the play has undergone 2 or 3 workshops. This means ‘You’re not discovering the play in rehearsal’.

Adam Rapp is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, stage and screen director and Pulitzer prize nominee

Adam had no formal training. He started writing fiction late in college. During training as a professional basketball player, an injury put Adam off the field, which is when he began to pursue novel writing. After moving to New

York and still pursuing a professional basketball career, his first novel was published when Adam was 23.

In New York Adam found himself in the company of actors because his brother was an actor. This led to Adam exploring plays, playwrights and writing for the stage. John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation was the first dramatic play Adam had seen: he found it dark, provocative and strange. ‘Witnessing that and seeing how it affected an audience was really exciting to me’.

At the age of 26, Adam’s first full-length play was accepted into the O’Neill National Playwrights’ Conference. ‘That was the first time I felt what it was like to be a playwright at the centre of the experience of theatre-making’.

‘At the time I first went to the O’Neill, it was essentially a month and a half long process where 10 to 12 playwrights would each get a week devoted to their work. A director and a dramaturg were assigned to you. There was a company of actors that they brought up from New York and they would populate all the plays. Each project had 5 days of rehearsal, a day of tech and then 2 staged readings, actors carrying book-in-hand and modular sets with suggested costumes from their own wardrobe’.

‘The playwright was in the process of re-writing, problem-solving, you were meeting with your dramaturg for advice on how to make the play better, how to make it more tense. It was the most alive that I had felt as an artist, or even as a human being’.

Adam very quickly became addicted to that feeling. His goal was to write another play and go back to the O’Neill. Adam’s athletic prowess in scoring goals paid off. He was accepted for a second time at the O’Neill the following year.

Adam’s first play was widely read in many theatres and it received very positive feedback.



However nobody would produce it. ‘It was a terrifying play called Ghosts in the Cotton Wood, about a family that was living on the fringes of an American desolate landscape and their house was tethered to a tree because it was sliding down a hill’. Adam has written ‘Around 35 plays. Red Light Winter is the most well-known play that I’ve written’.

Adam has been commissioned by various companies. During the developmental process for 2 of them, Playwrights’ Horizons and Steppenwolf Theatre Company ‘Both companies provided whatever we needed prior to the rehearsals’. For Kindness, which was developed by Playwrights’ Horizons, there were a couple of closed readings just with the artistic director and the literary manager in attendance, who provided feedback for Adam. Adam would polish the script then the new draft would be read.

Adam is also often engaged as the director of his work. ‘I’m a better director of my own work than I am a playwright of my own work. I think I’m more rigorous dramaturgically when I’m directing my own work. I’m able to see what the actors are connecting to, and what they’re not. I’m able to see what’s too long, too fat, not enough. Missed moments’.

For Adam the table work is probably the most important part of his developmental process. ‘Getting around the table with the actors and designers and just reading the play and discussing it, accounting for every moment really meticulously and not getting up on our feet until we’re absolutely accounting for every moment’.

Theresa Rebeck is a playwright, screenwriter, novelist and Pulitzer prize nominee

Theresa undertook a very hands on MFA in Playwriting from Brandeis University where she covered all creative roles. ‘In those 2 full years I did nothing except see myself as a playwright. I wrote, worked on other people’s plays, help to produce, direct and crew’. Theresa also completed a PhD in Victorian Melodrama. Theresa felt the gift of her MFA was ‘its emphasis on production. Learning how theatre works. And how actors work. And how it all comes together’.

While still completing her PhD, Theresa started to work with small theatre groups, in particular the Playwrights’ Platform. The group would meet in each other’s homes and read each other’s material. Once a year they did a One-Act festival.

‘It was very much local playwrights working together to do theatre at a very grass roots level. At that time the group pretty much paid for it themselves’. Theresa was involved over



a period of about 2 to 3 years. ‘You knew you could take your stuff there and have somebody look at it. Playwrights’ Platform gave you a place to go’.

The yearly One-Act festivals provided a focus. Theresa believes people came to the meetings because they wanted to be eligible for a slot in the festival. In order to get your play on at the festival you had to attend the meetings. The festival presented 10 plays over 2 nights. Theresa maintains ‘Every play benefits from production, no matter what level you are at’.

One of Theresa’s plays that was performed at the One-Act festival, Breakfast on the Back Porch was a ‘big hit’ and a small theatre in Boston asked Theresa to develop it. This then turned into Theresa’s first produced full-length play, Sunday on the Rocks and her first semi-professional production. For personal reasons Theresa moved to New York where there was already a groundswell of attention around Sunday on the Rocks; interest to produce it in N.Y. and also interest from an agent.

‘The gift of the course was its emphasis on production. Learning how theatre works. How actors work. How it all comes together’.Theresa Rebeck , Playwright, TV Writer, Novelist

On the basis of Sunday on the Rocks Theresa was invited to be part of a writers’ group: Manhattan Class Company. Theresa also got involved with a group called Naked Angels, who to that time were also doing One-Act play festivals.

One of the things that Theresa teaches is that ‘You have to see your work done. You have to be proactive. You have to actively seek production outcomes’.

Writers’ retreats. Theresa wishes that she had done more. Theresa was invited to the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab with the play that was performing on Broadway when I interviewed her, Bernhardt/Hamlet. It was a 3-week retreat and for Theresa the retreat ‘Really unlocked the play for me’.

Anne Washburn is a playwright, screenwriter, New Dramatist Alumni and Whiting Award winner

In order to get some credits so she could ‘Get into grad school’, Anne went to Portland Oregon with a friend who was a director and began a small theatre company in the back of a shop. They had a deal where they could put on plays for half of the box office. After 2 years of making theatre in Portland Anne went to NYU for her MFA, which was an extremely positive experience and she had some fantastic tutors. ‘Tony Kushner was an influential teacher during this time and expanded my intellectual horizons’.

At NYU the playwrights were meant to write a full-length play every semester. Anne thought this was beneficial ‘Especially when you are developing your voice, you just need to keep writing, play after play at a break neck pace. I think that’s very productive’.

Anne is a New Dramatist alumni. During her 7 years she undertook the New Dramatists Composer-Libretto Studio. ‘New Dramatists was exceptional. The whole thing of being able to have a meeting whenever you like. If I wanted to have a play read, you could just grab a space at New Dramatists, have a reading for a day. The actors would be paid. Not a great deal but more than you could pay. I had a 1-week long workshop once. In fact I did a couple of development workshops with New Dramatists. So great. You have that space and they have



your back. Everyone there is so supportive. And it’s all free. And unencumbered’.

After Anne graduated from grad school, ‘Which was a great experience but it’s not like I came out of it with any notion of how to get a play on’, something very important to Anne’s development was joining the Soho Rep Writer Director Lab. There were ‘5 or 6 playwrights and we would meet every 2 weeks for 9 months. And each of the playwrights would write a new play and that was terribly important. A because I wrote a new play and B because I was exposed to all these great writers, which was intimidating and really helpful’.

‘And C, I was meeting these young directors who were just starting out. That was huge because in New York, I don’t know what it’s like in Australia, but in New York a good way to get a play up is to have a director take it under their wing and shop it around for you. Or find a way to get it produced’.

‘So, the first three productions I had in New York, two of them came about because of directors I met in at the Soho Rep Writer Director Lab’.

‘Dramaturgs. When I started writing there was a lot of suspicion about that word’. Simon Stephens, Playwright

‘One of the things I love about being a playwright is that when a play is on stage the audience is always aware that it’s a play’. Tony Kushner, Playwright

WRITERS/THEATRE MAKERS LONDON

Christopher Hampton CBE, FRSL is a playwright, screenwriter, translator, film director and winner of many awards including an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and a BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay

Christopher started writing plays around 7 to 8 years of age when he attended a school in Egypt called the British Boys School, which had a playwriting class. Back in the U.K. Christopher went to a school called Lancing, which encouraged theatre, both modern and Shakespearean texts. In the year between high school and university Christopher wrote a play, which was produced in a little theatre in Headington Oxford. The play received positive reviews and then it was produced at the Royal Court Theatre followed by a production on West End.

In Christopher’s final university year he came down from Oxford to see a play at the Royal Court. He met up with William Gaskill who was then the Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre. It was proposed that Christopher be appointed as the Resident Dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre. They’d never been



a Resident Dramatist position in a London theatre before. Gaskill applied to the Arts Council for funding to support the venture.

From 1968 to 1970 Christopher was Resident Dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre. Gaskill had made it quite clear that the role would entail being a ‘Dog’s body’. ‘I ran the script department. I was sent all over the country to see new plays and write reports on them. All this is at the tender age of 22. Then my second play, which was more ambitious than my first, was accepted by the Royal Court for production’.

The director of Christopher’s second play was also the director of Christopher’s first play. He was young like Christopher. ‘About two thirds through rehearsal we had concerns about the play and so we asked Bill (Gaskill) to come and see a run through’. The group went to lunch and Christopher and the director bombarded Bill about what they should do with the play. Bill responded ‘You’re very young. Yes, the play has lots of imperfections but I feel it would be best for you if we put it on as it is and you can learn from the audience what works and what doesn’t work’.

When the play was revived 12 to 13 years later by David Hare it was very clear to Christopher what needed doing so he remedied it. However at the time of the first production in the heat of rehearsals he couldn’t ‘see’ the solutions.

Regarding workshops. ‘It’s a bit of a hobby horse of mine. I believe that things are workshopped to death and the net result is a kind of homogenisation and suppression of originality’. Given the longevity of his career Christopher has had time to reflect and the things people object to or are disturbed by are almost invariably the most interesting things. ‘The things that they want you to rewrite, take out or lose are the things that make the piece distinctive’.

During the process of this study I have been struck by the role of the translator in terms of

their intimate knowledge of the script and their potential cross-over into a dramaturgical role. ‘I have strong views on translators. They are poorly regarded and poorly rewarded’.

In terms of residencies, retreats, workshops, writers’ groups and other developmental initiatives, neither Christopher or Tony Kushner engage with these activities. Christopher contends ‘Tony has such an individual voice, where would you begin’. Christopher values working with a director. ‘That is the relationship that I am interested in. The director talking candidly about what she/he thinks works and doesn’t work. I don’t react well to advice from cultural bureaucrats’.

When Christopher did that initial residency with the Royal Court theatre he had to complain because he didn’t have a moment to write. ‘But what was really great and educative was that he was allowed to be involved in all the productions the company was doing. To see and read a massive amount of new work. This experience was probably more useful than being able to write a play that year’.

‘So, in a sense being paid to go away and write a play is great but it’s not as valuable as being immersed in the life of the theatre for a year’. Christopher believes this to be a really useful thing for any potential playwright. ‘Like an attachment scheme. Where you assist the director and also write reports on plays that you’ve seen in other theatres’.

‘I believe that things are workshopped to death and the net result is a kind of homogenisation and suppression of originality’.Christopher Hampton, Playwright, Screenwriter



‘What was really great and educative was that I was allowed to be involved in all the productions the company was doing. To see and read a massive amount of new work. This experience was probably more useful than being able to write a play that year’. Christopher Hampton

Terry Johnson is a playwright, screenwriter, dramatist, stage director and winner of the Laurence Olivier Award for Best new Comedy and the Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Best New Play

Terry studied at Birmingham University. ‘I did a lot of practical work. The most notable practice work was with David Edgar, who was running an undergraduate playwriting course. So that was my first sit-down playwriting for 3 years under the auspices of Mr. Edgar who was pretty wise’.

Terry came out of university unsure of whether he wanted to be an actor, or a writer, or a director. ‘I was always a chap who put plays on, so my ambition was to be a director. But I was red brick and working class and back then, early 70’s, there wasn’t a way in at all. Theatres were still run by Oxbridge. So I naturally fell into writing because that’s the bit you can do on you own’.

‘The plays I wrote were good enough for the venues to put them on. I guess I wrote 4 or 5 and finally directed the 6th play, Dead Funny. That was a strange fecund time. I had gone off to write television. I had got stuck and I didn’t write for 2 to 3 years’.

In terms of development activities in the early days of his career Terry took copious notes from the producers. ‘The size of the theatres I was working in meant that they didn’t have literary managers. But more often than not, it was the producer, or the manager or the owner of the theatre. In the early days, places like the Hampstead and the Bush and the Royal Court, you got as much input from the producers and the artistic directors as you did from the dramaturgs. Dramaturgy itself, in my life span, has had an increasingly dirty name, really. There are precious few of them that were huge and intelligent inspirers’.

Terry learnt a huge amount from director Mike Bradwell who was hired by Bush Theatre to direct Terry’s play. ‘He just looked at every word. He would do the aggressive dramaturgy in order to prepare the play for the actors. And he didn’t let me get away with anything. Mike taught me about detail and accuracy’.

‘There was no finer place than the Royal Court for developing playwrights’.

Lucy Kirkwood is a playwright, screenwriter and winner of the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and the Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Best New Play

While Lucy was studying at the University of Edinburgh, although there were no playwriting courses there was a ‘Brilliant theatre company called the Edinburgh University Theatre Company, whose home was Bedlam Theatre’.

‘It was very hands on. People were able to try things out. Put on productions. As with any play very hard to know what it is until it is in front of an audience. Would-be practitioners are able to act in plays, write plays, direct plays with the added vital ingredient – the audience’. Lucy wrote her first play for Bedlam Theatre, which was produced as a student production while



she was studying English Literature.

Lucy submitted her first play into the National Student Drama Festival. The play wasn’t accepted however, unbeknownst to Lucy the play was entered into another competition, which was why it caught the eye of the writers’ agent Lucy has now. The agent read the play, began to ‘put the play under the nose of the right people’ and this lead to Lucy being offered commissions. One of the commissions was for the National Theatre Studio, a work that eventually became Chimerica and the other was Tinderbox, which was done at the Bush Theatre.

Lucy’s agent was pushing and advocating for Lucy at the beginning of her career and this had a profound impact on her trajectory.

Mike Leigh OBE FRSL is a writer and director of film and theatre; also winner of numerous awards including screen awards the Palme d’Or and Golden Lion; a Cannes Best Director Award and several BAFTA awards

Mike felt that he had a handle on story-telling from his teens. He undertook studies in a range of focus areas and at various institutions including RADA where he studied acting, Central School of Arts and Crafts and the London Film School. However, it was the time

Mike spent at the Camberwell College of Arts that he found most beneficial to his future career as a theatre and filmmaker.

Around the time Mike directed the 1st production of Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs, he began to think about theatre being made in a collaborative way. As Assistant Director at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham Mike worked with young people aged 16 to 25 and began to develop a process of improvising plays, a method he has been working on ever since. By the beginning of the 1970s Mike had done 10 of these ‘improvised’ plays over a period of six years.

Mike doesn’t write a script in a traditional sense. Rather his works, in the most part, are created through a process that he began developing in 1965. During the making of his works ‘The job is always to discover what the works are during the process of making them. Painters paint and novelists write novels often embarking on a journey of not knowing what it is. The work evolves and emerges. That’s really what I do, not least because by involving actors, I am bringing them in as if we were on the ground floor. It’s not that we form a committee to decide what we should do a play about, not at all. On the contrary the actors’ job is to work through the character and through the action’.

‘So, the deal with every actor and I’m talking about all of my films and plays expect the three historical ones. The deal is I say to them be it this project play or film: ‘I can’t tell you what it’s about and you will only ever know what your character knows, you will never know what anybody else is up to unless you discover it through your character and you have worked out an overview’. That’s the deal. You have relationships that become sustained and very thorough. A work where you are really exploring relationships’.



‘Finally, I will do a very broad structure, which the actors are to work from or to deviate from. In conventional terms the scenes are not written down. They never need to be written down. People know what to say because we have rehearsed it’.

‘The basic principle is the same for every project but its changes, it grows with every project. Each project throws up new particular things that you have to deal with and investigate’.

Simon Stephens is a playwright, screenwriter and winner of a Tony Award for Best Play, a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, a Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play. Also a Royal Court Theatre Young Writers’ Programme tutor

Simon had no academic or formal training in playwriting. He started writing for theatre because he fell in love with theatre spaces. He had dabbled in some ‘amateur’ theatre and watched plays at York University. Simon began writing plays without understanding or knowing anything about the form of what his was writing. ‘I was writing from an intuitive place’. He wrote 4 plays when at university and produced them at the university’s Drama Society.

Simon left London and went to Edinburgh where he became involved in student drama ‘Even though I wasn’t a student’. In Edinburgh he wrote more plays and put them on at the Fringe. During the production of an early play Simon formed a relationship with a director, which was very helpful in terms of his development as a writer.

He returned to London and began to send his plays out to professional theatres. By this time he had a family to support, which he did through teaching. A producer read one of his plays, Bluebird, loved it and sent the play to the Royal Court Theatre. The Literary Manager of the theatre at that time Graham Whybrow rang Simon, told him that he had read Simon’s play and in the autumn of 1988 the Royal Court produced Bluebird. Simon’s long relationship with the Royal Court Theatre had begun.

This production led to a commission with the Royal Court of one of Simon’s plays that they didn’t produce. However it also lead to the Royal Court inviting Simon to be their Resident Dramatist for 2000. ‘The Royal Court thought I needed to learn my craft. They believed I had a raw talent but they didn’t believe that I knew what I was doing. And they wanted to create an environment where I could learn what I was doing’.

In terms of what Simon’s Resident Dramatist position involved: ‘Part of it was a new commission. And the other commitment was to attend the Friday morning script meetings, 10am to midday at the theatre. The function of the meeting was to advise the Artistic Director about what plays he might do. The scripts were a combination of commissioned scripts, scripts that people were excited by… So I was reading other people’s work and talking about it. Reading 2 or 3 plays a week and then debating the script’s qualities. That meant being able to stand up for or argue against plays’.



Simon did around 48 of these meetings during his residency. This meant he read around 3 plays for each meeting, approximately 150 new plays. During this time he was developing the ability to analyse plays and a vocabulary to discuss their strengths and weaknesses. For Simon, ‘Without a formal education in playwriting, developing an intuitive instinct to interrogate the choices other playwrights made was very empowering for me. It allowed me to reflect on why playwrights made certain choices. This was hugely beneficial to the development of my craft’.

As well as Simon, the theatre’s associate playwright would be at the meeting and often guest playwrights as well. At the Royal Court at the time there was a Resident Dramatist, a Literary Manager, an Associate Playwright and another 3 to 4 other associates. Currently Simon is an associate playwright at the Royal Court so he has gone full circle.

Initially Simon didn’t know how to contribute at the meetings. He asked Graham Whybrow to write a list of plays that would expand Simon’s understanding of contemporary drama. Graham wrote a list of 35 plays, which Simon read in a week.

During the residency Simon was given the opportunity go to other people’s rehearsals, free tickets for all the shows at the Royal Court and access to some shows outside of the Royal Court. He was immersed in theatre-making and theatre-going.

‘I also had the opportunity to meet and talk to directors, other playwrights. In that year of my residency I went from being completely separated from the world of theatre to being very much part of the theatre world’.

Simon remembers a land-mark experience in terms of his development. ‘We did a week-long workshop for 6 playwrights whose work

the Royal Court was interested in. It was one of the defining weeks of my life. We would read scripts in the morning with each other. We all chose our favourite play, brought them to the workshop, read them together. In the afternoon the group did workshops with different specialists: Stephen Jefferies, Graham Whybrow, Dominic Cook, Ian Rickson and David Land’. 18 years later there are 2 elements of David’s workshop that Simon still uses. ‘The workshop was completely life changing. And the things I learnt in my residency at the Royal Court for that year I have drawn from in the subsequent 17 years of playwriting since I did it’.

Enda Walsh is a playwright and screenwriter and winner of several awards including a Tony award for Best Book of a Musical and a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Musical

Enda has no formal training in playwriting. He studied to be a film editor. He believes ‘Storytelling is in your DNA’. Enda first started writing when he was 14. He began writing short stories and poetry. Enda knew when he started writing short stories that he was writing from the 1st person POV and that his stories were performance-based and driven by characters. ‘I knew from the age of 15 that I was going to be a playwright’.



Enda didn’t have any access to any writers’ groups, retreats, residencies etc. in his formative years as a performance writer. However the Dublin Theatre was ‘Huge when I was growing up. Actors, a few writers, directors: many have made their way onto the international scene from the Dublin Theatre. It’s not training, it’s a club’.

‘When I decided that I didn’t want to do film editing I wanted to become a playwright, I ended up down in Cork. Cork is the second city in Ireland. And as a Dubliner you don’t move south. You don’t go to Cork’!

In Cork, Enda became part of a group of 20 to 24-year-olds who every week produced performances that they wrote and presented to an audience. The unique aspect of this venture was that the group actively garnered opinions from the audience directly after the performance.

‘We would write the work on the Monday, begin it on the Saturday then on the following Friday we would show it no matter what the hell it was. These were pieces 5 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. Sometimes we did 1 piece. Sometimes 5 or 6, 5-minute pieces. There were about 8 of us’.

‘We all did everything. We all acted and directed and lit and wrote and sound designed. From the age of 22. The theatre was called Corcadorca Theatre Company. We produced a lot of work. We were given this theatre in Cork. A tiny little space called the Triskel Arts Centre. We produced work every Friday. To an audience. It was a lunchtime show’.

‘And then I would come out at the end of the performance and ask the audience: ‘What did you think about that’? We didn’t know what we were doing. We knew we all wanted to create our own stuff and do our own thing. We sought an active engagement between us and the audience. The audience became the

groups designated dramaturgs’. Enda would be walking down the street and he’d be pulled aside by an audience member to talk about the show. ‘It was extremely active’.

Enda always advises writers not to develop relationships with theatres that develop writers as they will ‘Back you into a hole’. Rather, Enda advises the writer to keep on ‘Producing, producing, producing and showing the work’. Enda recalls an early discussion he had with a writer-director when Enda was 18. I said ‘I’ve written a play’ and the writer-director said ‘You haven’t written a play. You’ve only written a text’. And it’s true. It only becomes a play when it is physicalised’.

Corcadorca Theatre Company eventually attracted Arts Council funding. The company developed a house style that was completely different to everyone else. It began in 1991 and is still going. Enda stayed in it for about 7 years. ‘It was a really important element of my development’. Enda strongly believes that theatre-making is ‘Not just about getting stuff produced in established theatres’.

Enda has worked with a dramaturg. ‘With a guy in Germany. ‘Tim’. He became my dramaturg for about 6 years. Tim liked a drink so we would meet in a pub at 11am. I would sip water and he would have a drink and would say ‘Tell me your play that you are working on’. And I would start to tell him and Tim would say ‘No don’t tell me what happens tell me the world’. Enda would tell Tim about the world of the play. Everything about it in an abstract way and then after a couple of days, Enda was ready to write the actual play.

When Enda wrote Lazarus with David Bowie, he told Bowie about the dramaturgical experience with Tim. So, they began Lazarus by looking at the world of the play. They looked at art. Read poetry. ‘We didn’t begin writing until the time was right’.



Enda worked with the dramaturg for 6 years until he told Enda that he didn’t need him anymore. During the 6 years they worked together Tim would interrogate Enda’s ideas. Enda believes that the role of the dramaturg has become ‘Quite passive. I like someone who really gets involved. Who argues it out with me’. Enda feels that from what he has gleaned talking to writers about their experiences, that the role of the dramaturg has become nebulous. ‘Just someone who links the director to the writer’.

THEATRE COMPANIES TORONTO

Factory Theatre Artistic Director, Nina Lee AquinoNina is a director, dramaturg, playwright and current Artistic Director of Factory Theatre. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in drama at the University of Guelph and a Master of Arts in Theatre at the Drama Centre, University of Toronto. She was a founding member and Artistic Director of fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company from 2002 to 2010.

Founded by Ken Gass and Frank Trotz, Factory Theatre begun as Factory Theatre Lab. Factory,

as it is known, was the first company in Toronto to ascribe to a policy of producing only Canadian plays. ‘Fiercely Canadian’ was and is Factory’s mandate and ‘Home of the Canadian playwright’ its mantra.

‘During the 1970s theatre in Canada was pretty much the celebrated works of Shakespeare, European and American playwrights. The Factory was one of those companies that when it formed it solely dedicated itself to nurturing and producing Canadian playwrights and their work. This mandate still remains true: it is the foundation, the core, the prime directive of this company. The ‘Bathurst Corridor’ which is known as Theatre Passe Muraille, Factory Theatre, Tarragon Theatre; they started around the same time in response to what was happening in the landscape at that time’.

Now Factory reflects what it means to be ‘Canadian’ and is one of the leading intercultural theatre companies in the country. Nina describes Factory as ‘Home of the Canadian creator because of the connotations of playwright. Creator is more open-ended, more liberating, and allows for all kinds of voices’.

That distinction carries over to the developmental activities that Factory offers. ‘We have artist-in-residence, or creator-in-residence. A lot of what Factory does is still very text-based, but not all of it; more multi-disciplinary work is coming through’.

‘Funding is accessed from all levels of government: local, provincial, and federal. From that actual bucket list, there are three ways Factory looks at it. The first is Factory loves the idea, loves the artist, here’s some money, go for it. The second grouping is: we love the idea, we love the artist, there’s something there that needs to be nurtured even more – let’s get the artist or collective into the Factory family and help them create even further. That normally goes through



Factory’s Natural Resources, which is Factory’s mid-to-senior level creation group. Then there is the emerging creators, where Factory loves the artists, loves the idea, let’s take them in. Then they go to the Foundry, which is Factory’s junior or emerging artist creation group’.

Nina facilitates the emerging artist group and the company dramaturg Matt McGeachy takes care of the Natural Resources group. Factory gives the playwrights and creatives a sense of structure, accountability, deadlines. Factory gives them a home for at least the season. They have access to a dramaturg and there is the structure of meeting once a month. ‘In the emerging group we meet more than that to create a sense of community within the group themselves’.

‘Networking, bonds are created, a sense of comradery. Just to share the work, to share the burden, to know that the writer is not alone even when they’re creating. They’re working on their own projects but when they come together and they see other fellow writers, they share that experience’.

Nina charts out potential developing scenarios. ‘The success story would be: we love this, let’s take this to the next level. The Foundry then becomes Natural Resources. After that to what we call the mid-stream artists where we invest workshop monies. It’s Factory getting to know the playwright better now. Working with the playwright within the playwright’s creative process’.

From mid-stream if all goes well and Nina can really see it on Factory’s stages, it moves into ‘Deep development, which could be 1 to 2 more years, or could be 6 months’. Then Factory deeply develops it, where the work goes through its final stages of development. ‘Deep development involves everything that the play needs. Sometimes actors, or a musical director.

Sometimes a movement director, or a multi-media-projection designer. It depends on what the project needs’.

Nina feels structure is the key to Factory’s most successful creators. ‘Office space is office space, and often creators prefer a coffee shop. Structure is very much connected to the dramaturgy, the workshops: all that feeds into a sense of a light at the end of a tunnel. Writers are working towards something, not necessarily a promise of a world premiere but a public reading in three months. It gives them something to work towards, tangible goals’.

‘Residency gives a sense of structure, being in a creative unit gives a sense of structure. Deadlines, creating critical paths for these creators. Not necessarily the same paths – some plays live and die by the physical space, especially if they are inter or multi-disciplinary. Giving a sense of structure gives playwrights and creators a sense of hope, and it makes the lonely journey, because it will always be lonely, not so lonely. Factory has their backs’.

‘Giving a sense of structure gives playwrights and creators a sense of hope, and it makes the lonely journey, because it will always be lonely, not so lonely. Factory Theatre has got their backs’. Nina Lee Aquino

‘Playwrights often feel alone in the world. We offer them a place, tickets to shows and a conversation’. Joanna Falck



Tarragon Theatre Literary Manager, Joanna FalckJoanna came into the position of Literary Manager of Tarragon in 2018 after also serving as Literary Manager from 2003 to 2007. In between these stints Joanna was Literary Manager at the Shaw Festival Theatre from 2007 to 2016. As a freelance dramaturg she has worked across Canada with a range of companies including Banff Playwrights’ Colony and Canadian Stage Company. Tarragon’s mandate on their website is to ‘Create, develop and produce new plays and to provide the conditions for new work to thrive’.

I asked Joanna about the history of Tarragon Theatre. ‘Tarragon is going to turn 50 years old in 2021. In the late 1960’s to early 1970’s a group of mid-sized theatre companies started in Toronto. Tarragon was one of the early companies that developed new work. There weren’t many Canadian plays being written. Companies were mostly producing British plays. British touring companies would come, American touring companies would come. There was some Canadian plays but not much of a culture of them being written’.

‘A series of companies were established in Toronto around the same time with different

mandates. Bill and Jane Glassco founded the Tarragon Theatre in 1970 and Bill was the first Artistic Director. He was interested in finding and producing new Canadian works. And Tarragon has continued in that tradition for the last 50 years. I think it’s seen in the community and in the country as being more traditional, literary playwriting, not collective creation; less interdisciplinary. I hate to use the word traditional because I think it has negative connotations. But the (work of the company) is more standard and regular plays. It also has a reputation for producing work from Quebec; translations of work from there, which has been a significant part of its history’.

On their website Tarragon Theatre describes itself as ‘Canada’s home for ground-breaking contemporary plays’.

Tarragon Theatre has had 3 Artistic Directors: Bill Glassco, Urjo Kareda and the current AD Richard Rose who began his tenure in 2002. Urjo Kareda was AD for almost 20 years. ‘Urjo really continued in the tradition of finding and developing Canadian new plays. Tarragon was the one of the first companies to have what was called the Playwrights’ Unit because Urjo felt at the time that writers needed help in regard to writing a play. There were lots of amateurs, lots of folk who were writing books or poems. But writing a play obviously was a particular skill’.

Urjo Kareda founded the Tarragon Playwrights’ Unit in 1982. Every year a new group of playwrights/creators is developed. The Unit ‘Has become one of the hallmarks of Tarragon’s development. Now, under Richard Rose, the company is really focussed not on the volume of plays and playwrights but more on the capacity for the company to financially support playwrights and produce their work. We now have a playwright-in-residence, which is a full-salaried position, one of the first in



Canada, on staff and in the rehearsal room. To call yourself a playwrights’ theatre, which I believe Tarragon does, it’s important to always have a playwright at the table’.

I asked Joanna how Tarragon engages with playwrights. ‘The Playwrights’ Unit, the Playwright-in-residence as I mentioned. We commission writers. We have currently about 12 writers that we call in-residence. That means not only supporting the writer dramaturgically but we also support them if they want space. One of the writers asked to give him studio time with a piano. We don’t dictate the process of development. We let the writers tell us what they need. Often the playwrights want to hear the play read by actors so we do a lot of those in-house readings. We also have the Play Reading Week, although it tends to more than a week! Those are public readings. They’re free. Tarragon has been doing those for a very long time. Most of the residencies we try to get the playwrights to aim towards June for the Playwriting Week as a deadline’.

‘We have created an audience for the play readings who are very keen to hear what’s being developed. Audiences have their favourite playwrights. We give out feedback forms. We don’t hand those directly to the writers. A playwright hearing their play in front of an audience is really valuable. We have a program called Workspace. That’s a Tarragon-led program for our writers. It’s longer-term development project for a show. Actors, directors and writer work over a 4-week project to develop a play and again, there are public presentations. It may be a music stand, it may script-in-hand, it may be trying out design elements. Really it’s about how the work plays in front of an audience’.

‘I’m invited to a lot of workshops and readings. If we see a show and we’re really interested in

what that company is doing; perhaps it’s not a play that we’d program but let’s invite them in and give them free space. We give them the option of doing the public performance. We support that performance with publicity and box office. It’s a way for us to get to know companies. For those companies that have their own audiences, to have those audiences come to Tarragon. It’s great for those new audiences to come Tarragon’.

‘We have a number of awards as well. We have awards that support emerging writers. It’s called the New Play Development Award. These are about supporting writers with space and money but also providing an artistic home. Playwrights often feel alone in the world; sitting in a café or at home writing. We offer them a place, tickets to shows and conversation. Lots of writers come visit me in my office. There’s a small grant program, through provincial funding. We read all the applications. We had $16,000 to hand out. We handed grants to at least 5 to 6 projects’.

One of playwrights-in-residence is from Germany. I ask if the playwright is a Canadian citizen. ‘She lived in Toronto for a few years, was around Tarragon as a volunteer and she gave Richard some of her work and he really liked it. Tarragon went on to produce 2 or 3 of her plays. She went back to Germany and now we’re talking about doing an exchange with writers in Berlin. She was really excited how playwright-centric Tarragon is because she feels that the playwrights in Germany are ignored because it’s very director-focussed’.

I asked Joanna to describe the Playwriting Unit. ‘The Playwriting Unit is 5 to 6 people who are invited into the unit. They’re paid for the year. It’s developing the playwright, rather than a specific work, although that may be the outcome.



Tarragon Theatre Literary Manager from 2008 to 2018, Andrea RomaldiAndrea has a Masters of Philosophy in Theatre and Film from Trinity College in Dublin. It was an academic degree, not conservatory. However it gave Andrea a variety of tools about what plays are, how they work and how to unpack them. Andrea’s undergraduate degree in arts, science and drama at McMasters University was more hands on, not through the class work, rather the extra-curricular work that was linked to the classwork.

‘McMasters has a long history of making the theatre available for students even through the summer so they could make their own work. They had a professional tech director and production manager. There was a One-Act Theatre Festival. There were lunch-time one-acts and they went anywhere from 12 to 14 weeks so each week they’d be a different play’. Andrea believes that ‘Through practice and experience in actually working in the

profession: these are the experiences that allowed her to become a strong dramaturg’.

Andrea was the Literary Manager at Tarragon Theatre from October 2007 to June 2017. As such, she has an intimate knowledge of the theatre’s operational structure. ‘It’s a playwright-driven model’. Andrea makes the point that the theatre has produced ‘collective creations’ but they are usually much more expensive to develop. Also, Tarragon’s model was built during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s and was formed around creating new work that was ‘Driven and written by playwrights. The infrastructure of the theatre really supports that although it has opened up in the last 10 to 15 years to a lot more ways of creating’.

‘In regard to Tarragon’s Playwrights-in-Residence initiative, these were usually playwrights who the theatre had worked with before either through the playwrights’ unit or had produced one of their plays. We would often assist the playwright in writing a grant. The grant application would either be to the

‘Tarragon Theatre. Canada’s home for groundbreaking contemporary plays. Our mandate is to create, develop and produce new plays and to provide the conditions for new work to thrive’.



Canada Council and/or the Ontario Arts Council for support so that they could write a play over a year or 2 plays over a year. At least begin writing them. The application was written by the writer with the theatre’s support and sponsorship’.

Andrea’s experience of the Playwrights’ Unit was that it involved 6 playwrights new to the theatre but not new to producing theatre. Often the demographic was writers who had experience producing their own work usually in fringe festivals or new play festivals but who hadn’t yet been picked up by a company. There were exceptions to this demographic. For example experienced writers who wanted to gain the benefits of being part of the unit.

‘There would be lots of meetings so the writers would be working to deadlines and they would share their work with each other. It wasn’t just solitary alone work for the writer. The writers in the unit were paid an honorarium. The writers would have 2 readings over the course of the unit: 1 private and 1 public. They would work with the Literary Manager and the Artistic Director’.

‘One of the most difficult things about writing is that it is solitary.’ Andrea Romaldi

‘Hannah Moscovitch is a Playwrights’ Unit success story. She was part of the Playwrights’ Unit in 2006. Then her play East of Berlin premiered at the Tarragon in 2007. Hannah became a playwright-in-residence. And then a number of her plays were produced by the theatre’.

‘Then there was the Emerging Playwrights Prize. This began as a competition. However it was too admin-heavy to process and read

about 70 scripts so Tarragon approached artistic directors of other companies and asked for nominations from their writing community, in order to solicit suggestions from all over the country. Then an award was given. That involved a year’s worth of dramaturgy and sometimes some readings’.

Tarragon also supports writers through the Ontario Arts Council Recommender Grants for Theatre Creators ‘to assist theatre creators to develop new work’. The program works as a ‘third-party recommender party’. Theatre-creators apply to theatre companies that are designated program ‘recommenders’. The recommenders then assess the applications before submitting to the Ontario Arts Council. On receipt of grant funding, theatre companies, including Tarragon, then disperses money to the theatre-creators to ‘seed new works’.

‘Outside of these initiatives, Tarragon continued to meet with professionals who were pitching them work. Also Tarragon was supporting works. So, all those plays would be in the pipeline as well as the ones involved with Tarragon’s development initiatives’.

‘Sometimes they’d be commissioning money for these works. Or Tarragon would find money for an extended workshop. This was called the Workspace. It involved 2 to 3 weeks of extended development in a rehearsal space followed by some public readings’. Just before Andrea left Tarragon, the company took the idea of Workspace, which was originally cordoned off for works that had been initiated by Tarragon and offered the program to other companies and theatre professionals who wanted to use Tarragon’s tiny space either for free or at a very low rate to develop new work through rehearsal and/or through a workshop.

‘Some of these companies were ad hoc companies. Some of them were groups of people who wanted to come together to work



on a project. Some of them were driven by directors. Others by playwrights who wanted to put their works up. The idea was that one of the most prohibitive things about producing and developing was expense for the venue’.

‘So the idea was that if Tarragon could give them the space to rehearse or perform it would make a difference and be meaningful for the creatives. Tarragon would handle their box office. Assist with marketing. They had access to the theatre’s data base. The companies weren’t charged for ‘hard costs’. If the company/group of creatives wanted to significantly rearrange the space there would be costs involved but generally the companies were changed nothing’.

The dramaturgical approach at Tarragon was variable. Sometimes it was necessary only when the play was being workshopped. Other times when it was being previewed. Some writers didn’t want or need a dramaturg. Some writers had a strong pre-existing relationship with the AD who work interact dramaturgically with the playwright.

Andrea believes that what works best for most playwrights ‘Or any creative relationship’ in terms of their development and the development of their plays is ‘Having someone who is willing to sit and listen to them about what they are making and what their needs are as creators and as artists and as people. And someone who is willing to advocate for those needs to be met’.

‘Deadlines are probably one of the most useful things for a writer. I have never seen a writer who hasn’t responded to deadlines. And having a sounding board. Whether it’s a formal dramaturg or someone the writer goes to regularly to talk to about their ideas, to clarify them. Someone who makes you explain what you are writing and why. In that discussion, the writer actually discovers what they are doing’.

Andrea believes that one of the most difficult things about writing is that it is solitary. Having a director or dramaturg or company involved means the playwright has someone to talk and impose deadlines.

Almost everyone that Andrea has worked with finds a reading really useful. Workshops, where there are several days working on a play, are not always useful to many playwrights. ‘Playwrights just need to hear it read and they need to write down their thoughts and leave. Some playwrights benefit from discussion. From working with colleagues like directors. Or even designers in the rehearsal hall. And actors of course. Having them take the play apart and put it back together again’.

Theatre Passe Muraille Artistic Director, Andy McKimFrom the late 1960s onwards a number of theatre companies based in Toronto lead the way in the creation of a Canadian canon of work. Theatre Passe Muraille was first in this endeavour and is hailed as being ‘The oldest theatre in Canada devoted to developing and producing new Canadian plays’. Since 1968 Theatre Passe Muraille has created over 700 new Canadian plays.

Before taking the reins as Theatre Passe Muraille’s Artistic Director, Andy McKim worked at Tarragon Theatre for 23 years as Associate Artistic Director. ‘In the 1960’s, Canada had produced some plays in its time. But you couldn’t say we had an oeuvre. In 1967 we had a centenary. We were obsessed with who we are as opposed to being obsessed with who we were not. We’re not American. It awakened an understanding of us having our own history and trying to be more conscious of what that history was’.



‘It seems very difficult to my mind to imagine a world class oeuvre of plays that don’t get the benefit of artists working on them after they’ve opened’. Andy McKim

‘1968 is when Theatre Passe Muraille started and that makes us the oldest operating theatre for the development and production of new work. Previously there was a lot of productions from England and the U.S. with regional theatres largely producing works from the classic canon and from the U.S. and the U.K. Within several years of the establishment of our company a number of theatre companies had sprung up across the country’.

In terms of development opportunities offered to playwrights and creators ‘The things that are distinctive to Theatre Passe Muraille as an institution are things that connect more to those artists who self-identify as creation-based, the collaborative artist. One is a late-night series that allows people to do presentations of works-in-development’.

‘Another thing we did was called ‘Pitch Andy’ where we give people an opportunity to come in and they get 5 minutes on their own to pitch for whatever they want. It could be a pitch for a show, it could be a pitch for a person, it could be a pitch for a project. It could be a pitch to get some support one way or another’.

‘The third thing and for me the most impactful idea is something I stole from Battersea Arts Centre. They call it ‘Scratch’, we call it ‘Buzz’. The simple

premise is that the work develops in front of an audience. It doesn’t develop from a page with a computer and a playwright. Rather, its shape is guided by an audience. It’s an opportunity for the artists to monitor the difference between what they imagine they’re doing, what story they think they’re telling and what story the audience is receiving. However, it’s not about the audience telling the artists what they should be doing’.

‘You try and put the artist in the place of being observers: recounting what they’ve heard, seen and understood. It’s taking advantage of the fact that the audience know nothing about the project. Then the artists can check that against their ambition. If they wanted a certain character to be someone else’s brother and no-one’s got it, then they need to go back and work that out. We do Buzz in various situations, anything from 10 minutes long to a whole work with technical elements after 2 weeks of development. The work is exposed to an audience then we talk to them about what they’ve seen and observed and what they’ve understood. We then provide free beer because afterwards you want to mingle over a beer rather than a Q & A session’.

‘It seems very difficult to my mind to imagine a world class oeuvre of plays that don’t get the benefit of artists working on them after they’ve opened’.

Stratford Festival Stratford Literary Manager and Dramaturg, Bob White‘I was taking an undergraduate degree in English at Loyola College, which is now part of a larger organisation called Concordia University. It was a fairly traditional liberal arts education. There was no theatre course at the time. It was just a bunch of kids basically who wanted to put



on plays. I decided that I was having much more fun putting on plays than reading Chaucer so I applied to graduate school to take a masters in drama. While I was doing my masters, I encountered this thing called dramaturgy’.

‘Once I graduated from the University of Alberta I went to Toronto and landed there in the early 70’s just when the nationalist movement in terms of producing the first wave of Canadian plays was happening. The theatres were looking for people to find plays that we could do; not horrid British and American plays that we all politically hated. As nationalists we voted to find ways to champion the Canadian voice. That led me to a 45-year career working on new plays’.

‘The playwright says; ‘I’ve sat through x number of shows here. I’ve got a sense of who your audience is. I think I could write a play for them that might have resonance’. A couple of productions we’ve done have come out of exactly that kind of encounter’. Bob White

‘The Playwrights Workshop Montréal started in the early 60’s with a bunch of Montreal playwrights. They were in financial trouble and were advised by the Canada Council that their support was in jeopardy because what they wanted to do was unfeasible in terms of financial realities. That they needed a professional dramaturg to provide the feedback’.

‘I applied and got the job. So there I was with this one-person operation. I was working

with the local writers but I opened it up to playwrights across the country to come to Montreal to work on plays. We didn’t have huge resources. We would do workshops and hire a bunch of actors to do readings of the plays. The most extravagant thing we would do would be to spend a week in a room with a director and actors and provide feedback for the play to the playwright. The other aspect of the job was to essentially try and promote the work and get theatres across the country to produce these new plays’.

‘I came to Toronto and the Factory was one of the very first theatres that had an exclusively Canadian mandate. Now I am at Stratford where I am the director of new plays. Stratford is a 60 million dollar organisation. It’s been going for 66 years. It’s the largest repertory theatre in North America. Every year we do 12 to 14 plays. Usually part of that will be 1 to 2 new plays. Sometimes 3 if we’re lucky’.

‘When Antoni Cimolino the artistic director took me on he said, ‘There’s 2 things I want you to focus on. I need parts for the women in the company because the classical repertoire is notorious for the lack of women’s parts. And the second thing he wanted to address was the ‘female gaze’. In practical terms that means that about 75% of the new work we’ve done in the last 9 years has been by women’.

‘We do a retreat. We invite 8 playwrights from across the country to come to Stratford for a month. There’s no requirement. They work on what you want to work on. They go see the shows. We have dinner 3 to 4 nights a week. It’s so they get to know us a bit and obviously we get to know them. That’s very helpful. Then the playwright can come to me and say, ‘I’ve sat through x number of shows here. I’ve got a sense of who your audience is. I think I could write a play about this that might have resonance’. A couple of productions we’ve



done have come out of exactly that kind of encounter’.

‘I think you’ve got to find ways to encourage whatever the playwright wants to write about. It’s about smart and interesting people who have smart and interesting things to say. I don’t think there’s anything beyond getting them into the belly of the beast so they can see how theatre actually works. But boy, it takes a long time for that play to go from idea to production’.

THEATRE COMPANIES NEW YORK

Atlantic Theater Company Director of New Play Development, Abigail KatzAbigail has been on the artistic staff of the Atlantic Theatre Company for nine years. Prior to that she worked with a company called the Pavilion doing devised work and a small company called Voice and Vision, which developed women artists.

‘I specifically wanted to work with the Atlantic Theater Company because I liked the work that they were doing’. Abigail

studied dramaturgy at Columbia University and it was through Columbia that Abigail came to Atlantic in the 3rd year of her degree to undertake her internship with the company.

Atlantic Theatre Company was founded in 1985 by an ‘Ensemble of impassioned student artists’ who were studying with David Mamet and Wayne Rigby. The theatre’s mission has stayed constant: to tell great stories simply and truthfully utilising an artistic ensemble.

‘Every few years they might add a few people to the ensemble. But it’s a lot of the original members. They’re not on contract. They have the opportunity to submit projects to us. There are about 30 in the ensemble who move in and out of projects, according to the company’s and their own circumstances. They are not all actors. Some are writers, directors, stage managers and they’re employed for the term of the project. There’s no audition process. When members have been added, it’s by recommendation and vote by the ensemble’.

‘As part of the artistic teams my focus is to find new plays and new writers and to a degree, new directors; to consider, to develop, to begin relationships with and bring recommendations forward for programming. As part of that effort one to the things I do is run a reading series called Amplified. We do anywhere between 4 to 6 of those a year. Writers don’t submit. They’re chosen from among the writers and plays that I have been encountering throughout the year’.

‘We have a program called the Launch Commission and we do two a year. They’re small commissions for early career writers. The eligibility criteria are that they can’t have had fewer than 3 commissions from large to mid-sized companies and they can’t have had an offer of a production. The idea is to get the writer early on and give them a leg-up at the beginning and to introduce them to the community because it’s hard to break in’.



‘On Monday we read and on Tuesday the writer goes off and writes. Wednesday, we read again. Thursday, the writer writes again. And Friday, we read again. That has been very fruitful in many cases’. Abigail Katz

‘If you get a commission from the Atlantic Theater Company then people will be at least interested in who you are. The commission is around $5,000 and they write a play from the beginning to the end. From our point of view it’s very much about starting a relationship with the writer. We hold first rights for all commissions. There’s a window during which we have to make a decision as to whether the play will go into production. The reading is the final thing that happens. From then, there’s a window of 60 days. If that time runs out, the production rights revert back to the writer’.

‘Different writers need different things. There is no one-size-fits-all. I am believer in giving writers the ability to work on things. We often do a Monday/Wednesday/Friday structure. On Monday we read and on Tuesday the writer goes off and writes. Wednesday, we read again. Thursday, the writer writes again. And Friday, we read again. That has been very fruitful in many cases. Some writers hate that. So, then it’s, ‘Tell me what works for you.’ Some writers just need a quiet place to write’.

‘Some plays need to be heard. You can’t get a sense of them unless you hear them out loud. It really is case by case. And there are plays where we didn’t do a reading at all. We just read it and then said let’s do it and we did it.

I think writers write differently when they know there’s a production happening.’

New York Theatre Workshop Associate Artistic Director, Linda S Chapman‘The founding principle and what we still do now is based on relationships with artists. We start with the artist. We don’t start by looking for a product, which many theatres do. Our theme is always finding writers, directors, designers, actors who we relate to in an aesthetic way; who we think we can collaborate with. The focus is on developmental processes’.

‘We’re receptive to people reaching out to us and we try to meet with people. We try to meet with as many individuals as we can. It’s not a closed shop. We’re pretty accessible. That being said, I don’t think anything has come from an unsolicited submission. We have looked at them over the years however it’s not the most effective way of getting involved with us’.

‘We have Mondays at Three readings. They’re readings at 3pm. We rehearse in the mornings and we read at 3. That started way back in the 80’s. We also have summer residencies, which have been part of our centre for a long, long time. I think this summer will be our 28th summer. There’s usually about 35 a year’.

‘We have a 3-week residency at Dartmouth College. Each week we are responsible for bringing 2 workshop showings to the theatre audience up there. So, we work on 6 projects over the course of those 3 weeks. There is a professional presenting component at Dartmouth. NYTW is responsible for the transportation and the artists’ fees. We do that generally in July and August’.

‘In June we have a 2-week residency at Adelphi University in Long Island where we don’t have



any obligation to present work. So, again the theatre department supports us with room and board and workspaces and we can bring early stage projects, however we don’t need to cater for an audience. Whereas at Dartmouth, we have to have work that’s further along the process, that will sustain a public presentation’.

‘We’ve been going to Adelphi for 7 years. All the residencies are for different stages of development. We try to not be prescriptive. We try to find outlets appropriate for where the artists and playwrights are at. One of our favourite asks is: what do you need next’?

‘We have a formal call for proposals, which goes out at the beginning of the new year. We call for proposals for the Monday readings, the Adelphi residency and for the Dartmouth residency. We give them some guidelines and dates, that sort of thing. We’ll get 80 to 100 proposals for the various opportunities’.

‘The founding principle and what we still do now is based on relationships with artists. We start with the artist. We don’t start by looking for a product. The focus is on developmental processes’. Linda S. Chapman

‘Another aspect of what we do here is that we have a number of artistic fellows and administrative fellows. Our artistic fellows help us read. And we also have a readers’ group for general submissions and we call on them to read as well. The selection is done as a consensus amongst the artistic staff. Once we get some of these projects in the pipeline, the Literary Director or myself will reach out to the

artists we want to support and we’ll try to get them on the calendar’.

‘Personal engagement is the first thing. We work best with people who are interested in the collaborative process and developing their craft and their process. In terms of content we are more interested in the individual in relationship to society than in traditional family or relationship dramas. We like heightened theatricality, challenging theatrical forms as much as the content itself’.

Playwrights Horizons Literary Associate, Lizzie SternAs a student and growing up in New York Lizzie idolised Playwrights Horizons, which she saw as the paragon of non-profit, off-Broadway theatre institutions. Before her position at Playwrights Horizons Lizzie was an intern at Manhattan Theatre Club. Here Lizzie loved engaging with new work. After the MTC Internship Lizzie was an intern at the Lincoln Center Theater’s LTC3; a wing of the Lincoln Center that only produces new plays.

‘One of the exciting things about Playwrights Horizons is that it’s very mission-driven. We produce new plays by American writers. There are many ways to identify ‘American’ and it



is certainly not defined by being born in this country. The theatre was founded in 1971 by Bob Moss and grew organically from a very small collective’.

‘There are a lot of different ways a play goes from the page to being produced on our stages. It’s very connected to the programs. Playwrights Horizons offer commissions at many different levels from $5,000 to $25,000, depending on the experience of the writer. Playwrights Horizons has one commission that’s a $20,000 commission. It’s called the Amal commission and can only be offered to a writer who is of Middle Eastern, North African descent. Then there’s the $5000 commission that can only be awarded to a playwright who has never been commissioned by a theatre before’.

‘The way that Playwrights Horizons and the literary department see our jobs is as relationship building. Every time they encounter a play they›re not really thinking about what they are going to do with this play but how they are engaging in dialogue with this writer’.

‘It’s really both the play and the writer: the play is an expression of the writer’s voice, so Playwrights Horizons sees the play as part of a much larger puzzle: the development might not be that particular play. It’s mostly about developing a relationship with the playwright’.

‘Playwrights Horizons get thousands of plays because they have an open submissions policy. The company reads them in entirety and provides a full, detailed response to every single writer. Playwrights Horizons is the only theatre in New York City that does this so it feels like an important contribution to the larger eco-system of theatre in this country. Playwrights Horizons is encouraging the voice of writers nationwide and the act of writing by giving writers a space to send their work and to give them feedback and to make them feel heard’.

‘The way that Playwrights Horizons and the literary department see our jobs is as relationship‑building. Every time they encounter a play they’re not really thinking about what they are going to do with this play, but how they are engaging in dialogue with this writer’.Lizzie Stern

‘Playwrights Horizons also has the New Works Lab and Super Lab programs. New Works Lab is a reading program. PH will bring in a playwright that they are excited about; a writer they’ve probably been building a relationship and dialogue with. The play could reach PH’s attention in lots of different ways: through the playwright’s agent, the playwright or PH may have attended a reading of it somewhere else. We do around 10 New Works Labs a year’.

‘We do less Super Lab programs; perhaps 2 a year. The Super Lab program is produced in partnership with Clubbed Thumb, an off-Broadway company. The New Works lab has an incredibly diverse profile of theatrical forms: two or three act-long dramas or hour-long comedies whereas Super Lab works are almost always 90 minutes or less and are wacky, provocative, theatrically inventive plays’.

‘The playwright decides how they want the process to serve their needs. Plays are in very different stages when they enter the program. Some plays are very fresh and never been read out aloud before and others are plays that have had workshops at other theatres and are much further along in their development.



Often playwrights will have a director attached or sometimes we come up with a few names. It is the playwrights decision who is attached to the project. The director and the actors are all paid for that week’.

‘The other big part of play development is that they have three resident companies in the Resident Company Program: three organisations whose work and mission PH really believe in, who are working with writers that excite us, that are in our orbit and who PH wants to get to know better. They are also companies that don’t have space. One of the most prohibiting factors of making theatre in the city is finding spaces to rehearse and perform it. So, we give them space at a heavily reduced rate downtown at PH’s studios where our theatre school is housed as well. Each company is in residence for three years and then they cycle out’.

‘The Guest Curator Program is a new initiative that PH started last year. We invite an artist in to curate a New Works Lab. We give them free reign to program a New Works Lab season’.

‘Then there is the Redux Series. PH does six plays in a season. The Redux Series is a seventh show that we program in our little Sharp Theatre. It is a play that PH has seen around the city that was exceptional, that generated an enormous amount of excitement in the theatre community, has a built-in fan base, which had a run that was too short. We produce plays in the Redux Series only opportunistically. We are not going to produce plays unless there is a play that the PH wants that fits this formula’.

‘The Theatrical Fellowship Program. We used to call this a residency and now we call it a fellowship. Each year we have a group of around 10 fellows in different departments; casting, literary, general management, marketing, stage management. Many of the fellows have been playwrights. PH offers

them a stipend and a monthly metro card and they have responsibilities. Some see it as an alternative to a graduate program because they’re getting hands on access to how a non-profit theatre runs on a day-to-day basis. They have exposure to exciting new work, form industry connections and access to the theatre staff’.

‘Playwriting is a collaborative art. It’s collaborative in the most obvious sense; you need actors, a director, time and space. That’s why workshops at theatres are so helpful and important. It’s collaborative in the sense that for many writers hearing their work aloud and getting feedback from their peers is fundamental to the development of a new work, which is why writers’ groups are so important’.

Lizzie believes that residencies gives playwrights a chance to ‘Really feel like the ground and the infrastructure underneath them is firm and safe’.

‘I think that all of that developmental time and space and mind-melding that playwrights are doing with each other is so much more of what theatre is than what anyone ever sees on stages; that’s really what the theatre community is’.

‘It’s collaborative in the sense that for many writers hearing their work aloud and getting feedback from their peers is fundamental to the development of a new work, which is why writers’ groups are so important’. Lizzie Stern



THEATRE COMPANIES LONDON

Donmar Warehouse Literary and Editorial Manager, Clare SlaterClare has an undergraduate degree in Literature and Theatre from York University. Her approach has not been an academic one. Rather, an instinctive one driven by being an informed audience member and artist in her own right. At the National Theatre Clare has had different roles: casting, fundraising, and literary management. She also ran a theatre in Notting Hill called The Gate. She then came back into literary management at the Donmar.

‘The Donmar is not a new writing house unlike the Royal Court. It programs a mixture of works, some of which are new plays. We commission plays, that’s how we engage writers and then we stage them. The Donmar does 6 shows a year and under the current artistic director, not that there is a formula but 1 or 2 of those plays have been new plays. Then perhaps another one may be a new interpretation of a piece of the canon, or a new translation’.

‘If the Donmar has something under commission they’ll throw anything at it if it needs it, to move it forward. Whatever the writer or the director wants, within reason. The Donmar is here to make our commissioned shows be the best they can be, so we invest in commissioned works as much as we can. Sometimes that not just the commissioning fee, sometimes that’s the writer coming in and getting a reading with a bunch of actors or a week’s workshop’.

National Theatre Senior Dramaturg, Nina SteigerNina has a BA in theatre. She started first as a writer and director and then spent a lot of time learning how to work on new plays at new writing theatres in New York in the late 90s and early 2000s. Nina worked at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, New York Stage and Film and the Manhattan Theatre Club in a ‘Multiplicity of scales and forms, just exploring how plays were made and how writers work, what the writer-director relationship is and how a new play rises to its audience’. In London Nina worked at Soho Theatre for over ten years as the head of the new work development. She began work at the National Theatre about two and a half years ago.



The National Theatre first began delivering performances in 1963 and since then has produced over 800 plays. In 1984 NT’s Studio was founded, which ‘Has played a vital role in developing work for the NT’ where ‘Writers, actors and practitioners can explore, experiment and devise new work’.

In 2015 the NT’s New Work Department was created to bring together the devising and experimentation work of the Studio and the script commissioning and development focus of the Literary Department. ‘All our artistic development is now led by the New Work Department, including new play commissions, workshopping of devised projects, and new treatments of classic texts. We nurture emerging talent, as well as providing dramaturgical support to mid-career and established artists. Our aim is to create the conditions for writers and artists to make the best possible work’. Nina says that it’s ‘Still the case that the National Theatre takes in unsolicited scripts’.

‘Attachments are a really vital part of having an open door for earlier career artists at the National, so we have six writers’ rooms. People come for six weeks and are paid to write without having a formal obligation to submit anything to us at the end. They are just resourced to come in and be a writer for six weeks. Those are really important. We have created a lot of artist exchanges and lab set-ups, not where the writer is necessarily writing in the room, but where they’re talking and thinking about particular challenges within the industry at the moment’.

Nina thinks writing is a very solitary art where the writer needs a community but they need to be their own muse. ‘We try to provide a bit of that. The National is not that first port of call entry-level theatre, and so a lot of the support and scaffolding that writers needs as they’re starting out isn’t what we’re set up to give’.

Paines Plough Theatre Company Joint Artistic Director, George PerrinGeorge Perrin and Paines Plough joint artistic director James Grieve met at the University of Sheffield doing English Literature degrees. They then set up their own company, nabokov, which they ran for 10 years before joining Paines Plough.

Paines Plough was founded in 1974. The company only develops and performs new work. Of the 10 plays the company produces yearly, roughly 50 to 75% will be brand new works and the remainder will be new works from the previous year or the year prior to that. PP supports the writer dramaturgically through the writing of the work. There might be some changes made once the work previews for an audience but after that no changes will be made to the script.

‘Paines Plough only deals with playwrights (not theatre-makers). We engage with them in lots of different ways. During the early stages of a work, the writer might send their plays in for consideration towards production. Paines Plough receives between 500 and 1000 unsolicited scripts a year. Paines Plough reads all the plays, responds and advises the writer whether the theatre will put their play on or not. If PP can’t produce a writer’s work but likes it they might stay in touch with the writer



and actively engage with their work by seeing shows they have written’.

‘Paines Plough also runs open access workshops, which are opened to writers around the country. We’re a touring company so most of our work is outside of London and across the U.K. PP meet and workshop with anywhere between 200 to 300 playwrights a year in that forum. PP also has a Playwright Fellow every year. We award a Fellowship to a writer to spend 6 months with PP, which is a bursary and some resources to develop their craft. This initiative is called the Playwright’s Fellowship and we develop one playwright a year though that’.

‘Paines Plough also have courses that are geared towards writing for their specific touring mechanisms. We have a Pop-Up Theatre called Roundabout. We do a Writing for Roundabout introduction to help around 10 writers a year write for Roundabout’.

‘Paines Plough also does an introduction to small scale for around 5 writers a year. We also hold a mid-scale writing group where they have about 5 to 6 writers on yearly attachments towards writing bigger plays’.

‘And of course Paines Plough also commissions writers and produces their plays. These commissions range from very early stages with low contact right up to experienced writers who are often produced by PP’.

‘We did a consultation when we took over PP in 2009 with the playwriting community and asked them what they wanted from the company and they said the thing that they wanted most of all was their plays put on. They also wanted clear answers about whether their plays were going to be put on. At that time there had evolved a tradition in this county of keeping writers in a kind of holding pattern. They’d send their play to someone and receive some notes back. The playwright would think

‘Oh great, well if I just implement these notes that company may be more likely to put my play on’. However then the playwright would get some completely different notes from another theatre company and the playwright would implement those notes. Then soon the playwright was writing a mish mash of a play based on different sets of notes. And no one was actually going to put the play on’.

‘So we took the money that it cost to do that type of work and we put it into putting more plays on. And we told writers we’d give them a really straight answer as regards whether we were going to produce their play. Rather than get into the slightly muddy middle ground of ‘maybe’. And that’s how we were able to go from doing what we had previously done as a company, which was 2 plays a year to then go up to doing 10 plays a year’.

‘Mostly writers want money so they don’t have to do their day job. So they have time to write other than evenings and lunch breaks. After that they need support: being told they are good enough. Thirdly they tend to want laptops or most of them aren’t actually able to write’.

‘But above all they want their plays put on. So actually the biggest act of development that you can do for anyone is tell them that you’re going to put their play on. Championing their work. Trust and faith in them. Anything else like residencies, retreats etc. will help a little bit but these activities pale in comparison to the impact of a play going into production’.

‘We have historically done exactly what we do now, which is produce new plays, search for voices that are not being heard’. Chris Campbell



Royal Court Theatre Associate Director, Lucy MorrisonThe Royal Court sprang from the efforts of theatrical manager, director, teacher and actor George Devine. George ‘Aimed to discover ‘hard-hitting, uncompromising writers’ and create a company that would challenge and stimulate British theatre. In January 1956 he placed an advert in The Stage calling for scripts and received over 700 submissions. The one that stood out was Look Back in Anger. George had the vision to stage the work even though it had been rejected by British theatrical royalty.

Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court on Sloane Square in May 1956. ‘It was the third production of the new English Stage Company under Artistic Director George Devine and is now considered the play that marks the beginning of modern British drama. The Royal Court was Britain’s first national theatre company and has held firm to its vision of being a writers’ theatre. Its plays have challenged the artistic, social and political orthodoxy of the day, pushing back the boundaries of what was possible or acceptable’.

With a number of plays behind her as a director Lucy is Associate Director at the Royal Court. She started directing when she was working at Paines Plough where she also conducted

workshops and readings. ‘It was amazing realising that you could be part of the engine room of new plays and be useful’.

I asked Lucy what she thought worked most for writers in terms of residencies, retreats, etc. ‘I like writers’ groups because they create a community. Those relationships can stay with you throughout your career. Dramaturgs and directors come and go but I think the relationships formed with other writers work on so many levels. Playwrights really care what other playwrights think of their work’.

Royal Court Literary Manager (2010 to 2019) Chris CampbellWhen Chris was an actor with the National Theatre in London he was asked to be on their unsolicited-scripts reading panel. ‘Almost all theatres that accept unsolicited submissions have a panel of freelance readers to go through them’. Chris went to the regular script meetings. NT liked how Chris talked about plays and eventually they asked Chris to chair that panel, which he did. This led to Chris being offered a part-time job in NT literary department. His experience in analysing scripts deepened and then he received a call from the Royal Court 9 years ago advising him that they were looking for a new Literary Manager.



‘Working with new playwrights is what we do and the Royal Court occupy a very fortunate position in the mental landscape of British theatre. Dennis Kelly, great writer, said a while ago ‘If you’re a British writer you don’t really consider you’re a playwright until you’ve had a play on at the Royal Court’, which is a very nice thing to say and it’s no doubt slightly exaggerated but it does contain a certain truth’.

‘There’s a famous letter, a sort of statement of intent, that George Devine wrote when he founded the English Stage Company (which we know as the Royal Court), in 1952. George Devine said that there were many companies that gave attention, respect and care to productions of the classics, but there was nobody doing it for contemporary playwriting. Devine said contemporary art and contemporary music are very well looked after but contemporary theatre and contemporary theatre writing is not’.

‘I have a framed copy of that letter in my office because that is still the English Stage Company’s mission. We have historically done exactly what we do now, which is produce new plays, search for voices that are not being heard’.

‘The great thing the National Theatre has is their studio resource. They can offer all kinds of support. The Royal Court/English Stage Company doesn’t have resources to develop plays unless we intend to produce them. We only invest in plays we think we might produce. We engage all over London and increasingly all over the country. We have an international department. We’ve always engaged all over the world, but it’s always with writers, the playwright as the primary artist, and new ones’.

‘By far the main way that the Royal Court begin relationships with playwrights is that they send us a play. That’s still by far the best way to start a relationship with us. We’ll read anybody’s play and that’s always been the case.

People sometimes ask ‘How many of those unsolicited plays you receive are produced’? We receive about 3000 plays a year, so the answer is ‘Hardly any’’.

‘A much more interesting question is: ‘How many plays do you produce by playwrights you first got to know because they sent you a play unsolicited’? And the answer is: really quite a lot. If we like the play you send, then a number of things might happen. We might simply write you a letter with notes in it. We don’t do that for the majority of scripts that the Royal Court receives, so that’s already an engagement’.

‘We might ask you in for a cup of tea and a chat. The Royal Court might invite the playwright to one of our playwriting groups: either an introduction to a playwriting group or a more advanced group that we occasionally run, an invitational group’.

‘We might give them an assignment, where the company gives the playwright, say, £1000 to begin working on an idea that we would talk about together. We tend to give an assignment to a writer that we like but we’re not ready to commission yet. We’re not ready to make that big commitment’.

‘At the very top end we might commission. If an assignment did go onto commission we would minus the assignment fee. The commission fee stays the same across the board from new to experienced playwrights. It’s between £11,000 to £12,000 pounds. If the play is produced downstairs in our larger space and if it goes somewhere else then the playwrights receives royalty payments as well’.

‘As regards developmental initiatives such as retreats, residencies etc. It really is entirely case by case. This is a function of the fact that what the Royal Court does is produce plays. We don’t develop scripts on the American model. What we try to do is get the play



into the best possible shape it can be for production. So, we may do a reading but not because we always do a reading. We might do a two-day workshop. For example we have a commissioned play at the moment. One of the Royal’s associate directors is enthused and they will do 2 days on the play. It will be the writer, the associate director and a couple of actors. After that the playwright will probably write another draft using whatever has happened in the workshop. When the writer delivers that draft then the Royal Court will make a decision regarding the programming of the play’.

Chris thinks residencies are fantastic if you can afford them, particularly residencies with a number of writers. ‘The great residency that the Royal Court runs is the international residency. This year (2019) we’re going to have 12 writers from the European Union who will spend the whole month of July at the Royal Court. The playwrights will get a director, actors, translators but above all they will get each other. And that’s why I think residencies are so great. Those relationships can last a whole professional lifetime’.

‘Residencies and writers’ groups do the same thing. They meet weekly. We’ve just started one that’s going to run for a year. It’s what the writers give each other. It’s so much more important than people coming in and saying ‘Mind that structure’. Writers’ groups are incredibly useful. It gets the playwright away from that necessary solitary nature of the writers’ life’.

‘Most people that go to theatre have a gregarious side to them and a lot of writers find it tough when they actually have to sit there and do it. The solidarity of a group who have shared some of the same problems who might have solved some of them for you: it’s fantastically useful’.

Royal Shakespeare Company Literary Manager, Pippa HillPippa came to theatre through the Edinburgh Fringe. She was at University at Edinburgh studying economics and history but spent most of her time in the students’ drama association, which was then at the Bedlam Theatre. ‘I ran the theatre as a fringe venue during the festival in my second year and never looked back really’. Pippa has worked in various roles. Her first job was at the Hampstead Theatre assisting Jenny Topper when she was artistic director. Pippa was also assistant to the literary manager, which at that time was Jeanie O’Hare. ‘So, it was a practical training rather than an academic one’.

‘Creative development was part of the original mandate for the RSC. The company was formalised as the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1961. Part of the charter was enshrining the principle of producing the works of Shakespeare alongside radical new plays. The RSC has always done new plays. Harold Pinter was the company’s first writer-in-residence. The company has always done a mixture of the radical and the classical. That’s part of its raison d’être’.

‘Playwrights are often sent to Stratford as part of their residency. There are a number of cottages. When they are free for a block of time,



writers use them to concentrate on writing a draft. Stratford is a good place to concentrate’.

‘There are three clear strands in terms of our engagement with writers. There’s a commissioning strand, which has 30 to 40 commissions at any one time. There are three stages in Stratford so the company needs to ensure that there are plays in development for each of those three stages. The main stage has a new family show each year and it’s my job to make sure that the company has 3 to 4 large-scale family shows in development’.

‘For the Swan Theatre the company has a series of commissions of brand-new plays, adaptations or translations. And in the Other Place (studio theatre) there is a yearly or biannual festival of new work, which is often between 2 and 4 new plays. That’s the commissioning strand and that takes up the bulk of the company’s time. So that one big area of writer engagement’.

‘The other strand is more speculative work. Under the umbrella of the Other Place, the company does a huge amount of research and development, supporting artists to develop new ideas. These are typically not under commission but they are artists, writers, theatre-makers that we’re interested in. They might be devisors, composers, puppeteers, actors in the company who have got a new idea that they want to explore. The company will give them some support: space, funding, collaborators to work with. There are typically between 30 and 50 of those each year. These activities could last a couple of days. Or a week or 2 weeks. There’s this constant stream of work-in-development. The company will often commission them and then put them into the other streams of work’.

‘The last stream is that the company will go and see work. We do a lot of meetings with playwrights. We see their work, we reads their work, attend readings. We also have a writers’

group, which is a 6-weekly salon where writers are invited to join. It has nominated speakers and it’s a social networking event as well’.

‘Writers’ groups are about writers writing and showing their work and I think that’s enormously beneficial. It means you’ve got a cohort, you’ve got a group of colleagues that you can go to seek advice from. It feels like a community’. Pippa Hill

I asked Pippa if there was a formal call-out for these initiatives. ‘It’s open to all. Anyone can write to us and say, ‘I’ve got this idea. Would you help me develop it’? It is an open-door policy. We do have some quite stringent guidelines, which can be found on the web-site, for the kind of things we’re looking for. What happens is there’s a group of us; myself, the deputy artistic director whose portfolio is specifically new work, the producer’s department and the casting department. This is my team and we meet every 6 weeks and we look at all the applications for workshop support. We go through the criteria and we support as many as we can’.

I also asked how the company went about commissioning playwrights. ‘It’s normally the result of quite a long relationship. If the playwright is writing for one of the two main houses, it’s a big commitment. The relationship needs to be strong and trusting and we spend a lot of time building those relationships before we get into commissioning them. We most often approach writers ourselves and invite them to



come and meet with us to discuss our ideas, see our work. And see if they like us as well’.

Pippa had informative points regarding writers’ groups. ‘Many writers’ groups are craft-led. They are about writers writing and showing their work and I think that’s enormously beneficial. It means you’ve got a cohort, you’ve got a group of colleagues that you can go to seek advice from. It feels like a community. Ours is more informal in that we only invite people to come along if we know that we’re already interested in their work and wish to build a relationship with them. It’s more about inspiring them to look at the world differently to meet different and interesting people. We have people come to talk about artificial intelligence. Or from the cabinet to talk about politics. It’s about different insights into the world that you might not necessarily have access to. Our writers’ group is more of a salon. It’s more of a way of engaging with us that doesn’t feel formal and not about presenting your work as a writer. But it is about feeling that you are part of a company and part of a group. Our writers’ group is not really about writing. It’s more about a space where we can meet and get to know the writers’.

‘In terms of general writers’ groups, other than our ‘salon’ approach, I think playwrights find writers’ groups incredibly useful for a variety of reasons. One of them is to share their work and seek advice in a safe space. And one of them is to feel they have got peers and to feel that they belong. To really get away from the more lonely business of writing. It’s an opportunity every 6 weeks to get out and meet other people. Having colleagues may be a bit of a life-line’.

…‘Three clear strands in terms of our engagement with writers’. Pippa Hill

INSTITUTIONS AND INDIVIDUALS THAT DEVELOP PLAYWRIGHTS MONTRÉAL

Dramaturg and former Banff Playwrights Colony Co-Director, Maureen Labonté Maureen pre-dates ‘University degrees in dramaturgy and literary management’. She has a BA from McGill University in Literature and was part of the rise in Canadian theatre in the 1970s. ‘That’s where I learnt on the job. The Canadian nationalists fought hard and successfully for a Canadian voice on our stages. Theatre Passe Muraille, Taragon Theatre etc. were at the centre of what the new playwright was. Also the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa and the Alberta Theatre Project. Canadian playwrights and therefore Canadian play development was born’.

Maureen worked at the Banff Playwrights Lab, formerly the Banff Playwrights Colony, for a decade in various capacities from being their first dramaturg to co-director. Banff was and is ‘Unique in Canada in terms of the idea of a retreat. A place where writers can go and focus on their playwriting. Banff was playwright-driven’.

‘At Banff we had a company of actors and we offered each writer readings. We encouraged



writers to come for a minimum of 2 weeks. We learnt from experience that 1 week was definitely not enough. In 1 week the writers were just settling in instead of getting down and writing. A 2-week period was very productive. There was no formula imposed. The writers had various services that were offered to them and in consultation with me or a dramaturg, they could pretty much call the shots on what they wanted and when’.

‘The stage of the works when they came to Banff varied. There could be pays that were close to production. Or, depending on the writer, the work could be in a much earlier phase. It was a national program so we had writers from all over the country. Writers of all ages and of experience. Some years Banff would have 15 to 18 playwrights coming through over a 5-week period. The first week would be just writers and then the actors would come in for 4 weeks’.

‘Banff never expected the actors to give dramaturgical feedback, that was never an open discussion. The actors were often doing two readings a day. Banff really picked good workshop actors and if the actors had questions the questions would be more about motivation or ‘I don’t understand what’s going on in this scene, can someone please talk to me about that’. Banff’s aim was to fit readings into a 4-hour block. This was linked to equity rules. We could then get 2 readings in. In our experience the second reading was always so much better’.

‘Banff didn’t have the actors participating. They came in and did their job, which is to act’. Most of their actors were very relieved that that was the situation. ‘Everybody has an opinion and if everybody expresses that opinion we lose plays. ‘Sometimes’ is the operative word here. But we lose both plays and playwrights in that process. It’s hard to

write anyways, and it’s hard to hold on if you’re inundated with feedback’.

Banff didn’t encourage showcasing plays to determine whether companies will program the work. The Lab was about the playwright. ‘It’s really important that we empower our playwrights. They’re the ones with the stories to tell. I deplore the fact that there are approaches to dramaturgy where the people working with the writers give the impression that they know more about the play in question than the writer’.

‘Dramaturgy is often tied to production and production houses. So there’s a power play there. Of course it is wonderful to have a production but often playwrights go public too soon. They will show their first draft around. Or they will have potential meetings for their first draft or an early draft where they’re not too sure where the work is going. I wish that schools, theatre companies and organisations that develop plays would encourage the writer to own their play’.

‘Everybody has an opinion and if everybody expresses that opinion we lose plays. We lose both plays and playwrights in that process. It’s hard to write anyways, and it’s hard to hold on if you’re inundated with feedback’. Maureen LaBonté



Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal Executive Director, Emma Tibaldo ‘Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal was founded in 1963 at a time when Canadian theatre didn’t really exist and Canadian playwrights weren’t known. In fact, they weren’t there. So mainly British and American plays were being produced in our theatres. A group of playwrights got together and decided it was time to start looking at and developing their own work. They created this organisation which has been running ever since. Its mandate is to foster and develop new work by Canadian playwrights. We do residencies with playwrights from across the country. We work closely with local theatre companies in the creation and development of new scripts. And we have extraordinary playwrights whose work has gone international’.

‘So many companies sprang up in the sixties, seventies and eighties. Along with those theatre companies many playwriting courses were offered across the country, so in terms of what we do now, the need to train has dissipated. It’s not as strong as it was in the sixties and seventies’.

‘In terms of how we engage with writers. We have a young creators’ unit. That runs

for 8 months of the year. We invite creators between the ages of 16 and 30 who are working on new work within the theatrical community to come in and develop their work. We’ve been doing that for over 3 years now. Some extraordinary work has come out that has gone onto the Fringe and other festivals. A great first step into professional dramaturgy and collaborative work’.

‘We have the Gros Morne Playwrights Residency. It’s a playwriting residency where we take 7 playwrights to Newfoundland, to Gros Morne National Park for 10 to 12 days and we work on scripts. We solicit the whole country to send in their applications. A jury picks the scripts that will go to Gros Morne’.

‘Usually we continue to develop those works over the next couple of years. For example a play that went to Gros Morne last year, is now going into a prolonged workshop and that play will be produced next year’.

‘We have an interdisciplinary writers’ unit where people who work in different disciplines cross-pollinate and get to know about each other over a 2-year period. The whole idea of looking at performance through the lens of different disciplines and how one can feed into the other or what are the different processes available becomes the discussion over that 2-year process’.

‘We have exploring practice sessions where we invite different writers to come in and work with playwrights and creators in the city. We then pick up and continue to develop projects that come through that process’.

‘Then we have playwrights that go through theatre companies. For example right now we are working with Geordie Productions, which is a theatre for young audiences’ company. We’ve been working on this play with a playwright for 2 years now. And it’s going into production in



their upcoming season. So depending on what the local theatre companies are producing, we get involved in the development phase of plays. Fairly early. Right at the beginning, sometimes at the commissioning stage’.

‘In terms of workshops. This year so far we have had 28 workshops. Usually those workshops go anywhere from a couple of 4-hour sessions to 5 sessions that are 1 week long. Sometimes 2 weeks depending on the piece. Sometimes recurring, so we might have a 1-week workshop and then take a couple months break and come back for another week workshop, where we call in the actors and the directors and work on our feet’.

‘In terms of dramaturgs. I’m on salary, so I come with the space. We have a dramaturg in house for 24-hours a week. They also come with the space. And then we have mentorships where we try to bring in as many different dramaturgs as possible to pair off the playwright with someone they feel comfortable with and can talk to. Like anything else a dramaturg is only as effective as their relationship with the playwright’.

‘There is a lot of self-producing in Canada as well. A lot of playwrights will come in, develop work and then produce it themselves through the Canada Council. People who were pretty much shut out of the funding system have had the doors opened so there are more grass roots, D.I.Y. projects that are finding their way to production’.

‘For this company dramaturgy is at the centre of what we do. The dramaturg is there to open up processes and different avenues. There to open up possibilities and make it comfortable for the playwright to take risks. To try different things and not know where they’re going’.

‘Failure is part of what theatre is. You can’t be using human beings as your means of expression and expect perfection’. Chris Campbell

‘Playwriting… is to tell a story through privileged moments of heightened conflict and you have to be able to identify those’. Tony Kushner

‘Playwrights really care what other playwrights think of their work’. Lucy Morrison




With the inception of the Australian National Playwrights’ Conference in 1973 the concept of a ‘dramaturg’ formally arrived in Australia. The ANPC was co-founded by Brian Syron who modelled the organisation on the National Playwrights Conference (sometimes referred to as the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference), which he attended while visiting the U.S.

Part of that model-borrowing included anointing a range of conference personnel, including playwrights and directors, as dramaturgs. My research found that in the U.S. and Canada, dramaturgs are generally respected whereas in the U.K., they are sometimes regarded with suspicion.

My study is not to trace the origins of dramaturgy but of interest is how the role has been absorbed into Australian play-making culture. It could be proposed that development of Australian plays has relied on dramaturgy since 1973 without the role having a clearly defined job spec. Through my own creative practice I have been exposed to a number of dramaturgs. Each of them had a different approach. However, during my Churchill journey as indicated by this research, I was to learn that diverse dramaturgical methods are the norm.

As we have adopted this developmental process I was interested to gain insights into how the concept and role of the dramaturg has evolved in the countries that I visited. Included here are some short and longer grabs in response to dramaturgy.

THE WISDOM OF MANY

dramaturgy: some thoughts

dramaturge (also dramaturg) mid 19th century: via French and German from Greek dramatourgos, from drama, dramat‑ ‘drama’ + ‑ergos ‘worker’

Nicolas Billon‘The dramaturgs at Banff when I had a play workshopped were great. However I like the relationship with the director as dramaturg. The rehearsal process is where I do rewrites’.

Michel Marc Bouchard‘Sometimes this word ‘dramaturg’ is used for playwright. In French, I am a dramaturge, a playwright’.

Bekah Brunstetter‘In my experience, dramaturgs have been great for research. Also, I like the dramaturg’s structural eye. I like someone asking questions

like ‘What if we have this moment in the middle rather than the end. Wouldn’t that be more satisfying for the audience’’?

Cusi Cam‘A good dramaturg is super helpful. They ask really interesting and specific questions about the work. They’re not giving you answers, they’re not saying ‘On this page, do this’. They know the work as well as you do. They also know that they’re not the person who should rewrite it. I’ve never worked with him but everyone says that Oskar Eustis who runs the Public Theater, has a great gift is dramaturgy’.


Chris Campbell‘The first thing to say is that the very use of the word dramaturgy is strongly resisted here. I used to think it was because we’re anti-intellectual and terrified of European thought, but it’s not that. There are very few career dramaturgs in this country and the reason for that is that most of our directors do what would be called dramaturgy in most other theatre cultures. The work of the British-style director is largely invisible. People don’t realise that the reason the play is so good and the actors are so good is because of the director’.

‘I do dramaturgy with writers on scripts, but once we get into rehearsal here, dramaturgy is really the responsibility of the director. I can certainly help get the play into shape, but I’m not all that involved once it’s in rehearsals. I’ll come to some runs of the play. I’ll give the director my notes, but we don’t usually have a dramaturg in the room because the director is the dramaturg in the room’.

I asked Chris about dramaturgical involvement in the preliminary writing stages. ‘Yes, to some extent, but some writers don’t find that helpful. But you can say things like ‘This character is redundant at the moment’. Or, ‘This person is only there so other people can talk to them’. Increasingly nowadays you can say things like ‘Why are the women so boring? They don’t have anything to say. They just respond to things men say’. The thing I say more than anything else is ‘This is not clear’. I have those sorts of conversations’.

Joanna Falck‘Tarragon still offers dramaturgy, workshops and readings. Some people think that we force a play into a box. But I think we do the opposite. We allow the playwright to write the play they want to write as opposed to the play we think they ought to write. The playwright is at the centre of the process’.

‘What’s valuable about Tarragon is its focus on writing, giving writers time, giving writers space, giving writers money and giving someone like me, or Richard, to talk to on a regular basis. That has produced a lot of good plays from Tarragon’.

Philip Kan Gotanda‘I think the most helpful dramaturg I’ve had are the ones that help you with the story. I’ve worked with some really good ones including Oskar Eustis who runs the Public Theater now. He was advising me, questioning things. The experience had a great deal of impact on that play’.

Jason Grote‘Dramaturgy is really up to the individual writer. They are driving their own development. Some want that feedback from others while some want it from their peers, so it really varies’.

Christopher Hampton‘The director and playwright relationship. That is the one that I am interested in. The director talking candidly about what she/he thinks works and doesn’t work. I don’t react well to advice from cultural bureaucrats’.

Pippa Hill‘Dramaturgy. I would say that it is entirely writer-led. My approach is listening very carefully to what it is that the writer wants to create and to provide them with a bespoke journey in order to achieve that goal. At the RSC we have two stages that present particular challenges to writers. They are big, thrust stages. They don’t operate for very long with a 4th wall. That’s quite a new muscle for some writers who have been working in smaller, black-box studio spaces, or have been working on a combination of small-scale stages or TV. Often, it’s helping the writers grapple with the architecture of those stages and how they work in dialogue with the audience, which is quite different

DEVELOPING PLAYWRIGHTS AND THEIR PLAYSdramaturgy: some thoughts


from traditional proscenium arch or black-box studio theatre writing. The engagement with the audience tends to be much more apparent in plays that we’re developing for those stages’.

‘Essentially, I would say my dramaturgical approach to each writer really depends on what they need, in order to achieve what it is they want to achieve. For some of them, it’s a very light touch that doesn’t need that much help with structure or narrative. It might really focus on emotional support for the writer and help with navigating through the company. On other projects, it’s a very close creative partnership. It’s about me having a very trusting relationship with each writer to begin with and building that relationship. And then, responding individually to each writer’s process for each project that they’re on with us. And constantly adjusting to get them where they need to get to’.

‘It sounds weirdly a bit woolly, but it’s just really difficult to say, ‘I do this and then I do this and then I do this and then this’, because actually it is different each time. The thing that the RSC is able to provide is a broad range of methods of development. There’s a wide range of resources that we can deploy in the research and development phase of a commission with a writer that allows them to create a play, of scale, over a long period of time. Quite a slow way of cooking a play’.

‘Audience dramaturgy is thinking of the audience for a show as part of the team that is developing the work, rather than the work stopping when it hits its first audience’. Andy McKim

David Henry Hwang‘I don’t like the idea that you get assigned a dramaturg. The idea that one kind of dramaturg can fit any kind of play. The same way that you wouldn’t want to be assigned a director. It’s an individual relationship. If you really respect the craft of dramaturgy you have to believe that that pairing is just as individual as the pairing between the playwright and the director’.

Terry Johnson‘You really don’t know where a writer is going with something and how helpful it’s going to be to impose structure on them or whether that’s going to mess them up. Or whether you should go, ‘Don’t write that. That’s not going to go anywhere. But this one’s great. Generate more material’. It’s very hard. It’s very presumptuous. And let’s face it. That’s the problem with dramaturgy. Who ends up being the dramaturg? It’s a) someone who hasn’t written a play, b) someone who hasn’t directed a play and c), likes plays. I tell you what playwrights do. They send plays to each other. A good playwright knows how to say it. A good playwright will say ‘This is what I think here and this is what I know here’. They know how to temper it. Playwrights are better than dramaturgs’.

Abigail Katz‘The underlying premise of the dramaturg is to always allow space for the writer and not be overly prescriptive. There are some really excellent commercial producers who have a very good dramaturgical eye. But they’re very practical. There are some writers who love working that way. But most writers don’t. They want to be in conversation with you and they don’t want to feel restricted. So, in the end it’s about what hat you’re wearing. There may be times when the dramaturg has to be a guide and have frank conversations with writers like, ‘This thing doesn’t make sense.’ ‘This scene, I don’t understand it.’ It’s all in the way that you say it. Asking questions is the big one. There is

THE WISDOM OF MANYdramaturgy: some thoughts


the Liz Lerman Critical Response Process. Lerman was a choreographer who developed a system of response to develop new works’.

Tony Kushner‘I don’t think that young writers should have to work with staff dramaturgs. I also don’t think that writers should have to do that meet-the-audience thing at a reading of their play. When the audience gets to tell you how much they did or didn’t like the play. If the writer wants that then it’s okay but I think it can also be damaging’.

Maureen LabontéMaureen believes courses in dramaturgy ‘Have changed the ecology around dramaturgy and play development. Courses have to justify the function perhaps. There are different ways of looking at the role of the dramaturgy. In particular the relationship between a dramaturg and the playwright. It’s been an interesting change in the last 20-25 years’.

‘My approach is that I really do my homework. I get a sense of where a play is at. Where the draft is at. And then at the meeting, I’m not prescriptive. I don’t go in saying ‘I think you should do this, I think you should do that’. I approach the work from a questioning point of view. I ask some good questions, and from those questions: that’s when the conversation happens. How many times when you’re talking to a playwright does the playwright find the answer talking to you? You’re talking about problems in Act II and as you’re talking about them the writer goes ‘You know what, ok, I think I get it now, the problem is...’. The playwright often will come up with a solution as you’re talking’.

Robert Lepage‘Peder Bjurman is a Swedish dramaturg that I worked with when I was in Sweden. He was a producer for Ingmar Bergman in Bergman’s last

days, in the theatre. He was also based in Paris and worked in Cultural Services in the Sweden embassy, so he understands film. Peder has become the dramaturg counsel on all my shows. Even my one-man shows. He always has these interesting storytelling structures. Things that he brings to me. He imports a lot from the film world into dramaturgy. He asks the right questions. He won’t impose anything, but he’ll say, ‘What’s that about’ or ‘What’s at stake here?’ He’s a really good consultant’.

‘I also don’t think that writers should have to do that meet‑the‑audience thing at a reading of their play. When the audience gets to tell you how much they did or didn’t like the play. If the writer wants that then it’s okay but I think it can also be damaging’. Tony Kushner

David Lindsay-Abaire‘And every one of my plays has gone through that group (David’s writers’ group) and gotten much better because of that group. Because we’ve been together for so long, we just speak the same language and we know how to respond to each other’s work. We know how to be respectful but also a little pushy when we need to be. It’s just a smart group of people that understand dramaturgy and how things are built. They know you as a writer so they can respond specifically to what you have done and what you are doing. It’s incredible. It’s so special’.



‘If I can have someone as smart as Daniel Sullivan who directed my plays Rabbit Hole and Good People to give me dramaturgical advice, terrific. It gets a little tricky when you’re at one of these festivals or conferences and you’re assigned a dramaturg. You know your play incredibly well. You’ve lived with it for months and dug in and you know it. Then they have someone who’s maybe read it a couple of times giving you dramaturgical notes or questioning you. The odds are just against them that they’re going to help you because they don’t know it yet’.

‘Audience dramaturgy? If you consistently sit over three or four performances where people seem disengaged or they’re not laughing the way you think, then you make changes’.

Kenneth Lonergan‘I didn’t get much out of dramaturgs but I was always very self-sufficient. And I had a group of friends to help me. I’m cautious of strangers. What I object to is that people like dramaturgs can insist that you must do it this way or you’re not going to be able to write a good play. I don’t agree with that. There are so many different types of plays’.

Andy McKim‘Because it’s not until a production has had many audiences, that it can truly develop in a way that an artist needs and aspires for their work. We just took a work on tour to Montréal. When we produced it here, it opened at 110 minutes. It was 85 minutes when we took it to Montréal. That’s critically important to have an opportunity to do that. And that’s part of audience dramaturgy. Audience dramaturgy is thinking of the audience for a show as part of the team that is developing the work, rather than the work stopping when it hits its first audience’.

Lucy Morrison‘As a director the building block of my practice is from dramaturgy. That’s how I direct, through the dramaturgy. I can’t imagine someone else taking that role. I worked with a company called Clean Break and during the 8 years that I was there I directed most of the work. And I would take the writer through the process. Before a word was written we were working on what we were going to write’.

‘This gives them access to a dramaturg, for outside eyes and 1‑on‑1 dramaturgy’. Nina Lee Aquino

Emily Morse‘In terms of how we populate the room we know many, many dramaturgs. We would help populate the playwright’s room with whatever collaborator they requested. What we say is: the whole building is dramaturgical in many respects because everything that is done at New Dramatists is development or exploratory or investigative. Many people might function as a dramaturg even though they don’t carry the title of a dramaturg. The resource playwrights can be dramaturgical. Because sometimes they want to have conversations with other writers. There’s a way that that particular type of exchange is more useful. I come from a dramaturgical directorial background so I might provide that but again, it’s all at the request of the playwright. So, if they want feedback I would give it but it’s not something I would offer or solicit. Most of us have dramaturgical backgrounds here’.

‘I feel a dramaturg is someone who is working towards the understanding of the intention of the writer. And fostering the play or the voice of the play on the terms that are set by the writer. So, helping to identify that in



concert with the playwright. And then the understanding of what the writer is intending to do: responding to the play according to those terms’.

‘There is a good definition that I will give credit to a playwright for. I once asked Rogelio Martinez what he thought a good dramaturg was and he said ‘Someone who makes him excited to go back to the play’. So, it’s someone who can work from inside of the play and inside of the writer’s voice to re-enforce what the play is and then how to continue fostering it to its full expression. The question you might be asking is helping them figure out how the play is being received by somebody other than themselves’.

Lynn Nottage‘I believe that because of the structure of American theatres if you are commissioned to write a play by a major theatre, those theatres come with a built-in dramaturg. Whether you want them or not. And so, from very early on, usually from the very first draft, you have someone who is giving you that feedback. Some playwrights have really inter-twined relationships with their dramaturgs and rely very heavily on them for feedback even at the very nascence of the scripts’.

‘Instead of forming relationships with dramaturgs, young playwrights should be finding directors who are both good at dramaturgy and direction’.

George Perrin‘We do all the dramaturgical work but we don’t use the word dramaturg. It makes it sound like there is this entire skills set that’s divorced from writing and production. But what we like to think of is we can help make that play the fullest expression of what the playwright wants it to be. Our job is getting it on stage. So it’s more about getting the play ready for production rather than dramaturgy.

There is an ideological difference between getting a play ready for production and inserting an extra layer and potentially an extra person doing the dramaturgical work on a play’.

Adam Rapp‘I was also directing so I was dramaturgically engaged as a director. A lot of work happens in the rehearsals; a lot of dramaturgy and rewriting. I think I’m more rigorous dramaturgically when I’m directing my own work’.

‘I’ve never found that working with a dramaturg during the writing process, the incubation time, was useful. Sometimes it’s good to talk to someone about it, a friend, another writer. That is to me most valuable. That’s more valuable to me than someone saying if you put A here and B here and C here. That never helps me’.

‘When you have an audience your eyes and ears receive the work differently. Get out of the 1‑to‑1 relationships with dramaturgs. It is no good for a writer’. Enda Walsh

Theresa Rebeck ‘Dramaturgs. Someone finally explained to me that they were put in place to ‘help the playwright’. But the confusion is that the producer or the production entity often pays the dramaturg and so their loyalty is towards management. It’s a very delicate and easily misunderstood function. When you are writing your play you don’t want someone else telling you how to write it. Often there is not enough time to build trust with the dramaturg.



I had one dramaturg that I worked with, we developed a relationship, a trust, and we did a lot of plays together. I’ve recently worked with someone at Roundabout Theatre Company that was great but generally I eye them warily’.

Andrea Romaldi‘To help the playwright or a group of theatre creators identify or close the gaps between what a play is currently communicating to an audience and what they want the play to communicate’.

Andrea makes the point that responses from audiences to a workshop are not always a good gauge of how a work is progressing. ‘They are much more critical of a production. This has something to do with their investment. Readings are not always a good benchmark of how plays will go. Dramaturgy is a play’s audience, an informed audience. A writer/creator has an idea of what they want their work to say to an audience. Sometimes they might know their play too well and might believe that things are in the play that aren’t. Or they believe the play is communicating something that it isn’t’.

‘This is where structure comes in. A lot of people think that structure is prescriptive but structure is about: how do you set up and fulfil expectations in the audience. Or, how do you set up and not fulfil expectations for the audience in a way that allows you to communicate what you want to communicate? That is the power of structure. There have been many times when I have read plays and thought it was going in one direction but then it didn’t. And sometimes that is a choice for artistic impact and sometimes it is an accident’.

‘This is an area that I speak to about with writers early on in the process. This is the intellectual side to dramaturgy but there is also a really strong intuitive part and that is: what is hidden in this play from the people who have

created it? What have they put into it that they don’t know that they are exploring? And if they did know they were exploring it, where could they take it if they did open up that exploration in a way that is challenging and exciting for them but also challenging and exciting for the audience’?

‘Sometimes, particularly with our own work, we might be writing something but we don’t know what it is about. We’re not able to articulate it. If we were able to do that then sometimes we wouldn’t have to create it. So sometimes a dramaturg can be really helpful and say ‘I think that you are really struggling with this idea’. Introducing that consciously into that discussion about the play and how it works and what the creators want to get out of it can be really useful’.

‘To help the playwright or a group of theatre creators identify or close the gaps between what a play is currently communicating to an audience and what they want the play to communicate’. Andrea Romaldi

Clare Slater‘There is no formula for dramaturgy. I need to get to know the writer as much as possible; their personality, how they like to take notes. Whether they really want them at all. I’m at my best when I know the writers work well. If I have worked with them before, that really is the ideal. The relationship is so important. Writers always know the answers more than anyone else, so when I am trying to help them



move something through to a next draft I have to hold in my head the questions that I know we need answering whilst also figuring out what the writer thinks needs answering’.

Nina Steiger‘Dramaturgy is one of those roles that has many, many different functions and I do a little bit of a lot of them at the National. Proposing material for development and production, identifying artists and pairing and brokering collaborations, developing and improving material towards the production process. Also, production dramaturgy. Seeing through the process and arriving quite late in to do a polish towards the end. Helping to hold and curate the long-term plan for a particular artist’s career. Investigating and imagining collaborations internationally. Seeing material around the world. And looking at canonical texts with fresh eyes and marrying that to what some of the more broad, strategic aims are for the company. So, if that’s around cultural diversity or formal invention, kind of thinking about the ecosystems of artists that we work with and who and how’.

‘I always ask the writer what effect they are looking for. Why is this a piece of theatre and what do you want the audience to think and feel when they leave? What is the offer that the show is making to the audience on the night and to culture as a whole? What is this play’s actual purpose? What is the change it wants to bring about in an audience and the emotions it wants to inspire to do so, to bring that change about? That’s the main question I ask’.

I asked Nina about fine tuning the script when it is in production. ‘By the time we’re talking turkey (serious business), that level of work has been done. We’re past cuts by that time. Of course, you’re always looking for cuts. The kind of nitty-gritty of the script work, e.g. trims across the length of the script to help it

achieve its aim really help it hit. However, we’ve figured out its aim by the time we program it’.

‘Stepping back from it, it’s really a process of protecting the writer’s experience of the production so that they’re in a good place to discover what the play is. And that’s one of the things that often happens during the six weeks of rehearsals: the writer discovers what the play is and goes with it on that journey. It’s trying to imagine what the impact of the script is intended to be and helping it achieve that’.

Simon Stephens‘That word has only recently come to England. When I started writing there was a lot of suspicion about the word ‘dramaturg’. I have worked with Graham Whybrow and he definitely wouldn’t use that word to describe his work. It comes with connotations of repairing things when Graham Whybrow is more interested in provoking and inspiring’.

Emma Tibaldo‘Yes, in English, it’s dramaturgy. In French, it’s une personne qui accompagne un dramaturge. So, it’s the person who accompanies a playwright’.

‘It’s not about putting a stamp on the play, with the idea that the dramaturg will make it better, but that the dramaturg is there to open up processes and different avenues and possibilities. To make it comfortable for a playwright to risk, or for a creator to come in and take risks. To try different things and maybe not know where they’re going’.

‘Dramaturgy can also mean what are the kinds of stories that need to be discovered. If the theatres aren’t willing to bring them forward, then it’s our responsibility. It’s a privilege to be able to look beyond what established theatre companies look at as theatre and make sure that people who don’t have a place to develop or be heard or to experiment, are given a space for that to happen’.



‘It’s more about changing that hierarchy of the director playwright; into playwright dramaturg, sometimes director, sometimes not, depending on who’s in the room and the actors. We try to keep the idea of collaboration for those who want collaboration, open. And for those who don’t, then tailor it to whatever they may need’.

Judith Thompson‘Director as dramaturg? Directors would have to be incredible dramaturgs and often they’re not’.

‘A good dramaturg does so much. It’s very important to have only one dramaturg. I think writers really suffer and it’s happened here, when there’s a room full of people and they all have an opinion, which can be so damaging’.

Anne Washburn‘Dramaturgs. I feel like it’s very, very useful to have another perspective on a play, but I feel it’s a really intimate thing who you get advice from. Somebody can have a perspective on your play which is totally valid and very interesting but their aesthetic maybe different from yours. They may see the play in a very fundamentality different way than you see it and their analysis may be brilliant analysis for a different play’.

‘I felt like sometimes I have worked with dramaturgs and it’s been great and it’s been super helpful. Other times I have felt what they are saying is true in some universe but not in the universe of my play. When a theatre just assigns you dramaturgs to me it very much feels like an arranged marriage where both people may be great and sexy, but the chemistry may just not be meaningful or helpful’.

Enda Walsh‘I worked with that dramaturg (Tim) for 6 years until he said ‘You don’t need me’. However, during that time Tim would interrogate my ideas. I think the role of dramaturg has

become quite passive. I like someone who really gets involved. Who argues it out with me. Something deep in the dramaturg’s stomach says ‘We have to have a conversation about this’. But talking to writers about their experiences and based on my own; it’s like the role has become nebulous and just someone who links the director to the writer’.

Bob White‘The most important thing is creating trust. You’re trying to establish a relationship with the writer so that they know your opinions and you’re really just having a chat with them most of the time, and you’re just responding to what you see on the page. For that to have any kind of weight, or to be helpful, it has to be based on trust. I’m not there to criticise. I’m not there to make judgements. I’m there in a legitimate sense of inquiry. If the play has struck a chord in me, for whatever reason, I follow that to find out what they were trying to accomplish. So, there’s that; creating trust’.

‘We’re all supportive of one another. There’s no such thing as mistakes, there’s only choices that are better than others. The best idea in the room wins. All of those things that are vital to how we create theatre. So, there’s that; setting up that relationship’.

‘And then I think about what are the strength skills I have that I bring to the room. I have a really good sense of structure. Once I have an idea of what the playwright is trying to do, then I can assist on how that material could be, or should be, or might be organised to deliver the ultimate experience to the audience. So, what I think I can provide to playwrights is a sense of how we can shape the play to create the effect they want to put to the audience. I think why that is most helpful to the writers is that they’re so close to it, they can’t actually see the structure’.



Plays need time to develop. Ideas need to percolate. Playwrights need time to mine forms that will best serve their ideas. Sometimes there is a race for projects to be programmed in a theatre company’s season without due lead up time. This results in a half-baked production and a critical response that very often shafts the play’s shortcomings back onto the actors, as they are the most visible element of the performance. No one is served well under these conditions. The playwright, the director, the performers, the designers, the theatre company and importantly; the reputation of Australian plays.

I asked interviewees: ‘What is the average time it takes to develop a play’? The responses are from playwrights, representatives of script development agencies and theatre companies and also from theatre creators Robert Lepage and Mike Leigh.

Bob White‘In depends on the writer. Paradise Lost was 2 years. But that was the quickest in recent times. 3 years is about right’.

Enda Walsh‘I usually only do 1 draft of a play. I write the draft in 3 weeks. If I feel I am ready to write it, I’ll write the draft in 3 weeks and then I won’t redraft or I won’t re-craft it. I’ll make some changes but it won’t be until late in the rehearsal period. I believe that you need to be real enough and confident enough to trust your gut. A lot of artistic process is about trying to capture the instinct of writing something even before you’ve written the 1st sentence’.

Emma Tibaldo‘It’s usually 2 years’.

Lizzie Stern‘There’s really no answer to that. Some plays can take up to 10 years just to develop. I’m thinking about Heidi Schreck’s play What the Constitution Means to Me. That was in development for about a decade. Whereas some of the plays on our stages this season were in development for 2 years. I would say anywhere from 6 months to a decade. I know that’s crazy. Probably a couple of years to average it out’.

Simon Stephens‘Varies wildly. Shortest ever, Sea Wall was about 3 months. Longest ever about 4 years’.

Nina Steiger‘It can be at the very shortest a year or so, a year or 2. From conceiving of it, creating it, delivering it, programming it and realising it. I can’t see it at the National being any less than a year and a half. Usually a bit more’.

THE WISDOM OF MANY

development: plays need time

‘I'm usually working on several projects at once and often a play is put aside for several months (or longer) while I work on something else and can get back to the play’. David Lindsay-Abaire


Clare Slater‘How long is a piece of string? It depends on the project. For example, the Donmar staged a new adaptation by David Harrower of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie earlier this year. David has been thinking about that adaptation for about 10 years. The Donmar came on board into that thinking process. Something that was established long before we were around. The Donmar took on that commission and that took perhaps 2 years for it to get into rehearsals. So that’s a really long gestation period. The flipside of that is sometimes we programme pieces very quickly, perhaps before they’re even finished because they’re related to current politics’.

Andrea Romaldi‘About 3 years. Some people take 5 years. That’s not typical. Some take 2. That’s not typical either. 3 to 4 years’.

Adam Rapp‘Ideally, I would like 3 weeks to write it and then I would like to have a week with actors because directing is part of my process. I would like to work with actors to stage whatever the world (of the play) is and start to talk to designers and involve them in the process during that week. And maybe show it to a small audience to show where we are in the process. I have thought about it several times. Of starting a company based on that model. And every time I think about it I realise that I don’t have enough money and I have to work in TV. If you could create a theatre farm under that model, I think a lot of really exciting work would come from it. Every playwright is different. Some playwrights want a very aggressive dramaturg or want their director to be involved early on, or their actor to be involved early on. You would want to foster that for each playwright’.

Christian Parker ‘So I would say from pen to stage, like average, 2, two and a half years’.

Lucy Morrison‘I would say about 3 years’.

Kenneth Lonergan‘2 years sounds about right, but a play could be spread out over 20’.

David Lindsay-Abaire ‘This is a really hard question because I’m usually working on several projects at once and often a play is put aside for several months (or longer) while I work on something else, and can get back to the play. If I have nothing else going on, a 1st draft of a play (after I’ve been thinking about it for a while) usually takes 3 to 4 months. Then maybe I’ll bring it into my writers’ group and do a rewrite. That’ll take me another month. Or I won’t touch it for a year. Or I’ll do a reading at Manhattan Theatre Club and they’ll schedule it for their season but it’ll be for a slot a year and a half away. So I guess it could take me anywhere between 8 months and 5 years to go from 1st draft to production. There are just so many variables in my life, almost all of them involving my workload and crammed schedule. If I had nothing else going except a play, then I bet the average would be 18 to 24 months from 1st draft to stage’.

Robert Lepage‘I take the 8 weeks and I spread it over 2 years. What happens is that I need the people for a 5-day workshop; we do readings, workshops, improvisations. And at the end, there’s tons of stuff that’s come out and it’s really interesting. People vanish for 4 months. And then they come back and we have a 2-week period. And then, after that 6 months goes by, we have a 3-week period. I’m way, way further ahead. Some people have done some research and checked things out. But it’s all the rendering,

THE WISDOM OF MANYdevelopment: plays need time


like your computer, that an 8-week process doesn’t allow to happen. So often we’ve done 5 days of work and it’s a big mess and we don’t know where we’re going. But some really exciting things came up. People go and do other stuff. And during that time, something happens in the brain. I don’t know how it works, but there’s a rendering thing that goes on there. And when we come back we’re all surprised that the show is just popping out and we’re seeing the connections and relationships. ‘Oh, that character is related to that character’. So, you have to let a lot of rendering time between. At the end, you have an impression you have been rehearsing for 2 years. But you’ve actually been rehearsing for 8 weeks. This is something I worked at for a long time, and it really works wonders. Sometimes, there are all these knots. These narrative things. Let’s just forget about it. 4 months go by and suddenly that knot doesn’t exist anymore. The solution came out of an improvisation that we never could have done before’.

‘But it’s all the rendering, like your computer, that an 8‑week process doesn’t allow to happen’. Robert Lepage

‘I always think of Leonard Cohen who talked about some writers, their writing is like a raging river and for others it’s like a trickling brook’. Maureen Labonté

Mike Leigh‘At the National (Theatre) both the plays that I did at the National in the last decade. Nick Hytner at the National said ‘The standard rehearsal week here is 6 weeks. I will give you 3 standard rehearsals so we have 18 weeks. So we had 18 weeks for each play. We had 10 weeks for Abigail’s Party’.

Maureen Labonté‘I would probably say on average, it could easily be 2 years. I always think of Leonard Cohen who talked about some writers, their writing is like a raging river and for others it’s like a trickling brook. He said that he was a trickling brook. I have always kept that in mind. Some writers are quicker, they can churn it out. But I think a really good play is not like writing for TV. A formula helps increase speed. If you’re talking about writing for TV or film and you’re being encouraged to write to a formula, well maybe the work goes a bit faster. But a really good play, let’s say 2 years. Even just getting to a first draft for some writers can take a long time’.

Tony Kushner‘I’ve read new plays that were written over the course of 2 weeks that were pretty much ready to go, and I’ve worked on plays that were developed for 9 years’.

Lucy Kirkwood‘Definitely a couple of years. And a couple of years before the writing to think about it. Because there is a lot of thought for me to consider whether it’s even worth writing’.

Terry Johnson‘5 months to 10 years. I’m an irregular writer so there is really no pattern’.

Pippa Hill‘We’ve got 3 stages that are of quite different scale. The Other Place is a studio space, which is a very flexible studio space. We can commission

DEVELOPING PLAYWRIGHTS AND THEIR PLAYSdevelopment: plays need time


work for quite a fast turnaround for that space. So that it can be more reactive to immediate political events. We can get brand new plays in there quite fast. We have produced plays with 6 months lead in. It’s between 6 months to 2 years for that stage. For the larger spaces, the Swan and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, we’re asking writers to write plays for upwards of 20 characters. It’s a thrust stage. They’re both theatrical spaces. They don’t respond well to filmic structures, or very pure naturalism or subtext. They need quite a real theatrical heartbeat. Those tend to take a little bit longer. Typically, one play will take about 2 years. For the RSC we’re opening a big musical next year and that would have been 2 ½ to 3 years in the making. Matilda took a very long time and that was 5 years. It just depends’.

‘It’s a thrust stage. They’re both theatrical spaces. They don’t respond well to filmic structures, or very pure naturalism or subtext’. Pippa Hill

Christopher Hampton‘In the first part of my career, when I mostly did plays, I would aim to write a play every couple of years and about 9 months of that time would be working directly on the play. The rest of the time would be thinking about it etc. However, I finished a play the week prior to this interview and for complicated reasons the play had to be written quickly and I wrote it in about 4 weeks’.

Joanna Falck‘3 years is about the average. There are lots of caveats but I would think that 3 years is about average’.

‘Also, every time we go into one of our 4‑week rehearsals, they can’t be sure the play is going to work, so there is always that excitement and fear’. Chris Campbell

Chris Campbell‘There’s a constant tension in this building over whether they should give things plenty of time to develop or whether we should bung them on as soon as possible. That’s a real polarity in the building, which I find really useful. I love it. I’m very excited by the fact that, for example, if you give me a play now right this minute, the Royal Court could conceivably program it in September of next year. And that’s happened. It’s a feature of U.K. theatre culture that we don’t really rehearse enough and the runs aren’t long enough. The Royal Court does between 12 to 15 productions a year. Manhattan Theatre Club does 4. It costs you more to do a huge production. We, the Brits, Royal Court; just keep it moving, which means that some directors get very frustrated because they would like longer to rehearse. Rehearsal process is 4 weeks, all new works. Some re-writing happens in rehearsal but I hope to have it done before then. And we’re still re-writing in preview. It’s a challenge. Sometimes it gets very hairy indeed. Also, every time we go into one of our 4-week rehearsals, they can’t be sure the play is going to work, so there is always that excitement and fear’.

Michel Marc Bouchard‘I have the good fortune to have the luxury of time now, so I don’t have to rush my projects. It’s always 3 or 4 years in front of me’.

THE WISDOM OF MANYdevelopment: plays need time


Generally writers had no problem discussing their approach to playwriting. My initial thoughts re playwriting process were borne from the notion of performance writers grafting some aspects of their screenwriting practice onto their playwriting practice. As expressed in the introduction to this report this line of inquiry is not to suggest all stage plays adopt the screenwriting structural paradigm or that all plays are naturalistic. Having written for both stage and screen and in the knowledge of the extensive pre-writing documents generated for screenwriting, I was curious as to the impact one writing form has on the other. I return to Andrea Romaldi’s comments on this topic.

‘I believe structure is about: how do you set up and fulfil expectations in the audience’? Andrea Romaldi

…‘Playwriting is pretty emergent. I will write and write and write to find structure’. Hannah Moscovitch

Another aspect of this enquiry is linked to endings. I asked writers if they begin with the story before they write or if it evolves as they write. Throughout this section I have included my questions when needed for clarity.

THE WISDOM OF MANY

playwriting process


Bekah Brunstetter‘I’m not much of an outliner or planner. I get an idea and I start to feel it. There’s usually a song that makes me feel like the play feels and I listen to the song over and over again and then I just start writing. I haven’t had a new play that is not a commission in years, which is great but it changes that process because you then have to artificially create that feeling for the deadline that you’ve been assigned as opposed with just feeling it and wanting to write it’. I asked Bekah if her screenwriting practice impacts on her playwriting process. ‘I really need to keep the 2 forms of writing separate in my head. This is why I have never outlined a play because it would seem like the wrong process for it. But one thing I have done that I have pretty much done since grad school: I will write the 1st scene of a play and then I’ll write the last 2 pages of the play’.

Sheila Callaghan‘With screen I do a lot more structuring beforehand so I have a sense of where a plot point is going to fall, on what page. Or I’ll have a sense of what major event is going to happen two-thirds of the way through. I plan it in outline form and flesh it out as I go. Versus, with playwriting, I will find pieces of flesh and build it around that. I write the things that I’m most excited to write first and then build it around that’.

‘In films they have all these different techniques and why, when we write a play, are we always seeking them out’? Robert Lepage

Jason Grote‘Usually by the time I get about halfway through I have a pretty strong sense of where it’s going. There are different kinds of climaxes in different kind of journeys. My innate sense of story is really reinforced, I think, by constant screenwriting. I like plays to be really highly theatrical. All of us collectively on the planet have watched a lot more television than we’ve seen theatre. So, we have certain expectations of where a TV scene is going to go’.

Nicolas Billon‘With my playwriting I always know where I am headed. I usually start by knowing the beginning and knowing the ending. I try to outline when I write a play. Although, unusually, the play I am writing at the moment, I don’t know what the ending is. This is partly due to the fact that I just spent 2 years doing almost nothing but film and TV so I wanted to work on something where I don’t know everything’.

Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman‘I’ll talk about the work that I’m just doing with Tarragon. It’s called Guarded Girls. Inspired by a woman who died in prison. Now I’ve left that woman and went into a relationship between mothers and daughters in general. I did a lot of research and interviewed a lot of people. And then I just sat down and the story just came out. I’ve never really had that experience. The story just unfolded. I was just listening to what I was writing. I didn’t know what was going to happen next. Because I’d had, at that point, been doing a lot of film and TV where you’ve got everything before you write it. It was so great to go back to the unknown where the characters start talking and you follow. At the start I usually have an image in my head. With all my plays, I see something and I start from there. And then with my writing, it’s completely about cutting. I write way too much, way too many images and it’s always about taking

THE WISDOM OF MANYplaywriting process


things away. Up until the last workshop I’m cutting lines and even one word’. I asked Charlotte if her screenwriting practice impacts on her playwriting process. ‘It has helped do a better pitch. I’ve now got some theatre jobs based on pitching an idea. I would never have been able to do that before. But so much of TV is about pitching and it was something I really disliked doing. I’ve actually become good at it. It’s translated to being an advantage in playwriting’.

‘It was so great to go back to the unknown where the characters start talking and you follow’. Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman

Hannah MoscovitchHannah’s first plays were produced in 2005/6 and it wasn’t until 2013 that Hannah started working in TV. ‘My screenwriting practice follows industry standards and the Writers’ Guild of Canada. When you are paid is when you turn in documents. They normally go from a 2-pager, to an outline, from a 1st draft to a 2nd draft to a final draft. I had no experience as a screenwriter and I’d never been asked to do that. The other major difference is that playwriting is pretty emergent. I will write and write and write to find structure. And character. I’ll end up discarding much of my writing. But that’s not what I do with TV. I mastermind. I go inside out. I’ll write from the get-go and then I fill in what’s going to happen. A lot of the thinking is up front and it’s not tied to the actual act of writing. And one of the big changes switching to TV was sitting in a room and pitching. I would never articulate ideas because they were in the draft that I would deliver but TV changed all that’. I asked

Hannah if she consciously considers structure. ‘Because I come from character and voice and fragmentary moments, I was always hard on myself as regards structure. I had to learn it and impose it on my practice’. I asked Hannah if her screenwriting practice impacts on her playwriting process. ‘I feel the TV experience, articulating my ideas, pitching ideas, has made me technically stronger as a writer. Once I had been in TV for a number of years I was just structurally incredibly fast. I questioned this. Am I going to lose my instincts? But I think it was really good to be forced to understand my craft. I don’t outline for theatre because I like the difference. I like that I don’t pre-plan. I like to roll around in it and work it out’.

‘A lot of the thinking is up front and it’s not tied to the actual act of writing’. Hannah Moscovitch

Judith Thompson‘I start always with monologues. Some people are wary of monologues. But I think a monologue takes you to the true soul and heart of a character, the unique voice of a character. The monologue doesn’t have to make into the play. We tend to homogenise our voices, the way we speak, because it’s about bonding when we speak to each other, when we talk about the weather. It’s a shared idiom, a shared language. But when there’s a volcanic monologue that’s really an interior voice expelled, a sort of free association; I always start with a monologue because then you understand the character’s private voice’. I also asked Judith if she has a story when she starts to write. ‘Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. We have to find sections in the play that are not dialogue with subtext, but are the voice emerging’. I asked Judith if her screenwriting

DEVELOPING PLAYWRIGHTS AND THEIR PLAYSplaywriting process


practice impacts on her playwriting process. ‘Shorter scenes, starting in the middle of a scene rather than the beginning, just being muscular. And also, structure. High stakes. They can be emotional. They don’t have to be a child about to be run over by a car, or a kidnap. They don’t have to be that. But we have to find the equivalent of high stakes on the stage, because the audience needs to be rivetted throughout. A lot of plays, let’s face it, are so boring that you want to die. That sense that character is action, that’s what I take from Aristotle most of all. That character is not personality but action. We only are by what we do’.

Michel Marc BouchardI asked Michel Marc if he outlines the play he is writing before he writes or does he just sit down and write. ‘I sit down and write. I have the good fortune to have the luxury of time now, so I don’t have to rush my projects. It’s always 3 or 4 years in front of me. I say to my students after 15 to 20 pages of writing, ‘Now you have to listen to what you have wrote. We have to hear what’s happening’. I asked Michel Marc if his screenwriting practice impacts on his playwriting process. ‘Yes. Because in movies you have the opportunity to move fast. You can cut and go suddenly somewhere else. Before, in my plays, I wrote act by act. Now, I’m more concentrated on moving the story forward. And I learned that through the structure of a screenplay’.

‘Now, I’m more concentrated on moving the story forward. And I learned that through the structure of a screenplay’. Michel Marc Bouchard

Robert Lepage‘When I tried to write the film The Confessional. There were all these steps. I really tried hard to write the project and then we postponed the project for a year because I just couldn’t write it. I knew what I wanted to do and what to say. But there was no way. In the meantime, I bumped into some people who did have the Syd Fields’ techniques and were counselled about plot-points on page 10 and on page 78 and the 5 acts. And then, there was the other system, the 3-act system with triangulation etc. So, then it was easier for me to approach the writing of The Confessional. Then these techniques and different ways started to have an influence on my theatre writing. Because, I thought in films they have all these different techniques and why, when we write a play, are we always seeking them out? So, after The Confessional we did creations that were based on some of these tenets. I felt as if some of the work we had done was 5-act based. I got more interested with the European-based system that Woody Allen uses in many of his films, which of course distinguishes some writing from the rest of America, which is a 9-act system. There are 9 acts. But the last act is not number 9. It’s number 8 because there’s an act 0. And act 0 can or cannot be, your story. It’s the back story. It’s the thing that justifies the rest of the 8 acts. So, I started to work with that system and created Lipsynch, the 9-hour show and we used that system. The thing about film structure and the influence it has on theatre writing, I think it makes theatre more accessible to today’s audience’.

‘Theatre is usually about unity of space. Even in Shakespeare. There’s something about theatre that makes it very non-cinematic in its narratives. Someone walks in, they close the door, they walk some more, they sit down, and then says ‘Why don’t we have dinner’? In the



cinema you would cut to the end and it’s the end of the dinner. All of those cinematic rules. One of those editing rules is, ‘Come in as late as you can and get out as early as you can’. Well, we use that. We force ourselves in the theatre to use that. We say, ‘Why don’t we do that? What’s stopping us from doing that in the theatre’? We’ve created an adaptation of this vocabulary, which is very cinematic, to the theatre. The audience is not at the end of the play before you are, which is much more often these days because the audience is much more educated narratively than we were 20, 30, 50 years ago. They’re used to been told stories through such a lot of crazy ways. They’re very educated in a certain way and much more open to a story that’s discursive. A lot of people believe that you still have to address the audience in a certain order, in a certain way, and usually when that happens the audience are at the end of the play before you are. That’s why they’re bored’.

David Henry Hwang‘I continued to write plays when I started to write screenplays. If anything, I think my ability to plot plays got better when I started writing movies. I think M. Butterfly is a more plotted play than I wrote earlier in my career as a result of my understanding of how plots work from working in film. There are people who say that you really can’t start a play from an idea, you have to start a play from characters or situation. I don’t happen to believe that. I believe that you can start a play from an idea, but not if you know what your idea is. In other words if you’re saying ‘I want to write a play about climate change’. And you start with that point of view then in a sense you don’t have to write the play. But if your question is ‘Why is it hard for human beings to comprehend climate change, to the extent that we could actually do anything about it’, that’s a question and I think that’s something that you can explore

in a play. I vaguely like to know where I am beginning and where I am ending, so I feel like the analogy is going on a road trip’.

Tony KushnerI asked Tony if he could articulate his playwriting practice. ‘Yes. I can. I’m not rigid about it. It’s not like I work out the way to do it and that’s how I do it every time. Every play requires something slightly different. I feel that most playwrights start with an outline. And there is a whole long process before you get even near an outline: a description based on what you know at the time the play is going to be. And then you continue to read and to think and to make notes and the outline will undoubtedly change over and over again. And you do it and usually at some point where the outline seems solid in some way, you really start to believe in it and the characters have materialised enough in that they begin to inhabit the outline and you start to hear things not in your own voice but in the voice of the characters. And then you start writing scenes. I don’t know about other writers but mostly I work on things linearly. I begin at the beginning and work my way through. There have been a couple of times that I skipped around in the outline and as you are writing the scenes, the outline begins to change as well and you keep going back to it. It’s a reassuring kind of writing because no one else is going to see it and it’s a way to escape from the fear of writing, which is considerable’. I asked Tony if he used any of the filmic tenets, e.g. inciting incidents, turning points and other formal film structural devices in his plays. ‘I never include any of those structural formal tenets in either my stage or screenplays’.

‘One of the things I love about being a playwright is that when a play is on stage the audience is always aware that it’s a play’.



David Lindsay-Abaire‘Well, it’s a little tricky to answer because I think every play I’ve written has been written in a very different way. I’ve become much more crafty than I was earlier in that I was really writing out of instinct and either there was a scenario that I was interested in or a couple of characters and I would just write without really knowing where I was going or how it was going to be built. Rabbit Hole was very deliberately crafted and built in a very specific way. Well, to start at the beginning and I do think this is true from the beginning, the way it mostly starts is I’ll have 12 or 13 ideas in my head that might become plays some day and they are there for a long time usually and when they don’t go away I think: there’s something here, let me see. And usually what I’ll do is take 2 or 3 of the ideas and mash them together and the play comes out of that. For Rabbit Hole it was this advice that Marsha (Norman) had given me many years before: write about the thing that terrifies you the most’.

…‘there is a speed and muscle that you learn when you are writing for TV that did come to inform the way I wrote a play’. Theresa Rebeck

That was the stimulus for David’s ideas. I asked him about his practice. As he had been writing screenplays by the time he wrote Rabbit Hole, in terms of his writing process did he consciously think of 3-act paradigms and dramatic rising action and turning points and mid-points? ‘Correct. Without being a slave to it’. And how did that impact on your playwriting? ‘Completely. Things that I had arrogantly dismissed as a young writer

saying ‘Well, I don’t want to write that, that’s formulaic. Why would I ever want to adhere to this hero’s journey or Joseph Campbell or this inciting incident and crisis point and all that nonsense’? But you had to do that for screenplays because at least working within the studio system they expect a certain shape. And I wanted to be the good student, I wanted to write. And the more I did it, the more I realised: all these structural elements would make my playwriting a whole lot easier. If I can just hold on to it a little bit without it becoming obvious. I wanted to hold on to the impulses and the wildness that I hoped I had as a playwright but it definitely shaped and informed my writing after that’. Would you map out your play in terms of how the scenes unfolded or the scene’s content and things like change in dramatic intent etc? ‘Certainly that is exactly what I do now. I feel like I was doing it instinctually in those early plays. I’d see lots of plays. I’d know how they were built. And so even though I hadn’t studied the specifics I was doing it instinctually. But once I could label it I realised this is what I should be doing’.

Kenneth LonerganI asked Kenneth if he thinks about story before he writes his plays and if the concept of knowing the ending has come from his screenwriting. ‘It’s all about that in a funny way because I write the story based on the strange events that happen between characters. I have always thought about endings and also if I don’t have a structural device to hang things on I’m in trouble. You can write on inspiration and idea for a while but it doesn’t carry you through. Part of the fun of it is thinking about a story structure’.

‘You can write on inspiration and idea for a while but it doesn’t carry you through’. Kenneth Lonergan



Lynn Nottage‘The Aristotelian very classical notion of the marriage between story and plot and the movement of characters: I believe my plays adhere very closely to the Aristotelian development of character. But I believe how they deviate is the notion of who belongs on the stage and what characters can be at the centre of drama. My screenwriting practice is easier to articulate because it is more formal than playwriting. The reason I find playwriting exciting is because it is dynamic and it can structurally shift in ways that are magical whereas with screenplays they tend to be much more rigid in structure’. I asked Lynn if those years of writing for screen impacted on her playwriting practice. ‘I believe that the rigidity of the storytelling structure of screenplays is very helpful. It was personally helpful for me because it taught me how to outline. When I was first writing screenplays for a production company they always wanted me to begin with very detailed pre-writing documents. These documents forced me to think about plot and story in ways that I generally didn’t do when writing plays, which were generally more free-form. After spending so much time writing screenplays, I brought some of those techniques back to my playwriting, which helped me write more quickly and find what I wanted to write about. I don’t always write a treatment when I write a play but if I get stuck I spend time thinking about story structure in a different way. And thinking about character journey in a different way. Those are techniques that I have borrowed from screenwriting. And it is most certainly true because I was recently in a Writers’ Room and I found that breaking down of character was a really interesting technique that allowed them to go much deeper into the life and the story of the individual characters. Some of those techniques are useful for a playwright’.

Adam Rapp‘I’ve written about 35 plays. The journey for each one is different. I will often know the evitable action of what the play is at the beginning. And I’ll know some middle stuff. I won’t know what people do to each other in scenes. I won’t how long scenes are. I don’t care so much. My whole thing, at least early on, is to get people into a room and leave them there as long as possible and don’t let them leave until they really have to. It’s very Chekhovian in that way. And people were always marvelling; ‘How can you write these whole plays with one scene’? And I love that. It was harder for me to do the opposite, to structure something. I learnt that through television, mostly. I figured out how to write with more plot points, more efficiently, because of the screenwriting. I think right now I’m in a really lucky time with what is happening in premium cable television because there’s an openness for different kinds of writing. Producers are less concerned with 4-act structure or 3-act structure. You can be more experimental. Shows like Fargo. This Season 2 of Fargo is one of the most brilliant things I’ve ever seen in any form. It totally breaks its rules constantly and it’s playing with form and it’s changing the point of view constantly’.

I asked Adam if his screenwriting practice impacts on his playwriting process. ‘Definitely. For example, I’m writing the book for a musical of The Outsiders and we’re very far along with it. We’ve already done workshops and stuff. Because of the nature of the songs dominating the narrative, and songs carrying the emotional weight and revelations, I had to get into the notion of writing to set up a song or to let the song dominate a scene. It was a more mechanical kind of writing. And I’ve found that screenwriting has definitely helped that because it’s more



plot-driven. It’s not about the language or the texture of character so much. It’s about how do we get to a song’.Do you consciously think of structural tenets when you write? ‘I don’t ever think about that when I’m writing. But always in my 2nd draft, I get into all that. The 1st draft is a mess. It’s instinctive. I think that now that I’ve written more plays, and I still enjoy it, I am now able to solve problems as I go more so that I used to when I would write these early drafts of plays that would come out of me in 2 to 3 days sometimes, crazily fast. Now, I can still write with that kind of velocity, but now I have a bit more understanding of what’s working and what’s not working, just because of experience. It’s still a bit of a mess. I have this mess and then I go back and I really try to examine it and tighten it and change it and find where the pivots are. To me, theatre is so much about an audiences’ nervous system and how we invest in character. If I can really get inside the character’s nervous system and stay ahead of the audience at the same time plot-wise, I’m winning at both ends’.

‘Theatre is so much about an audiences’ nervous system and how we invest in character’. Adam Rapp

Theresa Rebeck At what point in your career did you move into screenwriting? ‘I had been writing plays for about 10 years. One of my early projects, Spike Heels, people were interested it and thought it would make a good movie. I knew nothing about writing screenplays. And I don’t think you can learn it from people who ‘develop screenplays’. The process is very regimented. Outlines, treatments. The people who develop

films work in a corporate structure and documents make sense to them and they really believe that talking and giving notes on a bunch of docs is going to get you to a place where you can write a really good screenplay’. I asked Theresa if her screenwriting practice impacts on her playwriting process. ‘I was also doing a lot of television where some places required you to produce pre-script documents and some didn’t. What I learnt about TV is forward motion. There is no question that there is a speed and muscle that you learn when you are writing for TV that did come to inform the way I wrote a play. All the pre-writing docs I was asked to write drove me bananas. After all the thrashing out, I just didn’t feel like writing. And when I came back to writing for the theatre or fiction, I wouldn’t do it at all’.

Anne Washburn‘I learned very recently that Agatha Christie, when she started her murder mysteries did not know who the killer was. I just always assumed she knew and was creating a puzzle. But no, it’s just that she wrote and she got to the end and worked out who the killer was and then she went back and made revisions. That really spoke to me in terms of the degree to which I don’t know what’s going to happen next’.

Christopher HamptonAre you able to articulate your playwriting practice? ‘It does change for each work. What I try to do is find a style for each piece that is appropriate for the subject rather than developing a style of my own. There probably is a unique identifiable style but my aim is to make each work completely distinctive’. Do you map out the story first? ‘By and large, the planning period together with notes and construction would tend to be more than twice the time taken on actual writing. I spend a deal of time in the planning and when I am ready I write. I did a lot of TV work in the 1970s



around the same time when I did feature films. I’m about 50/50 playwright and screenwriter’. Have you written a 1-page synopsis? ‘No. I can’t do that. I told them ‘I’ve written the script’. I’m no good at those documents. And secondly, I don’t approve of it’. Has your playwriting practice evolved? ‘In the early days I wasn’t taking my writing seriously. The play went on and I was feted. After that, your enemy becomes self-consciousness. The second play was hard and the plays have remained hard to write. I don’t find the process easy ever. It’s always a struggle’.

‘In the early days I wasn’t taking my writing seriously. The play went on and I was feted. After that, your enemy becomes self‑consciousness. The second play was hard and the plays have remained hard to write. I don’t find the process easy ever. It’s always a struggle’.Christopher Hampton

Terry JohnsonDid the structural elements of TV writing change your playwriting? ‘Not the structural aspects but the workman-like aspects. The thing about writing for TV, back then anyway, it wasn’t a heart project. It was the first time I sat down with the script editor and he said, ‘Here’s the outline of the next episode’. From the beginning you’re not on your own, you’re writing for someone else. So, the nature of how you write changes. You throw more away. There’s a point where, to get the show finished, you just do what you’re told. And that was very

healthy. And I don’t know, there was this big splurge in a way I didn’t know before, which was, stop worrying. Just write something and see where it takes you. And to realise that, to generate a good 60 pages, you were going to have to write 300 pages. Playwrights constantly try to edit what they’re doing at the same time they’re doing it and you can’t quite do that. You have to take a pencil for a walk’.

You’re not thinking consciously about inciting incidents, turning points or mid points? ‘No. I know that they can be applied and probably I unconsciously apply them now, knowing that terminology. But it’s unconscious. For me and most playwrights I’ve encountered, the last thing you learn is 2nd act structure, because you spend a lot of time procrastinating and working out how to even generate the play. But the sneaky truth is you can put almost anything into Act 1 as long as it’s entertaining or intriguing. But if you don’t get your 2nd act structure right, you’re dead in the water. The Aristotelian aspects of film story structure are the ones that playwrights learnt in the first place. They’re mainly to do with the rear end of the play, not the beginning of the play’. Are you thinking about the point of a scene, for example? ‘No. Content. Content. What would be fun to watch? What would be a good argument? What would be stupid? Just lots of ideas. Structure them later’.

Lucy Kirkwood‘I have what I call a ‘thinking and failing’ practice. Thinking, doing, re-writing. The only constant practice for me is the amount of time that goes into each project. I can be thinking about a project for 2 or 3 years before I begin to ‘write properly’. This approach can be frustrating because there is a culture in the U.K. of plays that respond to ‘hot’ issues. I like to dig around, like to find the bigger ideas beneath the smaller stories that are in our consciousness’. In terms of the writing



documents associated with feature film, viz., synopsis, treatments etc., have you had to do those? ‘Yes. Treatments both tempt potential investors but also are practical in that I can use the document as the foundation for my screenplay’.

‘I don’t map out in terms of writing a list of scenes but I often know where I’m at with a play if I know what the ending is’. Lucy Kirkwood

Do you think writing those documents has had any impact on your playwriting practice. Perhaps in terms of story etc.? ‘I think I have a more concrete and definable practice around how you frame the question around any piece of work. So, what you frame your intention or ambition: what is the thing you are going to show us. I believe this way of conceptualising comes from screenwriting. For example Chimerica. It could be called ‘story-led’ whereas for me I didn’t ever think of myself as a plot-driven writer. I am much more a ‘character-led’ writer. I just finished something and was pleased someone described it as being ‘page-turning’. There are lots of things that grip you in the theatre and it’s not just about turnover of narrative. I actually get quite nervous about the grammar of screenwriting and screen development creeping into the theatre’. With your playwriting practice do you tend to map things out, have a structural overview. Think about endings? ‘I don’t map out in terms of writing a list of scenes but I often know where I’m at with a play if I know what the ending is. The thinking time that I referenced is linked to knowing what I am going to write at a subconscious level. It’s like living in a house

before buying the furniture or knowing what you need’. It’s interesting that you generally know the ending. ‘This is partly to do with whether the play is worth writing. Most of my successful plays have been where the endings have come clear and strong for me early on’.

‘One of the great things about doing screen work, which I love doing, is that it helps me to be solvent. This means that when I am lucky enough to have the money I like to write not for commissions, just for myself. I like to grow the works in the dark like mushrooms and share them when I am ready. That means the work comes out how you want it to come out’.

Mike Leigh‘I haven’t read any books about structure and to me, you just tell the story. I always start with an idea or a theme. I have got lots of ideas. But there is a distinction between this is the idea; we are going to do this and going in with all sorts of things floating around and, when you gradually start to pin down and relate one to the other and suddenly think actually this is the idea’.

Simon StephensWith your playwriting practice, do you map the story out before you write a play? Do you know your ending? ‘Yes. I am a ferocious planner. It was Stephen Jeffreys that put me onto that. During my residency year the director Raymond Gray taught me the meaning of the word ‘playwright’. That the writer crafts and shapes the plays rather than writing them. During the residency I learnt from Stephen Jeffrey’s the power of planning. Also different approaches to planning. David Land talked about the narrative and, it’s the approach to narrative that is fundamental to my work subsequently. And that I have taught. The way in which story works and the different approaches to dramatic structure. And that wasn’t from screenwriting that was from kicking playwriting around’.



‘Every stage the writer is aware of the mechanics of screenwriting. Generating documents like treatments is killing any sort of creativity’. Enda Walsh

Enda WalshMany screenwriters have to go through a process to get funding, which includes writing the synopsis, the outline, treatment. Did you have to write any of those documents? ‘I did and it was the most miserable experience. I found it terribly uncreative. At every stage I felt like, ‘Oh, I’m writing’. Whereas as a writer; you shouldn’t feel like you are writing. The stuff is coming out and that’s the way it is. Every stage the writer is aware of the mechanics of screenwriting. Generating documents like treatments is killing any sort of creativity. And also, that the redrafting process is tiresome’. Do you ever sit down and work out the ending for example, before you write? ‘Sometimes I’ll have like an image. I wrote a play years ago and I had an image of 3 elderly ladies looking at a kettle boiling and I thought that was a great end to a play. So, then I thought about the audience watching 3 elderly women watch a kettle boil for about 3 minutes. And then I wrote a play completely based on that ending’.

Cusi Cam‘I think I actually learnt about structure from writing TV shows. And the structure is so tight. I suddenly realised after writing a few plays, ‘Oh, I think I can actually take things out and streamline the story and I’ll be getting the effect I want to’. TV writing is particularly tight because you’re trying to tell something in half-an-hour or an hour, or you have to complete part of a story. It’s always interesting

how you can be surprising and mess it up a little. To me, playwriting and TV writing really speak to each other. I used to find them very different but now it just feels like it’s a big stew. If I hadn’t gone to Juilliard I think I may have been a much more ‘out-there’ writer. My playwriting did become more naturalistic for a period of time. It definitely became much more structured. Now a little less so, but at the same time I sense the structure underneath it. It’s holding it up. I am always telling this to students: you have to know what the structure is before you can start defying it in some way. Those things are so helpful to know: dramatic action, escalation, stakes’.

Terry Curtis FoxI asked Terry if he could articulate his playwriting practice. ‘Probably not. I am a very instinctual writer. When I write plays I start on page 1 then I start going forward. That doesn’t mean I don’t tear up 20 pages and start all over again, but I don’t outline’.

Freddie Machin‘You’re always talking about characters with needs, what are obstacles to those needs, and how did they choose to overcome them. Do they fail or succeed. And that is common to all storytelling. Obviously, the format and technique and the style varies vastly’.

‘That sense that character is action, that’s what I take from Aristotle most of all. That character is not personality but action’. Judith Thompson



development: plays need time gives insights into the time plays and created works need to develop. This interview with the Artistic Director of New Dramatists continues that conversation. New Dramatists is an organisation whose charter is, essentially, to develop playwrights. Registered as a not-for-profit organisation, it generates no income and relies on 3 stands of government funding along with foundations, corporate, individuals and a major celebrity-endorsed annual fundraiser to operate. New Dramatists’ operational funding is $1.5M. The big caveat attached to that is the organisation now owns their building. Empowering the playwright is central to the organisation’s ethos.

As referenced in my recommendations, takeaways from New Dramatists include long-term residencies and their initiative to assist with the development of musicals. Emily’s well-articulated interview outlines these concepts in greater detail. I have included my questions in italics where necessary.

‘New Dramatists was formed in 1949. We are currently celebrating 70 years. Founded by a working playwright, Michaela O’Harra who wanted to be in the company of playwrights. At that time there was only Broadway. There were no developmental opportunities, no regional theatres etc. It was just Broadway, which was more a producers’ medium rather than a writers’ medium. Michaela was interested in what other writers did. And why they did it. Essentially a resource exchange among peer writers. It was set up as a community; a company of writers to share resources and that involved anything

from meeting to sharing pages of their scripts, to going to the theatre together, to observing rehearsals of plays in development towards a production on Broadway. They also did craft discussions with a range of writers of differing experiences. That was the way New Dramatists originally worked’.

‘Early support for the organisation came from the Broadway community. Big Broadway producers got behind us and gave seed money plus complimentary tickets, rehearsal observance etc. Fundamentally the mission of New Dramatists has remained the same.

THE WISDOM OF MANY

spotlight on New Dramatists: in interview with Emily Morse


To identify talented playwrights and offer them time and space in the company of other peers towards making lasting contributions to the American theatre’.

‘The program supports professional playwrights through a 7-year residency. After every 7 years the program does a review to ensure that the program that is being offered is serving the community of writers who are undertaking the program at the time. The needs of each group change. Some of them are generational. How the plays are written. How they are developed. How they meet or find their audience. So, every 7 years the program is under review as it is a different group of writers every 7 years. It isn’t one group that goes for 7 years it is a new group every year. It’s a kind of revitalised community. The most apt image that I have of the New Dramatists is that it is a living organism. It is constantly observing the new and being changed and altered by it’.

‘Once the playwrights become resident writers here they drive their own development through the course of that 7 years but they do it in the company of each other. That is a unique feature of what New Dramatists offers to writers. There’s the duration of time, the access to space but also that there is a community and company dynamic. And foster resource-sharing amongst the writers. They drive their individual trajectory through the course of their time at New Dramatists. They work on what they want to when they want to work on it. They determine the terms of that engagement. They determine the terms of those resources but they do it in the company of each other. There are some programmatic aspects as to how New Dramatists articulates those values’.

How does a writer apply and what is the process of selection? ‘We have the admissions committee, which is 7 people. It changes 100%

every year. They are the group of people tasked with reading and evaluating all the applicants plays, meeting 3 times during the selection week, winnowing the list then determining by consensus who are the 5 to 7 writers who come in every year. They receive around $10 a script, which adds up but is certainly not comparable to the task because they are defining new dramatists for the organisation. The staff do not participate in the decision making. I facilitate the process for the 7 committee members to do that. In the first round the applicant is anonymous’.

‘We get around 400 plus applicants a year. They submit 2 scripts. They designate their A and B play and the selectors read the A play first. And then as they advance in the process the B play is introduced into the consideration. Each of the committee members read around 200 plays in the course of the 9 months. The whole of the 1st committee meeting, the 2nd committee meeting and most of the 3rd committee meeting is really about the work. It’s not about the candidacy. It’s about the strength of feeling for the work’.

Do the 7 application committee members consider criteria like: is this going to work for an audience? Do each of them bring a different set of criteria to judge the plays? ‘New Dramatists build the committee very deliberately with all sorts of diversity in mind. For example, the current composition of the committee is 3 current playwrights, 2 alums and 2 outside professionals. We start with the current residence writers, we look at who they are and what they bring to the table: racially, ethnically, gender presentation, stylistically and aesthetically. Like ‘How do we think that committee member will respond? They are more experimental. Or, they like more well-made plays’. Not that New Dramatists is always consistent along those lines but they are looking for what insights and expertise the

DEVELOPING PLAYWRIGHTS AND THEIR PLAYSspotlight on New Dramatists: In interview with Emily Morse


potential committee can bring to the table. They may specialise in comedy. They may need a comedic reader on the committee. Then they look at what is missing in that consideration and they try to compliment the 3 currents with the 2 alums. Or perhaps they need someone of a different generation. Someone who lives in a different part of the country. Someone who was of a new generation of New Dramatists. It can be any number of those things. And then we have the 5 and we further compliment with the 2 outside professionals. We might need an actor because they read more from their soul, whereas directors have a more calculated thought process. A producer who is running a regional theatre in Virginia is going to have a different POV on this work. And so we do our best to create as broad a readership as possible within those 7. So that’s one response to your question’.

‘The second response is, because we are not a producing organisation, producibility does not have to be a factor. I think it becomes part of the conversation. But for the most part what they are reading for is excitement. What makes them sit up and pay attention. And they don’t need to worry about whether or not its producible. It’s really what makes them excited about the play or the voice or the adventures the writers are exploring in their form. It’s really about strength of feeling. It is really exciting to hear writers reading and determining about other writers’. It must impact on their own practice. ‘Exactly. And that’s part of that community sharing. Once they are at New Dramatists they do influence each other. They do show each other what is possible. But they also know they are not competing with each other. Which is not always true in a producing institution.

‘To identify talented playwrights and offer them time and space in the company of other peers towards making lasting contributions to the American theatre’. Emily Morse

THE WISDOM OF MANYspotlight on New Dramatists: In interview with Emily Morse


Where the programming is more slot-driven. The artists don’t often overlap with each other in a producing institution. They come in, their play is produced, they go whereas here they are all in each other’s discussions ‘How did you do this or how could I do that better’’?

Does the selection committee deliberately go after writers with disparate styles so that the writers cohort will be an eclectic mix? ‘Interestingly enough it ends up happening. I think that it is more about an organic development because of a diverse committee versus a design of the process. Ideally what New Dramatists wants is a group of people that the committee is excited about and is reflective of their collective values as a committee. It’s about consensus, about building and defining consensus not so much as compromise or capitulation but fighting through the obstacles of different opinions and subjectivity to find you may not always getting exactly what you want but you are able to live with the outcome. So, what I have found as a facilitator is that I have built consensus around shared values. The selection committee do a little bit of that in the course of their conversations. For example, ‘What is it that you would want your group of writers to reflect? What makes you excited to go to the theatre? What is the art of theatre? What is it doing differently from the great storytelling that is happening in TV and film right now’? Even though many of those writers and now our writers! Those 3 meetings are each about 15 hours long. But the whole process is 9 months. It’s a great democracy. The committee start off with this abstract idea about what they are bringing to the table. And then, over that time, they are waiting to embrace what other people are fighting for. And wanting to advocate what they are in favour of. And that is what informs the consensus. Some people will say, ‘I do not like that writer but they are ambitious’ or ‘They

are imaginative’ etc. They are able to find the things that they can still support even if they are not their favourite writers. And that is really exciting to see. It’s messy and it can be contentious and at the end of the process people feel like they have done something’.

So, you have the 5 to 7 writers. Can you step through the process that group of writers are going to undertake over the next 7 years? ‘Once they are in there is not a necessity to retain or impose a group identity. They are essentially people that come in at the same time. But their trajectory because they are at various stages of their careers and their obsessions and ambitions are different from each other: the course that they take will really be determined by those things. However, the first thing they do is orientate as a group with the staff. So that they understand how New Dramatists operates in support of them. We have 8 full-time and 1 part-time staff. We follow up the group orientation with individual orientation, where I might ask them ‘What do you imagine happening to you in the course of 7 years? What are the conversations that you are interested in having with other writers or with your own work’? Then artistic staff look at how we can support them. We look at what programs we have that would lend this kind of particular or general support’.

‘Back to where we were stepping through the 7 years. We have the New Dramatists welcome and all writers meet. We have some anchor programs that are anchored in some very specific parts of our season and then everything after that is dynamic. For example, the 2 people using the building today; Brian Watkins is in the beginning of his 3rd year of his residency as is the Kate Cortesi. Brian is working on a play that is ultimately going to be produced at the Druid Theatre in Dublin Ireland. This is a brand-new play. He got into Juilliard after he became a New Dramatist.



Brian is working with us to facilitate this project. For example, he booked a room with a group of actors and a resource-playwright, in this case an alum who just finished her residency last year who knows Irish theatre well, knows the source material of the play and so is coming in to support Brian’s development as a fellow playwright. The room is populated based on Brian’s needs. After that he went away, did some work and then came back today for the read. He lives in NYC in Brooklyn and has a brand-new baby so he has been staying in the building because he has these deadlines and can’t really work at home. That’s another way that New Dramatists supports him’.

‘For those Kate and Brian working sessions, the actors are paid a nominal fee of $10. Cash. We give them $20 for the 2 days. It’s called ‘car fare’ by the union. We have to provide car fare. For 1 and 2-day readings the participants are paid $20. When New Dramatists extends the working sessions beyond the 2 days, they get paid $75 per work day and the writers can only do one of those a year. That’s a budget thing. New Dramatists does have to fund raise to support those workshops. Kate has a brand-new play. She brought in a group of people who began on Monday. It’s an extended workshop. They worked Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Kate has had new pages every day. Kate’s workshop will culminate in a public reading but it’s a way to mark the work rather than release the work to the public. It’s about: How does the audience become a collaborator in a development process. The play will continue to be worked on. But Kate needs to hear it in front of an audience at this stage of development. To continue working on it. It is not ready to be circulated to the field yet. Kate set that up in consultation with the artistic staff. The staff helped her to determine when she wanted to work, with whom she wanted to work with,

‘PlayTime. Because it was the first extended work offering, we built it to reflect the values of New Dramatists, which is time, space, the opportunity to develop ambitious work in the company of each other’. Emily Morse



who does she need in the room, where is the audience, where does the audience interface with the work’.

Will the audience feedback to Kate directly? ‘Not necessarily. It is the writers’ prerogative to have conversations with the audience formally or informally. It’s not mandated by us and almost no writers ever chose that. They know what they are looking for. Where was it funny. Where did the attention wane. Where did the audience sit up and pay attention. When did they look confused. The writer reads that pretty astutely. They are super vigilante’!

If I were one of the selected 5 to 7 writers and I was looking to develop my work, what are the things that New Dramatists offers? ‘New Dramatists offers unlimited 1 and 2-day readings. They offer extended 3 to 5-day workshops. The terms of which are set by the writer. Because they are finite we ask them to think very circumspectly about how that concentration of time moves either that project or their process forward. They bring in either plays or process to be investigated in these extended work sessions. 1 to 2-day readings. 3 to 5-day workshops. 2 writers’ meetings. In the 2-day and 3-day workshops the writers decide how to use that time. It can be anything from ‘I have these 30 pages and I don’t really know what it is. I want to hear it out aloud with actors or, I don’t want to hear actors read it because actors make everything so good I want to hear what it really is’. So they might have writers read it because they are smart and they can read it but they are not going to make it ‘shiny’. And then they want that conversation with other writers. Sometimes they’ll have the staff read it. Sometimes they will read it to us. It’s so flexible. But sometimes they’ll rehearse for 5 hours, take an hour break and then read the play to an audience. That’s also perfectly fine. How they use their time and space can be from the most experimental to the most

traditional. And everything in between. And one project could run that kind of course because you know sometimes people work with one play over many, many workshops and culminate it in an industry reading. For example, ‘I am ready to put this work out into the field’ and so then we’ll work with them to identify who they want in the room. Which theatres make sense. What producers. Agents’.

‘They also have 2 intensives. One is called PlayTime. They call it a ‘Laboratory Retreat’ in NYC, where there are 5 writers who are developing ambitious projects simultaneously in the building with a company of actors. Each writer determines who their primary collaborator is. It’s often a director but it’s not necessarily. Because it was the first extended-work offering, we built it to reflect the values of New Dramatists, which is time, space, the opportunity to develop ambitious work in the company of each other. There are lots of activities, which are company-building and fostering of the company of writers. The first 2 days are spent reading the plays at whatever stage of development with just the core company, which is the writers, their collaborators, stage managers and the staff. That’s Thursday and Friday. And then the actors come. Writing time is Saturday and Sunday. The actors join that process again on the Monday morning and we do a full company meeting. The writers talk a little bit about what their projects are and then they go into their individual rehearsal. So, we’ll have 3 rehearsing simultaneously in the morning slot and then 2 projects rehearsing in the afternoon slot. And in the middle of those 2 rehearsal slots we have what are called Tea Times. So, food, opportunity for them to engage with one another in the course of moving from one rehearsal to another. And ideally to continue conversations that were started either on those first 2 days or in that company meeting where



everyone is finally hearing what the writers are working on. We do morning yoga, which is optional, there’s always breakfast. We do studio tours where we ask the writers who are developing works to open up their process to the company. Responding to ‘What is it that you would want the company to know, either about the project you are working on or how do you generate work as a generative artist’.

‘The writers at New Dramatists are host artists not guest artists’. Karen Hartman

‘All this happens in the middle of the first week of PlayTime. It’s all about how do you keep engaging people in not just their own little corners but to keep them aware of the bigger program within which their project has fallen. On the Saturday we have a breakfast check-in for the writers: are there things that are coming up in their process that might be useful to share amongst each other. And we do the same thing for their primary collaborators. (Laughs) I can only say it this way. We force the writers to sit in each other’s company. And we create like a sanctuary downstairs. And the doors are closed and they sit and write together for 4 hours. And afterwards they say it is amazing. Because there is something about not being isolated. That’s the Saturday. And while that’s happening upstairs we have another writer conducting a writing workshop for the rest of the company. The actors come, staff, stage managers; anyone can attend the writing workshop, for free. Again it’s a way to keep everyone in the building. And then the final 3 days. They open up their rehearsal rooms essentially for us to come in and see what they have been doing over the 2 weeks. Essentially 9 days. Again, they can choose whatever they

want to. It can be a reading, it can be scenes. Especially those that are very nascent in their development, where they will read scenes and sort of narrate. They’ll go ‘Well, there’s these 2 scenes and then I think what will happen is this’.

It’s also giving them the tools to talk about their work. If they had to get producers on board they could discuss or pitch the idea. ‘There’s that and it’s also about agency. They are empowered to own the work even in less dressed stages. That’s also about what New Dramatists does and that’s to promote leadership and agency over one’s process. It translates to the field and can influence that kind of change in the field as well. There was an alum of New Dramatists, Karen Hartman who came up with the idea that ‘The writers at New Dramatists are host artists not guest artists’. Whereas in producing theatres they are guests. Here they can be directors. They can be producers. That leadership empowers them to be able to say: ‘I know what works’. Because they have experienced and experimented with it over a 7-year period. A lot of writers are developing that vocabulary about how you see, view, hear and develop their plays. And that can be very influential’.

‘PlayTime is something the writers do once in their 7 years. We’ve had people use PlayTime to finish a draft of a play. Or to explore a certain sort of process with a play. New Dramatists has created think-tanks around an idea. There is no prescribed way to do anything. We don’t have menu items on how to support works. And within that, it is very nimble. I’ve created a passion as to how many different ways can we support somebody’s work based on their goal. It’s always in consult with the writer and always the conversation is ‘What is it that you need, what are you trying to accomplish, what are you thinking about, or we could try this’. The process here is very adaptable’.



‘That’s a number of initiatives. As mentioned, we have 2 intensives. One is PlayTime and the other is what’s called Composer-Librettist Studio, which is linked to developing a musical. It’s really an intensive about the tenets of collaboration but its articulated through the creation of songs. It’s 5 writers, 5 composers and 5 sight-reading singers or performers. The writers are self-selected through the resident writers. The composers apply and as do the singers, who need to be able to read music and perform. There are a lot of cultural and community-building activities during the early stages of the studio and then assignments are distributed. They’ll put composers together with a writer. And then a singer. The first assignment for the playwright is interviewing your singer and then writing a song for them. The writers have 48 hours to complete the assignment. The music and the lyrics are handed to the performer, they rehearse it pretty much on the spot in front of the company and then they perform it for the company. Then they go through a series of critical-response feedback about what they heard, what questions are remaining, what questions do the artists have about the song they are working on. And then the teams change. There’s a different assignment issued. Again, 48 hours to complete it. Same process. And they go through these 5 times. By the end of the 18 days they have 25 new music theatre pieces that are performed on a kind of marathon day. Everybody works with each other’.

‘And it’s all about how to collaborate. How do you address conflict. How do you work through conflict. All made as transparent as possible. The idea being to create a wider vocabulary around how do we collaborate. It isn’t just being nice. It’s how do you work through conflict with your collaborators that are artistic or personal. The final day is the only day that is

open to the public. People come in and listen. Composer-Librettist Studio and PlayTime, those are the 2 intensives’.

‘Then the New Dramatists’ After 7s Festival. This is the celebration of the writers who are completing their 7 years. The After 7 Festival is scheduled in June to celebrate the culmination of the 7 years. The writers who are finishing their 7 years. We do it in 3 segments. The playwrights do a segment of excerpts from the plays that they got into New Dramatists with. The 2nd section are excerpts from plays they worked on while they were resident at New Dramatists. Then the 3rd segment is plays that they are currently working on as they leave New Dramatists. Then I narrate the course of their 7 years with these plays as the articulation of their work. We talk about what they have done, about the sort of things that you end up knowing just because you’ve just spent 7 years involved with them and with their bodies of work. About what they have discovered process-wise. It really is a reflection of the specific relationship between these writers and New Dramatists. The After 7s Festival is open to the public and anyone can come. Sometimes they want outreach to specific people but for the most part it’s really us. A lot of the writers do have agents and a lot of them don’t. Whoever they need to come to the reading we are certainly happy to reach out to. Those are the activities and initiatives that are consistent here’.

In regard to the candidate that the committee choses. What sort of body of work do they have behind them? Are some at the beginning of their career? One suspects not. ‘Sometimes they are. It can be anybody. Currently we have 51 writers-in-residence. And they run the gamut from early career never have been produced to MacArthur Fellowship winners. We have so many. Annie Baker is one. Sam Hunter. Sarah Ruhl. Lynn Nottage.


…‘How they use their time and space can be from the most experimental to the most traditional’. Emily Morse


Tarell McCraney. The New Dramatists community is the fledging career playwright to the MacArthur Fellowship winner. People working in devising companies, people being produced on Broadway, regional writers. The demographic of the candidate is really all over the place. That’s the great thing about having a selection committee that changes every year. A committee that essentially defines what New Dramatists is to them, then gifts it to us in which case we end up with this incredibly eclectic company of playwrights that are at

all levels and working at all levels. And what they are while they are here, are writers who ares writing. There’s no criteria around who has been produced. Because we support writers who are writing, not just those who are being produced. And that’s also an important component here. And how they support each other and learn from each other. Of course there can be competition or the feelings of competition, which we try to dispel in terms of how resources are distributed. Equity is a big part of my job: how to manage resources. Who gets access to what’.

I haven’t mentioned the word dramaturg. Are they regarded as a collaborator? ‘We know many, many dramaturgs and would help populate the playwright’s room with whatever collaborator they requested. What we say is: the whole building is dramaturgical in many respects because everything that is done at New Dramatists is development or exploratory or investigative. And many people might function as a dramaturg even though they don’t carry the title of a dramaturg. So, writers. The resource-playwrights can be dramaturgical. Sometimes they want to have conversations with other writers because there’s a way that that particular type of exchange is more useful’.

I am interested in your personal background. You clearly bring a lot of passion and experience to the job. I saw that you’ve been at New Dramatists in another capacity. You’ve also done a lot of work with the Philadelphia Theatre Company, Actors Theatre of Louisville, New Directions, New Workshops; are there any of those past experiences that were standouts for you in terms of developing playwrights? ‘I went to Temple University in Philadelphia in the hope of doing a double major in theatre and dance. I was a performer. I went to a college that didn’t allow a double major in arts.



So, I decided to get my degree in theatre and communications. I did my concentration in psychology and all my electives in the dance department. While that was happening, I started developing relationships with some graduate choreographers who were getting their MFAs in the Temple University dance departments. A very good dance program. Very experimental, modern-based versus more classically-based. And they asked me to perform with them. What I loved about the program was that a lot of the program centred on how dance is made. As a practitioner I was in all their development processes. This gave me a very flexible idea of how things can work based on the primary artist and what they were defining as their goal. I worked with 3 choreographers, all different but modern-based. Very different thinkers, very different choreography aesthetics. Some worked from text, other works from image, others worked from tone. I place my laurels and ‘thank-yous’ on them. Yes, I was upset at the time that I wasn’t getting acting work. In hindsight I was very grateful because the theatre was very conservative. But the dance was not and unlocked a lot of ideas and also what it means to work dynamically with an artist and trying to help them articulate their vision through the body, through the mind. And then I felt a similar feeling. I went back to the theatre and thought: I wasn’t going to be an actor anymore, I was going to be a director and I wanted to work with writers. I wanted to work on new plays’.

‘I became a resident director in the playwriting program. And I started working with writers similarly to the way I was working with dancers. I found there was a different vocabulary. But it was the same ‘unknown’ experience, a lot of excitement. ‘What about this or how does this work or try this’. Again, not structuring or creating a prescribed way of working. It was all

about what was the dynamic with the primary artist. And it was very clear to me even as a director that the primary artist in that case and in all my subsequent working relationships, was the writer. And how do I help them articulate their vision best, as a director, as a producer, as a dramaturg. What sort of process do they need to arrive at that? And does it need actors, how many actors. Maybe it’s just us reading the play. Maybe its designers’.

‘And it was very clear to me even as a director, that the primary artist in that case and in all my subsequent working relationships, was the writer’. Emily Morse

‘I then came to New York and was making work downtown. I worked for a commercial theatre producer. I became a literary manager and dramaturg in a producing theatre in Philadelphia. But I did not love the institutional role of being a literary manager and dramaturg. I liked more mess than is tolerable with many institutions. I really wanted relationships with writers and the theatre was director-driven. So, I came back to New York and one of the phone calls I received was from New Dramatists. They asked me if I would be interested in being a resident director here. I said ‘Yes’! I felt that, in New Dramatists, I had found the place where all those seemingly disparate experiences of my trajectory made perfect sense. I also worked in the visual art world where the idea of the studio tours came from. We don’t do that in the theatre, where it’s all about pushing it to look finished rather than what is the process. Certainly we never see writers in the creative process because they are mostly solitary’.



The evolution of programs: where they started and where they are now. Has there been much evolution? ‘There’s been a lot of evolution. Even just looking at the trajectory of the organisation and early days of Michaela’s founding, where they sat around tables and read plays to each other in suits and ties! I think that it is an important thing to emphasise that our job has always been to respond to the playwrights’ expressed needs. When Todd London became Artistic Director, there was an accelerated building of process with the artists and it was the artists that said ‘We need more time’. They said ‘We love PlayTime but we need extended workshops more on an ad hoc basis’. That’s our job. To really work with the playwrights to make sure that what we offer is really working to support their work and how they make their work. And so yes, a lot of evolution. And the way that ‘time’ works, is that we carry a lot of knowledge about how people have worked so then we have a plethora of models to offer other writers’.

‘The demographic of the candidate is really all over the place. That’s the great thing about having a selection committee that changes every year’. Emily Morse

Retreats, workshops, residencies working with dramaturgs: has one of these activities stood out as being the more successful with writers in their development? The thing that I keep hearing, I don’t know if it’s the most successful with writers, but they love having other writers in the room. And people keep discovering how beneficial that can be. They love being able to have that conversation

writer-to-writer. After the actors leave and the directors leave: to have a conversation writer-to-writer has been very beneficial to them. This is almost a non-answer but I think the other thing that is beneficial to writers is going into a room and realising that they don’t have to do it one way. Having nimble programming and process. There is no cookie-cutter. ‘Oh, I don’t have to work on the play from beginning to end. I can start from the end and work forward’. You know, I think it is literally the realisation that there is no one way. That they can be in charge. And the other thing is, that you don’t have to solve all the questions of your play in 1 workshop. Because you have 7 years. You can spread out the investigation over multiple working sessions. I think these are revelations’.

How important is the building and do you have to pay rent on it? ‘It is everything. We own the building. We don’t pay rent. It was a mortgage that they had in the ‘60s when we took over the building. It was a Lutheran mission up until that point that was being sold. It became the home of New Dramatists and then, in the early 2000s, they had a very generous board member, Joanne Jacobson, who loved writers. Her mission was to support writers. Joanne said that she really wanted to make a difference to our month-to-month. At that time the biggest expense was the mortgage and the copy machine. Prior to the digital age all the writers had free photocopying, which gave the writers agency: they could send their scripts to people. Joanne looked at the budget and said she would pay off the mortgage. The building is really, really important’. New Dramatists is a non-profit I would imagine. ‘Correct. And we say that the writers own the building’.

Could you talk me through the structure of governance at New Dramatists? ‘There are 3 main components. The staff is one. The board



of directors is the other. And the third is the writers’ executive committee. Once a writer has done 7 years here they can volunteer to be on the executive committee, which is the policy making body composed of playwrights. The organisation takes all matters of personnel, programming, decision making to the writers’ executive for their feedback, for their input and sometimes their decision-making. Then 4 members from the writers’ executive sit on the Board of Directors as voting board members. It’s a way of creating a type of cohesion amongst the organisation to make sure that the staff is reflecting the views of the writers. The writers are influencing the decisions that the board is making. That the board can oversee the responsibilities of the staff including budgeting and fiscal responsibility. The writers are the ones who decided how to pick the PlayTime participants. They’re the ones who will form the task force to do the 7-year program evaluation. This further promotes the idea of leadership within an organisation and something contrary to what a lot of people think about writers not wanting to be leaders but then it’s about how can they lead, how can they influence’.

‘We don’t do that in the theatre, where it’s all about pushing it to look finished rather than what is the process. Certainly we never see writers in the creative process because they are mostly solitary’. Emily Morse

I believe there was once an exchange between the Australian National Playwrights’ Conference and New Dramatists? ‘Yes. The ‘Exchange Residency’. Writers would submit a play to be considered. They would be submitted to the host company and that company would select the writer. And the New Dramatists would do the vice-versa. They would do the same. A committee would select the play/playwright from Australia or the U.K. and the playwright would live in the New Dramatists building. It was a cultural exchange as well as being the writer undertaking aspects of the New Dramatists’ program. Once a year the Australian playwright would be here 3 weeks. They would see a lot of shows with complimentary tickets, the writer would meet other writers and producers. They had the opportunity to forge relationships. There would be a reading of the writer’s play. There would also be an interrogation of the play through the lens of cultural difference with questions like ‘How would this work in front of an American audience and would it work for an American audience’? This exchange dissolved. Every 7 years the New Dramatists does program evaluations and other priorities were thought more important. The decision was also based on the fact that there were funds needed to be raised for the cultural exchange writer and this couldn’t be prioritised because the New Dramatists have a collective to look after. And Australia was matching that funding? ‘Yes’.

If you could name just one thing, apart from money, that you think is crucial to the development of a playwright, what would it be? ‘I think it’s being in charge of it. Being the leader of their development. I think this is very important. Yes, money, space and time but putting the writer in the leading role of how they determine their development; the agency to do that’.



PLAYWRIGHTS – LOS ANGELES

Bekah Brunstetter: I believe you have to hear the play aloud. You can’t sit there and look at it on your screen. It is not a book. It’s alive. You need other humans reading it and helping you understand what you made. When I finish a draft I’m 50% done. It’s got so much further to go because I need my collaborators. I would also list writers’ groups. I wouldn’t be anywhere without them. Essential.

Liz Flahive: A meaningful collaboration with the director. I have worked with Leigh Silverman on my plays. It’s an intense relationship. It makes everything stronger. Leigh steps into a dramaturgical role.

PLAYWRIGHTS – TORONTO

Nicolas Billon: Something I often tell young playwrights is: find your people. Whether that’s a director, an actor, a designer, a stage manager. Find the people that you want to make work with and cultivate those relationships. Those relationships are really the thing that have made me a better writer.

Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman: A deadline. Something that you have to show. The pressure of having people hear your work is important for a playwright.

Hannah Moscovitch: The security of having a home theatre. Knowing that Tarragon is on my side and wanting to do my work. Knowing that they are there supporting me and having faith in me: that’s the big thing.

THE WISDOM OF MANY

QUESTION: If you had to name one thing that is the most beneficial to the development of a playwright, apart from money, what would it be?


Colleen Murphy: Guaranteed production. I am not a big fan of workshops. It’s not a one-size-fits-all situation. There might be a playwright who literally can’t hear or feel the work unless it comes through an actor. I don’t need workshops. Readings are great. Give me a reading.

Judith Thompson: A champion. At Tarragon, Urjo was that. He was my champion. He would write letters like: ‘It’s so important that this play is written’!

PLAYWRIGHTS – MONTRÉAL

Michel Marc Bouchard: That the audience follows you. It’s the best way to be a better writer. It inspires you to keep going. In terms of structure, find a mentor. Someone who believes in your work and is cleverer than you.

Robert Lepage: Playfulness. Theatre is not about acting, it’s about playing. There should be no actors onstage, there should be only players. And you write a play. This notion of playing has been completely evacuated from the process, completely evacuated from our stages. A real theatrical process is when you create a playground and a playground has no rules except playing. In a playground you have to create chaos before you create cosmos. Cosmos is order. It is beauty. Everything is in its right place. But you cannot have that if you do not create chaos. Chaos is all the subject matter and we don’t know what it’s doing. But it’s a playful process.

Michael MacKenzie: Playwriting works when you’re channelling conversations between people. And you let them take them where you’re going.

PLAYWRIGHTS – NEW YORK

David Henry Hwang: The opportunity for playwrights to hear their works and see it up on its feet in some form or another. It could just be actors standing up in a space who’ve had an afternoon of rehearsal with enough time to have some basic blocking and they’re holding their scripts.

Tony Kushner: Production. They can be low-scale productions. But good productions. Getting plays up on their feet in front of audiences is critical for the development of writing. Playwriting is an art form that requires

DEVELOPING PLAYWRIGHTS AND THEIR PLAYSname one thing of most benefit to the development of a playwright


an audience. It’s unlike novel writing or poetry. The playwright can’t work in isolation because they can’t grow if they do. And that will divide people who should be playwrights from people who shouldn’t be, even if they are enormously talented. It’s whether or not they are able to handle the encounter with the audience, the contract with the audience. To find out if the play works, it has to be put in front of an audience. And one most important factor is that you don’t take a brand-new play by a new or by an experienced playwright and give it to inexperienced actors.

David Lindsay-Abaire: Producing plays instead of doing readings of plays. There is this thing that happens where new writers start writing for a music stand instead of writing for the stage. You’ll find out so much more about your play when it’s on its feet and the actors are in front of an audience. Plays aren’t perfect. But be brave enough to produce a young writer and figure it out. I learnt so much from Manhattan Theater Club. They produced each of my plays and I became a better writer. I was constantly putting my work in front of audiences and realising: this is how this could be built or this will engage the audience better. All this happens when you’re in a live room with people responding to the work in a live way. You will never learn that if you’re only doing readings of plays.

Kenneth Lonergan: Production experience. A long-term production experience. Where they can do a reading. They can work on the play. Do as many readings that they like and then they can have the play produced at a small venue professionally without critics coming because that can be harmful to a new writer: harmful if you are celebrated and harmful if you are panned. Production experience with actors, directors and designers. I would also make sure that the playwright was given some sort of authority so it’s more of an equitable creative relationship. Many times the playwright is the least experienced person in the room before they have been produced.

Lynn Nottage: For an early career writer developmental opportunities. An opportunity to hear your script read by professional actors in a workshop setting. Not just 1 day of rehearsal and a reading but an actual weekend of mental workshop of your play, some time to respond to that reading, do rewrites and then hear the work again.

Adam Rapp: Time to get inspired. I think there’s a real deficit in people allowing themselves to be inspired by other people; other authors, other writers, other directors.

THE WISDOM OF MANYname one thing of most benefit to the development of a playwright


Theresa Rebeck: Kindness. Organisations that put time and space aside and say ‘What do you need’. Being at the centre of a support system. So there is respect. For everything you do. Putting the writer at the centre.

Anne Washburn: Form your own theatre group with other writers, directors, designers, actors and have somewhere which is cheap enough that you can do your own work. Have an understanding of scale. I think as a young writer it’s much better to have a low scale production than a high scale production.

PLAYWRIGHTS – LONDON

Christopher Hampton: Immersion in the day to day life of a theatre. And the decision-making of the theatre. I recommend this because it was so beneficial to me. You go in with a lot of theories and you come out with a lot of answers to practical questions. You are not only becoming involved with the theatre each time you write a play, i.e. involved in the rehearsal and performance of your own play, but involved in the rehearsals and performances of other people’s plays. So you can see where they work and where they don’t work. Why they work and why they don’t work. I also think if you have a play running in a theatre you should go and see it a lot. The Royal Court actually invented this brilliant idea of asking playwrights to translate plays. Prior to that it had always been Professor so and so. The Royal Court came up with the idea of playwrights doing each of the Chekhov plays. I did Uncle Vanya. And I went to see it 4 to 5 times a week to see how the play worked and how those actors delivered it. So I had that plus the experience of sitting down and analysing Chekhov’s play for 3 months.

Terry Johnson: Access to rehearsal rooms. Not just of the playwright’s own plays. Watching people grapple with a script and discussing a script. Sit in a corner and be persona gratis to the rehearsal period of a new play, or even an old play. Writers do need a home. The Royal Court was conscious of that, that you could use as your office. Access to a stage door is important. A home is important. And you need that feeling. That someone has paid attention to you. A key to the door. The rehearsal room is the place, that’s where it all gets sorted out. And it’s also a rather private space. So it’s not an easy thing to grant. That’s one of the reasons it’s so valuable.



Lucy Kirkwood: It’s probably that Virginia Woolf thing, which is a room of one’s own, which is partly tied up with money. You need to be able to afford to do that, to have time, to write. Without wishing to sound pretentious it’s the reverence around playwriting and acknowledging that it’s not just writing a certain number of words a day. Its building something and creating conditions for a writer to do that.

Mike Leigh: I suppose it would be look at plays, read plays, look at films, look at art, and look at life. Life experience. I think that’s important too.

Simon Stephens: Read. There was about 6 years in my professional life where I read 3 to 5 plays a week. Read not just for pleasure - that’s limiting. Read as a thief. When you read a play ask what you would steal from it. Another great question when reading plays, especially if it’s a great play is: how could I take this play and ruin it. Be playful, which is a good state of mind to be in when you ask these questions. It’s a serious question because it encourages the reader to cut to the quick of the decisions that the playwright made to make it great. It releases the decisions they didn’t make.

Enda Walsh: People say that in theory the idea is to not be afraid and to risk failing but the problem is that a lot of the young playwrights are only failing for the 1 or 2 people who are reading their script. It’s better to fail in front of an audience of say 20 or 30. When you have an audience your eyes and ears receive the work differently. You’re not changing it. You’re hearing it. Seeing it differently. Get out of the 1 to 1 relationships with dramaturgs and script editors. It is not good for a writer. I was lucky that I fell into a company that was bold and brazen and young. We had the courage to engage the audience in real conversation. The last 10 minutes of the shows for Corcadorca was me on stage going to the audience: what did you think? So production is my answer. But it can be just actors standing in a space. It doesn’t need to have high production values.

THEATRE COMPANY REPRESENTATIVES – TORONTO

Nina Lee-Aquino: I believe that plays can change the world, so developing the play-maker is my duty and obligation because that will present solutions and possibilities of what the future can be. When I am developing a creator, I am developing something bigger than just a thing on stage.



Joanna Falk: I think hearing the play out loud in front of people.

Andy McKim: Unquestionably, audience dramaturgy. I believe that bringing in an audience during a generative creative process before a work is fully realised or fully formed - informs the artists on whether they are being successful on their terms. This happens by just asking people what they saw and thought. Surely the artists are looking for a particular experience for an audience. If the audience is not having that, it’s great to know why they’re not. That’s really useful information and dramaturgically powerful in the development of the work.

Bob White: It’s production. It’s getting that play up in front an audience. I think that’s where you learn. I know it’s pretty obvious in many ways. We spend a lot of time on the development train and it’s all this closed loop of pundits and experts. As we know from any open reading of a play, all of a sudden the thing comes alive when you have people in the room. So, I think it’s making sure there are production opportunities.

THEATRE COMPANY REPRESENTATIVES – NEW YORK

Abigail Katz: Time. So many writers feel like they don’t have any time to sit with it. If companies are able to give writers time to work through a project and have a perspective on it. Whether it’s time to write, or whether it’s time to be with artists in the room to figure some stuff out. I don’t mean it to be unending and luxurious. I mean the use of time in a very deliberate way.

Linda S Chapman: I think understanding what’s important for the artist and privilege that voice that’s within them. That’s what is important to us: the individual voice.

Lizzie Stern: Infrastructure. And that can be defined in any number of ways. It can be defined as actual space to rehearse and to work, or as a group. Community.



THEATRE COMPANY REPRESENTATIVES – LONDON

Clare Slater: Enough money. I really see the value of when you pay writers properly and acknowledge the amount of time and love they put into creating something. Buying their time properly is really, really important. It’s the only way to allow the most talented people to carry on living and working as an artist. So my answer is the right amount of money.

Nina Steiger: I think it’s wonderful if people are able to work totally outside of their comfort zone with a really good artist from a completely different background, whether that’s internationally or culturally or formally. Pollination is the lifeblood of originality.

George Perrin: Putting playwrights’ plays on. Production.

Lucy Morrison: Production. The experience of working with all those different people in production. You can only get so far with a dramaturgical relationship and then you need the actors to take responsibility in a space for the playwrights’ work.

Chris Campbell: Production, by a million miles. And you should be allowed to fail. Failure is part of what theatre is. You can’t be using human beings as your means of expression and expect perfection.

Pippa Hill: I would say that the opportunity for a playwright to see and hear their work with an audience present is probably the most beneficial thing that you can do for a writer. That is my personal view. It might be less formal than a production. It might be a script-in-hand, or it might be some kind of showing without décor. But having the opportunity of having all the elements, bar the production, in the room: the actors, the play and the audience, yourself - the writer and the director, is in my view the thing that will tell you the most as a writer as to how successful you are, or how close you are to fulfilling the brief that you’ve set yourself for that particular piece of work. I don’t think it’s possible to be a playwright in isolation because it is profoundly and fundamentally a collaborative artform. It is a live, dramatic artform that requires your work to be in live dialogue with a live, present audience.



EDUCATORS/REPRESENTATIVES OF ORGANISATIONS THAT DEVELOP PLAYWRIGHTS – MONTRÉAL

Maureen Labonté: Time. That’s why I am so enthusiastic about my ten years at Banff. To give playwrights time away from it all is really, really precious. Writer retreats.

Andrea Romaldi: To read and see as many plays as they can. I believe that’s how playwrights learn the most.

Emma Tibaldo: It would be the permission to fail. And then to look at that. And whatever failure means. Because for me failure means that you haven’t realised what you set out to realise. So, to be given the permission to do that and then to continue to have the support where it can be looked at further.

EDUCATORS/REPRESENTATIVES OF ORGANISATIONS THAT DEVELOP PLAYWRIGHTS – NEW YORK

Christian Parker: Production opportunity

Emily Morse: I think it’s being in charge of it. Being the leader of your own development. Yes, money and space and time but putting the writer in the leading role of how they determine their development and having the agency to do that.

Jean Anzulis: Space and people.

Cusi Cam: Trust. Theatres, directors, actors, dramaturgs: trusting the work and trusting that you’ll find a way through it. Trust is also patience. Plays emerge. Trust the writer’s process and trust them to find the answer.

Terry Curtis Fox: Boundless curiously about the world. If you’re not curious about everything what are you going to write about? Some people are better delving into characters. Some people are better illuminating the farce of the human condition. But if you’re not endlessly curious you are not going to have endless source material.



Of note is that in the U.K. where there’s a long history of developing plays, there are virtually no tertiary-level playwriting courses. The deduction from this is that playwrights in the U.K. are developed by theatre companies and/or through their own practice. Conversely the U.S. has a number of tertiary-level playwriting ‘concentrations’. The U.S. also has theatre companies that, through their various programs and initiatives, develop playwrights and their plays. On Canada’s east coast numerous theatre companies, which sprang out of the Canadian nationalist movement in the 1960s and the desire to champion Canadian voices, develop playwrights. The National Theatre School of Canada situated in Montreal has a dedicated playwriting program.

This section includes a range of responses garnered from interviewees that work in institutions that teach playwriting and also playwrights who have attended institutions where playwriting is taught.

‘There are 427 scripted television shows in production in America right now and playwrights have become very valuable to this process’. David Henry Hwang

David Henry HwangAssociate Professor Concentration Head: Playwriting and Theatre, Columbia University School of the Arts, NYC

‘I’ve only been running the MFA playwriting program at Columbia for 4 years. I’ve tried to make the program more career-ist. I feel it is important to acknowledge that there is diversity, that there are all sorts of stories that can be told and all sorts of plays. So if you think about the 3 full-time faculty staff members; myself, Lynn Nottage and Charles L. Mee: we’re very different kinds of playwrights. The program should be able to deal with all these different forms. What is also import is: 1) identifying the student playwright’s voice and nurturing it; 2) production: plays are meant to be heard and performed, not read. We try to provide as many production opportunities as possible. And 3) is the career-ist aspect: survival. I believe that the students need to come out of the program with a tool kit of things they can use to make a living. And we happen to be living in a somewhat anomalous moment in playwriting history, in that it’s actually a monetizable skill. There are 427 scripted television shows in production in America right now and playwrights have become very valuable to this process. So, given streaming and cable and 10 to 12 episode arcs, the playwright should be able to, if they want, work in TV and make a nice living and still have three or four months a year to write your play. That’s a pretty good balance’.

THE WISDOM OF MANY

how playwriting is taught across a selection of institutions


‘It’s an MFA, 3 years. The centre of the program is of course about writing plays. In 1st year we cover fundamentals including structural approaches, which this year is being taught by Rogelio Martinez. Lynn Nottage also teaches in the 1st year, she takes the American Spectacle course. Then they have television. The students have to take at least one television class. We now have 4 television sub-concentrations, so they can take up to 4 television classes if they want. There’s a collaboration class that they take 1st year where they create projects with their cohorts in the program: actors, directors, dramaturgs. There’s a musical theatre tract in 2nd year. There’s a lyric writing class in the first semester of 2nd year and a musical theatre class. I teach in 2nd year; a re-writing class. The core playwriting stuff is my class and Charles L. Mee’s class. The students also have screenwriting in 2nd year. Also another collaboration class which is co-taught by Anne Bogart, myself and Christian Parker, who is the head of dramaturgy. They create projects, some of which are playwright initiated, some of which are director initiated, or dramaturg initiated. It’s important to have the skill of working on projects where you come as the craftsperson and you’re supporting someone else’s vision. Then the 3rd year do their thesis production, which are full productions, mostly at Signature Theatre on 42nd Street. They choose a mentor who is anyone from the field who they are attracted to. I also teach a professional development class in 3rd year so the student can meet and liaise and network with artistic directors and dramaturgs and producers and those kinds of folk. During the course the student can take electives: there’s a theatre history class, dramatic literature, adaptation classes, where they look at say Greek drama and try to emulate those forms’.

Lynn NottageAssociate Professor Theatre, Columbia University School of the Arts

Lynn discusses her time as a student at Yale University’s School of Drama Playwriting Department and also outlines her teaching units at Columbia University’s School of the Arts Playwriting Concentration. ‘During undergraduate school I took very basic playwriting workshops. Plays would be brought in that were then critiqued by the class. We also took a screenwriting class where the focus wasn’t so much on writing screenplays but outlining and building narratives. It was about how do you tell a story from beginning to end in a way that is visual as opposed to being language-driven. I also took dramaturgy classes where we’d read plays and analyse the script. We also had workshops, which led to productions. It was a 3-year MFA. The Yale course has changed since I was there but the fundamentals remain. There is still a workshop class and the development of a work that leads to production, which is one of the fundamentals. Taking a work from the page to the stage. At the time I was at the academy the plays that we studied were by playwrights like Chekhov. There were a lot of British playwrights: Peter Barnes, Trevor Griffiths and Pinter. At the time Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams were not so much in vogue. Things go in cycles. While I was there August Wilson was developing his work at Yale. Also Athol Fugard. So there was more an emphasis on newer voices’.

‘I now teach playwriting at Columbia. A couple of courses that I have been developing for a while. In terms of the relationship between playwriting and screenwriting, in America it’s more so a relationship between television writing and theatre. One of the things that I have noticed is that particularly in television, playwrights are asked to merge their voices

DEVELOPING PLAYWRIGHTS AND THEIR PLAYShow playwriting is taught across a selection of institutions


with others at moments when they are still trying to find their individual voice. And so the course that I teach is American Spectacle: Looking Beyond the Proscenium. It’s really a course about nurturing the individual’s voice and finding adventurous stories that deviate from popular structure’.

‘The best part of the theatre school was that we wrote so much. And that's all we had to do. We had so many deadlines’.Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman

I asked Lynn if she taught popular structure in order the students understood what they were deviating from. ‘I don’t because they take other courses that do that. At Columbia when students come in the first thing that they do is a boot-camp, which is only looking at structure, looking at traditional theatre structure, which is ensuring that everyone comes in with some very basic skills and a notion of how to develop a character and plot out a story. When they come in they do this 3-week boot camp and they take an introductory playwriting course, which is reading plays and doing generative writing exercises. After that they take American Spectacle: Looking Beyond the Proscenium, which looks at different structures and traditions outside of the main stream theatre. Then they take television or screenwriting depending on which they want to do. They also take theatre history and then one other elective. Also a collaborative course, which is a course in which they work with actors, dramaturgs, directors and stage managers and they all create work together. That is the curriculum for the 1st year’.

‘The other course that I teach is basically a 1-on-1 course where I help the playwright come up with a strategy for writing a 2nd year play and also make them think about who they want to be as playwrights. So they write an artistic statement. If they want to go into film and television, they design a specific strategy for achieving those goals. The course was designed to make them feel very comfortable and confident about their craft and to get them thinking about the potential to make a living from writing. That is also another 1-year long class. There are 10 students and generally I meet with a student around 2 times a semester for 90 minutes. So, over the year I meet with them 6 or 7 times. I give them feedback on their writing. It’s more intense than what happens in a workshop because what I have learnt from the students is that in workshops there are too many voices and so with me they can say ‘You know, I’m only interested in talking about this one scene’ and then we can spend an hour and half talking about that scene or, one character’. In 2nd year they are doing Directed Studies with me but they are also taking Screenwriting and Musical Theatre. Depending on their elective they can take Lyrical Writing or Book Writing. Then they do a course with David Henry Hwang, which is specifically about rewriting a play and the art of re-writing. This is a very cool class where we bring in a master playwright to share a 1st draft of a play and their re-write of that play. They discuss that and after that they discuss the playwright’s play. In the 3rd year there’s no actual course work. It’s geared to merging the playwrights into professional practice, so they have to do 2 internships and then at the end of the year produce their play in the theatre in a thesis production’.

THE WISDOM OF MANYhow playwriting is taught across a selection of institutions


‘It’s really a course about nurturing the individual’s voice and finding adventurous stories that deviate from popular structure’. Lynn Nottage

Christian Parker Chair, Head of Dramaturgy Concentration, Professor of Professional Practice Theatre, Columbia University School of the Arts

‘The students graduate with an MFA in Dramaturgy. We aim for a cohort of 6 each year. The last 2 years we’ve ended up with 8. The core curriculum involves a dramaturgy course with me that goes over basically a kaleidoscopic way to look at plays and play structure and a history of dramaturgy as a field. It looks at the various forms of practice in dramaturgy. We would look at structure, we would look at defining action. We start with Aristotle. Then we move forward from there through history and look at how do we find our way in through spectacle and design. We look at how we find our way in through character. We look at the way different writers define character. We look at what we mean when we talk about a playwrights’ voice. We look at the many different ways you can develop a way of talking about unlocking and understanding a play and how it functions. That’s the first core course that the students get, alongside theatre history. They take an intensive directing course in the fall of their 1st year. The 1st year is also largely defined by an immersive playwriting course for dramaturgs called Creating a Play, where they work with playwright Leslie Ayvazian, who takes them through the process of writing a full-length play. But it’s not just about that.

It’s also about developing a vocabulary as dramaturgs. They dramaturg each other’s works. While they do this they learn a whole vocabulary about plays-in-progress. How to talk to somebody who is putting their work out there and is feeling vulnerable. How to develop those kind of empathic skills’.

‘Most of these students are not necessarily going to be playwrights. They don’t necessarily see themselves that way, but we find that going through the process of having to generate a full-length play that they have to present in a reading at the end of the year to the public, they learn so much about how to work with writers. That’s the 1st year. They do other course work in that year, too. The spring of the 1st year all the actors, directors, dramaturgs, playwrights and stage managers in our program have an intensive collaboration course taught by Anne Bogart, who runs our directing program. Anne is a wonderful director and she teaches a collaboration course for all of those disciplines together, built around putting up 3 rounds of new plays that the playwrights write. And then the playwrights make up the creative teams in each round and then they all rotate. All of the different disciplines within the MFA program all take this collaboration course together. It’s an incredibly important piece of training for everybody because it begins to build a real cohesive cohort and they start to make their own connections that hopefully they’ll take forward when they leave. They get their feet wet in their discipline in the fall and then a lot of their spring semester is built around this collaboration course. It’s a lot of work. It teaches them about who they want to work with, who they don’t, how they work, where people are in terms of being able to listen to the consensus in the room. All of the things that young artists are struggling with’.

‘2nd year is really defined by a second round of collaboration. David Henry Hwang, Anne and



I together teach a collaboration course that builds on the first called Collaboration 2. This time it’s just playwrights, dramaturgs and directors. There are still 3 rounds of collaborative projects that go up but each round is led by a different discipline. There’s a directors’ round, a dramaturgs’ round and a playwrights’ round. All 3 of those disciplines are represented on the creative teams every time, but each round is led by a different one of those disciplines. They get up in front of the class and they pitch their ideas, the class submits secret ballots to us, we build the teams based on what people are interested in working on and then they go for it. They generate all this good work over the course of the semester. I would say more than anything, a foundation of the program across the MFA disciplines but particularly in dramaturgy is about collaborative skills and deepening one’s vocabulary to talk about any kind of work that you might find yourself working on. Whether or not you’ve had anything to do with generating it. One of the things that I think we do well is that we don’t assign our students onto projects for most of the time except within the context of that class. However they have to learn the vocabulary. But they also have opportunities to initiate work and own their own identity as creative people. Sometimes they’re just enlisting a director and writer to do a thing that they shepherd as a creative producer. Or they act as more of a traditional dramaturg. It gives them a sense of agency. I think traditionally dramaturgs have been lacking in the profession and training programs have not accommodated them. Historically dramaturgs haven’t always been given respect. ‘You’ll be lucky if you get any of your notes taken’. Given this attitude, when I was out there in the profession I wondered what I was doing. I’ve got a lot to offer. I don’t want to lock myself into a role that is inherently only responsive. I found that just shifting the way we can talk about

what dramaturgs do has really emboldened them. It has enriched the other students in the programs understanding about how they can capitalise on the collective intelligence of the room in a rehearsal’.

‘2nd year fall. So, that collaboration course happens. They also do an intensive immersion in Shakespeare in the 2nd year so that they’re working on heightened language. This year we’re changing the paradigm a little bit and they’re going to be in an intensive directing course on Shakespeare. They’re not going to be directing the pieces. One of our other directing faculty teaches a Shakespearean course in the spring to the 2nd year directing students. He’s invited the dramaturgs to be in that course with them, so that they’ll do a dive into the material together, as opposed to being in more of a classroom setting with a dramaturgy faculty member. They take a course in adaptation. They have an opportunity in the 2nd year to take a course in acting if they don’t feel like they have a vocabulary about that. The point of which is not to turn them into actors, but again I feel strongly that they have to have not only a vocabulary about it but also to have had the immersive experience. So that when they’re in the room working with anybody in a different discipline they have some sympathy and empathy for what those people are doing’.

‘Dramaturgy is about collaborative skills and deepening one’s vocabulary to talk about any kind of work’. Christian Parker



‘Then in the spring of their 2nd year they also have a number of electives. I encourage them to be thinking about what their thesis project will be in their 3rd year, which is an independent study supervised by me or another full-time faculty member of their choosing. The project has to draw on their experience so far. I encourage them not to think about it in terms of a professional calling-card. Something that they imagine they wouldn’t do once they have graduated. That demonstrates to me something about their deepened skills as dramaturgs and what they know now that they didn’t know before. For this project many of them have adapted a work and written about that process, sometimes produced a play, or started a theatre company or written proposals on how to launch theatre companies. Some have done academic papers on a particular subject, either about a writer or dramatic literature or a critical look at the field. But more and more often I am seeing those students do a research project around what is happening in the American theatre and where they see a solution to a particular problem. It really varies. One student has been granted access to the archive of Sophie Treadwell, a little-known early twentieth century female playwright. Machinal is her play that is most known. A lot of her archives are hand-written scripts that were never produced. The student has been going through all these plays, which she hopes to get published’.

‘So, in 3rd year they have their independent study. That’s the only thing that we assign them to do in the 3rd year. They also have to do 2 professional internships before they graduate. They can do those at any time during their studies if they have the time. Most of them wait until the third year. One of the things that Colombia is good at, largely because our faculty are all still working in the profession, is that we are pretty plugged into the community.

Also the program has a good reputation, so our students don’t have a difficult time getting internships. I encourage them to do divergent internships as well in terms of what the work itself is. If they think that there’s an area where they might be interested in applying their skills, but they’re not sure, they should try it’.

David Lindsay-AbaireCo-Director Juilliard School Playwriting Program

David originally attended Juilliard as a student and now he shares the Co-Director role with Marsha Norman. In recognition of its benefactor, the program is called the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program. ‘It’s officially 1 year. However, nearly everyone is asked back for the 2nd year like I was. At the end of the 2 years the participants are awarded an Artist Diploma in Playwriting. It’s free. In fact, the students are given a small stipend. We get around 500 applications. They have to submit 1 play, 2 letters of recommendation and a statement of intent. A selection of readers go through all of the applications and then Marsha and I are presented with the 11 or 12 finalists. From the finalists we select 4 participants. When I was a student we came in totally green. We had no productions under our belt. Nobody knew us. And as the years went on and past participants started winning Pulitzer prizes the program became more prestigious and so the calibre of the writer has changed. But what hasn’t changed is how Juilliard is run. It’s the same as it was when I attended as a student to what it is now’.

‘It is essentially one class. The participants are allowed to audit any class in the drama department if they’re so inclined. For example they can sit in on an acting class. Most of the playwrights take the dedicated playwriting



Alexander class. The only requirement is that they attend our playwriting class. We meet once a week: 3 hours on Wednesdays. There are also public labs where the playwrights’ plays are presented by the drama department current acting students and alumni in a public forum. These twice-monthly Play Labs allow the writers to hear their work read by actors’.

‘The way the weekly class works is: we meet as a group, we start by saying ‘What plays did you see this week’? And we go around the table and we talk about the plays and we tear them apart and we say what we love and we say what we didn’t love and we just talk about other people’s plays. And then we say ‘Okay, great. Should we read the play now’? One of the students will have a full-length play. The participants in the program have to write 3 plays a year so in 2 years they write 6 plays. And we’ll do it just as I described in my writers’ group. Usually just the writers will be there and we’ll read it out loud. Sometimes some of the acting students will come in and read or occasionally an outside actor if there’s something very specific a writer needs. There’s about 8 to 10 playwriting students in the room,

me and Marsha and often an alumni or 2 will be there just for fun. We invite writers back from time to time. There’s a sense of family. Also it’s good for the current playwriting students to be in contact with past students. We read the play, then take a break and then we come back and we discuss the play’.

‘The students write 3 plays through each of the 2 years. So the class secretary will look at the calendar and say ‘Who wants 1st slot? Who wants 2nd slot’? And everybody commits to their slot. Then after 8 weeks there’s a class. 8 weeks in a row they do all their plays and then we’ll do a special class where Marsha or I will take a lecture. For example tomorrow Marsha is doing a lecture on musical theatre and how musicals are built. The students are playwrights but someone might have that special interest. Then we do 8 more weeks and they’ll bring in their 2nd batch of plays. And then I’ll do a lecture on say, the Hero’s Journey or something very structured saying, ‘We don’t teach you this a Juilliard but if you’re interested here is the structure that everyone in Hollywood would want you to write like. Take it or leave it but some of you said this is

‘These plays are so brand new and nascent. A writer can be destroyed too easily. We all know they’re 1st drafts. We know they’re imperfect. We don’t need you to fix it for us, that’s our job’. David Lindsay-Abaire



important to you so we’re going to do this. Only this one class and we’ll never speak of it again’. Then 8 weeks in a row is the 3rd session with the student’s 3rd play. And that’s how it’s done. They do that for 2 years and they write 6 plays. And then they all get one Play Lab each year. That’s a public reading. Each participant does one of their plays in 1st year and then a different play the 2nd year. Also in their 2nd year they do a workshop production, which are different. These are rehearsed off-book, with some production components, however we keep them low tech. 1 workshop production with 3 or 4 performances. The workshop productions have a 4-week rehearsal process, using the Juilliard students and perhaps bringing in an actor for a specific role’.

‘The participants in the program have to write 3 plays a year so in 2 years they write 6 plays’. David Lindsay-Abaire

‘Going back to the weekly classes where we do readings of their plays. We read the play and then we respond to the play. Generally, what we’ll say first to the playwright is: ‘What do you want to know? How can we be most helpful’? This is so that we don’t jump right in because every writer is different. Some are more sensitive, some of them don’t want a lot of critical feedback, some of them have very specific questions. Usually it’s like in my own writers’ group. It’s just a general: this is what I liked, I really responded to this, here’s where I had questions. But at no point are we to ever give prescriptive notes. Marsha and I speak first to set the tone and then the writers’ fellow students will jump in’.

‘At labs, we’ll do a big read with all of the actors. And the playwright will sit up front with me and Marsha. And we’ll say things like: ‘What did you respond to? What popped for you’? The actors all know they’re not allowed to say anything negative or prescriptive. They just have to respond from an emotional visceral place. They can talk about what excited them or made them think about certain things but they can never be prescriptive. These plays are so brand new and nascent. A writer can be destroyed too easily. We all know they’re 1st drafts. We know they’re imperfect. You don’t need to tell us that. We just want to get your response so we can take the temperature of the play. We’ll know what to do. We can go back and fix it. We don’t need you to fix it for us, that’s our job. By the time these plays have reached a workshop production we have to be even more careful because they’re built now. So we don’t want to dismantle them. We try to be respectful. The plays are generally from the previous year and so they’ve gone through a whole process. We debrief after and away from the workshop but seldom do we give dramaturgical notes at that point unless the playwright really wants them. But that’s not what that’s about. We ask agents to these workshops. Increasingly some of our students already have agents’.

‘One last thing about the weekly Wednesday classes. We finish each class with a ‘Defence against the Dark Arts’ session. The playwrights can ask me and Marsha anything they want about playwriting. Whether it’s how to navigate a difficult director or how best to get your script in front of producers. It’s a general sort of life-things session. The life of the playwright. Not about craft or writing. Just about living as a playwright in terms of career and personal relationships. That’s the ‘Defence against the Dark Arts’’.



Andrea Romaldi Director National Theatre School of Canada Playwriting Program

‘In the mid 20th century cultural leaders became aware that we needed to begin producing our own arts and our own artists and the NTS came out of that movement. It’s a co-lingual school to represent the fact that Canada is bilingual. The playwriting program wasn’t part of the school at the beginning. There were playwrights-in-residence in the 1980s. The playwriting program started to run consistently during the 1990s. The course is 3 years long. 2 students per year. In terms of the structure of the course. There are projects that are specific to each year. There is a 1st year project, which is a unity play: 2 characters, unity of time, space and action so that the writers really focus on writing dramatic action through dialogue: the fundamental muscle of writing plays. There is also an adaptation project that year. The adaptation of a short story for the theatre for the students to begin to get an insight into how dramatic stories are told differently than stories

in prose and what you have to do to a story written in prose to make it dramatic’.

‘Then there is a 2nd year project, which is probably the most open of all the projects. It’s for a cast of 4 to 5 about a subject of the playwrights’ choice. This is only my second year in the job but I sense that this is the project where the playwright does a lot of growing. Then in 2nd year there are 2 more writing projects. One is a 15-minute play project that is seeded through a free-writing class. It’s actually more of a directing project. It’s an opportunity for the directing students to work with the student playwrights and a dramaturg to try to work out their relationship. How to speak to playwrights about their work. How to work with a dramaturg. Then it is produced with the 2nd year actors. Then the final 2nd year project is a TYA: a Theatre for Young Audiences project. This has done very well, with a few plays being picked up by the local company that looks after young audiences. So, that is Phase 1 of that project with the idea that at the end of 2nd year the writer has a good solid 1st draft. During the



development of this play, the work receives a workshop with professional actors and then a reading. Those are the 2nd year projects’.

‘The 3rd year projects are: The 3rd Year Project or The New Words Project, which is the play that the graduating class all produce together and it is staged down at the Monument-National. Those plays have to be about 90-minutes long and because there are 2 plays, they have to work with the 3rd year acting cohort in terms of numbers. Those plays are workshopped over the course of the school year. They have 3 x 1-week long workshops and then several readings during the year so they go through an intense development process. Then the 2nd writing project in 3rd year is Phase 2 of the TYA project, which they began in 2nd year. It gets finished and workshopped’.

‘There was no emphasis on reading a lot of extant plays. In Canada there's been such a movement of new Canadian work and that's been a real focus’. Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman

‘All through this the students are doing other subjects: theatre history for the 1st and 2nd years and text analysis as a compliment to theatre history. In the text analysis class they are using models from a variety of different theoretical texts and applying them to the plays they read. Students also do workshops in different kinds of writing. For example they have a Creating Great TV Workshop and Writing for the Digital Age. Many of these classes are taken with directing students. The directing program is 2 years. And they only take students every other year. So, when the directors are

in 1st year they take a lot of classes with playwrights. All 3 years take either Europeans Plays or Canadian Plays. They alternate. One year Canadian. Next year European. In terms of which plays are chosen to study: Theatre History is classic Western canon. Text analysis takes some of those plays from the Western canon and analyses them but also adds in other plays as well. For example they might be looking at Greek plays but then look at the modern version of them as well. The idea being to analyse the classic play then analyse the adaptation. In terms of the European plays. Currently the person who takes the course is looking at as many contemporary European plays from as many countries as possible. I worked with the students this year. I chose some pieces from the poetics. Also some for story. I would like to have the students reading more plays. I don’t want to turn the program into an academic program but I want the students to have a stronger vocabulary, a stronger language, more access to text analysis models. Models of dramaturgy. Also seeing plays. This year all the students see the student productions at the Monument-National. There are 4 of them and I have added a post-mortem on every production. Everyone has to get together and talk about the production. It’s a simple idea but I want the students to be able to talk about works coherently. By seeing it and talking about it makes you think and realise how it works. Talking about your own work allows you to clarify your ideas. Allows you to communicate your ideas to your collaborators. Allows you to pursue the ideas that you want in your work. And advocate for those ideas’.

‘I learned mostly by doing. At NYU they had us writing constantly’. Jason Grote



Maureen LabontéNational Theatre School of Canada

At the NTS, Maureen developed and ran a pilot Directing Programme, co-ordinated the Playwriting Programme and the Playwrights’ Residency. She has also taught in the NTS Playwriting and Directing programmes. ‘Back in the late 90s early 2000s, I ran the playwriting program. It’s a relatively small program, with 2 students a year undertaking a 3-year program, which has turned out a lot of really good writers. I also started a playwrights-in-residence program because I felt it important to bring writers in from across Canada so that the students were exposed to artists other than Montreal-based artists or Toronto-based artists, which are the closest major theatre centres. I remember bringing in Daniel MacIvor and Jason Sherman as writers-in-residence for the year to work on their own work and work with the students. I’m sure this is true of Australia as well that what happens in large countries like ours is the separation. In Canada it’s central, east and west. Central Canada tends to dominate the theatre scene and that is true of Toronto and Montreal. I think it’s important if you’re a national theatre school, that the students are exposed to writers from across the country. The writers-in-residence had an office and accommodation for a whole year. The writers weren’t there full-time. These were people who had busy careers so we would figure out periods through each semester when they were available. I liked the idea of the cross-fertilisation and that the writers could come to Montreal and do some writing. I liked that the school contributed to their work and the school benefited from their presence and teaching. Budgets prevailed and I think the program lasted maybe 3 years. At the NTS I also developed a system, a method of text analysis for the playwright as well as the director. I have applied that text analysis

method to my reading and analysing of plays-in-development. It has contributed a lot to how I prepare for dramaturgical sessions’.

‘I was constantly working on plays and putting them on their feet’. Bekah Brunstetter

‘In terms of my own approach to teaching I definitely cover play analysis and structure. I think that’s important. There’s not just one way but with all good writers there is a structure to their writing. I use Picasso as an example. Picasso knew everything about making realistic art. He’d been to school and he’d done it. Then he decided to break the rules. He broke the rules knowing what the rules were. I believe in and I have taught the benefits of reading plays in order to learn about playwriting. Not just reading plays to critique. I’m not big on critiquing: ‘I liked it, I didn’t’. That’s irrelevant. It’s learning about playwriting through reading well-written plays. At the NTS I taught Canadian theatre, so from the perspective of writers in this country’.

‘My method of text analysis is based on the students reading and analysing a play together. For years I’ve been using Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad. It’s complex. It’s got flashbacks, multiple time-frames. We analyse then the students apply the analysis method to any play they want. What happens when you analyse something post-dramatic, for example. You talked to Tony Kushner for this study. Angels in America is a beautifully written play. There’s all sorts of similarities with Ibsen. I call it archaeology, where you get into the heart of it, you go down into all the component parts: the characters, time. Then apply that analysis to various kinds of writing’.



Terry Curtis Fox Arts Professor, Chair NYU Tisch School of the Arts Department of Dramatic Writing

‘The undergraduate degree is a 4-year course. We do what we call cross training, which is to say we make the assumption that you don’t know where your career is going. I also assume, especially for the undergrads that come in here at 18, that they will probably be writing for a medium that doesn’t exist now. There was certainly nothing like a web series when I was coming out. However the principals of drama are going to remain. Everyone must have some familiarity with all three forms. Some of them choose to keep mixing it up, some of them choose to specialise. But we say to them, you don’t know where your career is going to go. I went out to L.A. as a pure screenwriter, I was never going to do television however 75% of my career is in television. David Henry Hwang will tell you. He used to tell people ‘Learn television because that’s how you are going to make a living’. Now he tells students ‘Learn television because it will make you a better playwright’. Nobody is doing one or the other anymore. David will also tell you that he never intended to be an opera librettist but he is now the most in demand opera librettist in the world. Things happen and you don’t expect them and then therefore, the more familiarity, the more flexibility you have the better for your work and that’s what I want my students to have’.

‘In the undergraduate course because we are not a conservatory; we are not Juilliard, nobody gets cut. We are giving a liberal arts education. The only way we can get our undergrads through both a standard liberal arts program and a thesis, is at the end of the 2 years they must chose to concentrate on either theatre or screen or television. You can continue to take classes in the other media, but they must choose one concentration and there is a very structured sequence in each one of those. In the

graduate program they don’t have to declare their thesis until the end of the third semester and then they do a thesis in their class’.

I asked Terry to clarify ‘undergraduate’ and ‘graduate’ as in Australia we tend to use terms like ‘post-graduate’, which are degrees like MFAs. ‘Undergraduate is the 4 years they do before doing their Masters’ degree. The undergraduate degree is a Bachelor of Fine Arts. And because we are a liberal arts university we understand that some of our students are going to end up going to law school. I have students here now whose parents will not fund them if they were not able to go to med school after they had been here. So they are simultaneously getting that, while they’re getting a Bachelor of Fine Arts. But they come out with the same general education that everyone else at NYU gets so they have the ability to go on and do different things and some of them do. However, an astonishing number of them stay within the art form’.

‘It was a dramatic writing course. It was playwriting, screenwriting and television’. Jason Grote

Can you please talk me through the undergraduate course Terry. Let’s say I’ve just completed the first 2 years, what do I expect in the last 2 years of the degree? ‘You take your 3rd year. You will start with Play 2. It’s very structured. You will write either half of a full-length play or a full-length play. In your Play 1 class, you have written a one-act play now you are getting to write a full-length one’. So Play 1 was already written in my first couple of years? ‘That’s right. You have already now taken the Craft class, the Play 1 class, the Screen 1 class, the TV 1 class. Narrative structure is woven through all these



classes. Now you are going to write you full-length play and the class that you’re taking will be half of a lecture, half of a play. Here are some plays that we all read and also let’s look at what you are writing. So half of the class is a lecture on extant plays, which we discuss and the other half of the class is taken up critiquing what you’re writing. Then you’ll go into an advanced play class where extant plays are referenced and individually tailored to what the students are writing. For example someone is writing something Absurd I would say ‘You know you must read Rhinoceros. So the plays we examine are resident with what the student is writing. Then in your final semester you write your thesis play and that is pure writing from beginning to end. That is, you can either take that play you wrote in advanced and do a substantial re-write or you can say that play I wrote in advanced was just that thing I learned a great deal from, but I never want to look at it again and let’s start a fresh. For the undergrads it’s either work wonderfully or fall flat on our faces. And I always tell students that if you’re not looking to fall flat on your face you have no business being a playwright or a screenwriter or a TV writer. We fall on our faces all the time and that’s when we learn the most. We are doing our undergraduate thesis class with a simultaneous class in the undergraduate drama department and they are basically giving us a repertory company of actors and every week a different play gets read top to bottom by actors. So that they hear the play’.

‘I feels that Aristotle is a good place to start and stay for a little while until they feel a little more freedom in their own voice’. Sheila Callaghan

Cusi Cam Assistant Arts Professor NYU Tisch School of the Arts Department of Dramatic Writing

Cusi has been teaching for about 10 years altogether and at NYU for 4 years. ‘I teach playwriting and television writing. I also teach a fundamental class for freshmen called Craft, which is really about the ‘wright-manship’ of playwriting. The basics of it. I teach about conflict, what is dramatic conflict, what is dramatic action, what are the components of character, what makes an interesting, compelling character, what’s a protagonist, what’s an antagonist, how do you build a plot. The theme of the department I teach at NYU is ‘cross-training’ the dramatic writer, which sounds very athletic. We look at the areas that I have just outlined across film, TV and theatre. What does escalation look like in an episode of Breaking Bad and what does it look like in Oedipus Rex? How is it similar and how is it different? This is for the Craft class: the fundamentals. Everyone has to take this class. And a playwriting class, a screenwriting class and a film writing class. Then they can decide what they’re going to do in 3rd year. It’s a 4 year undergrad course. A BFA. We’re one department and we do a Masters too. So sometimes they interact, with undergrads and grads together. It’s big. 60 students in undergrad and 24 grad students. The first 2 years the students take subjects in playwriting, TV and film writing. In 3rd year they decide on what they’re going to concentrate on and that carries onto to 4th year. If they do playwriting the outcomes are building a portfolio of plays: a 90-minute play, a 2-act play and then a thesis play. There are different things they can do with the plays too. There’s a class that’s all about working out scenes with actors. The grad students, both the grad actors and the grad playwrights, meet each other and the playwriting students write plays specifically for the grad actors’.



I asked Cusi if the work of playwriting students who have done their first 2 years in TV and film pushes them into a more naturalistic style of playwriting by third year. ‘The program is only in its 2nd year. It’s a new curriculum. Last year was the first class where we did this progression. I think what’s happening, which is really great, is that a lot of people came here feeling certain they wanted to write for film or TV and then fall in love with writing plays. It’s a freer form’.

‘What is the pathway that it will follow after you do a reading? What is the next journey that the playwright can take? That’s what we’re trying to do here, make flow here’. Jean Anzulis

Jean AnzulisDirector Playwrights Horizons Theater School, NYU Tisch School of the Arts

‘In their 1st year all of the students take classes in everything. These take the form of rehearsals and labs. Everything is driven by the process of making something. In the 2nd year they continue their studies but expand out to a specialisation focus. Students start to select where they want to put their energies. It’s collaboratively-based, it’s company-based and it’s designed so that the student is assisted to find how they personally work, how they want to work and how the theatre can support them in that endeavour. We have 200 students every year in an undergraduate program. There are specific classes in playwriting. We look at feedback training and what is productive feedback.

This is an important first lesson. We have play readings and use the classics in an exercise of stealing. For example, what can you take from Ibsen and tell in your own voice? The students receive a reading list every summer. Plays are introduced each week and discussed and critiqued. In their 3rd year student-teams propose productions. These are authored and devised. The company commissions artists to come in and work with the students. That’s also an option. There are over 80 shows a year. Starting with a 1st year group of 65, there will be 10 who choose to pursue writing. NYU students don’t necessarily stay in the same space in their 3rd and 4th year. Horizons’ foundation is new work and collaboration. Some students concentrate on dramaturgy. There used to be a class specifically on dramaturgy a few years ago, but there were too many hours. Dramaturgy was the one class it was felt that the content could be channelled into the other course work. If a student shows interest and aptitude in dramaturgy, the course will set up a mentorship. Last year, there were 3 students involved in this program. Playwrights Horizons Theater has 3 resident companies all interested in developing new work. So, it’s a shared environment, an ecosystem. The best environment is a program that services a larger population. It’s not just a one-off event. There’s a need to create a writers’ retreat where those works are going to go onto the next step or are passed onto someone else. What is the pathway that it will follow after you do a reading? What is the next journey that the playwright can take? That’s what we’re trying to do here, make flow here. To me, that was always the missing element. Up town, they would do these readings and then that would be it. But where does that piece go and how can someone continue working on that piece? Sometimes I will take a play that someone’s working on, they’ll do a reading and I’ll say,



‘Great. Why don’t you come down here and we’ll give you a 2-week workshop and you can work with some of our student artists and you can continue to develop that work’. When we come together, it really is the cream of the New York writing scene coming into our house here. They’re inviting their friends and we might pick up the next person who wants to pick up your play, or might cast you in something, or might need a director for something. That’s what we’re trying to do. Most people in the last 5 years would say that their careers are really starting here at Playwrights Downtown because you are accessing so many different points of contact. We read every script we receive and give a very detailed feedback assessment, which is something like 3000 plays a year’.

‘And then in 3rd year we were required to write a play for the Monument‑National, a big theatre in Montreal’. Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman

Bekah BrunstetterBekah undertook a Creative Writing MFA at The New School NYC. ‘This was very collaborative and aimed at doing things. A lot of writing and having the language about what you have written and being able to communicate about it. The 3 years were very hands on. Everyone had to take acting; writers, directors and actors all took acting classes together. This culminated in strange performance pieces and also many short play festivals. So, I was constantly working on plays and putting them on their feet. As well as readings of our work my cohort read a lot of plays and interrogated the plays that we were reading. The MFA was about writing as

much as possible and identifying what my voice was. There wasn’t a great emphasis on structure. This meant not letting a lot of other voices in, for e.g. structural paradigms. I was trying to keep them out so I could identify and strengthen my own ‘voice’. Any drawing from dramatists, e.g. Brecht, was secondary to what you were writing. What you were trying to say’.

‘I would have the students read plays and then unpick them’. Simon Stephens

Sheila CallaghanSheila taught playwriting at the College of New Jersey and Florida State University. ‘I’ll teach the Aristotelian model but I’ll also teach an experimental model. For new writers, I feels that Aristotle is a good place to start and stay for a little while until they feel a little more freedom in their own voice’.

Charlotte Corbeil-ColemanCharlotte is a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada Playwriting Program. She graduated in 2004. ‘The National Theatre School is a 3-year program and they take 2 students per year. A very small group. In 1st year students write a one-act play and take classes in comedy, in dramaturgy, as well as some movement classes with the actors and improv. Very inter-disciplinary in the 1st year. In the 2nd year students write a two-act play. And then in 3rd year we were required to write a play for the Monument-National, a big theatre in Montreal. The acting class acts in them and the directing students direct. At no time in the rest of your life do you have such a large company of actors at your disposal!



I ended up writing 2 plays for my 3rd year piece. That involved the whole acting class and working with all the production teams. I also worked with a lot of professionals coming in from all over Canada. I made all these connections with industry people. The course emphasised structure in the 1st year. There was no emphasis on reading a lot of extant plays. In Canada there’s been such a movement of new Canadian work and that’s been a real focus. The classes were often not like classes. Rather someone would come in for a week and work with us. The course was focused on the student. How did their voice become stronger? The best part of the theatre school was that we wrote so much. And that’s all we had to do. We had so many deadlines. We really did leave the school knowing our voice. I couldn’t help get better because we wrote so much’.

‘I also asked them to memorise difficult poems and recite difficult poems because I wanted them to get a sense of the way language can sometimes say things that it is almost impossible for language to say’. Tony Kushner

Liz FlahiveLiz is a graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts Department of Dramatic Writing. ‘When I went through the course I undertook an equal weight of playwriting and screenwriting before I had to decide what my concentration was in 2nd year. There were classes in dramatic structure, contemporary drama, modern drama,

Chekhov, foundational script analysis. Once you determined your concentration; screenwriting or playwriting, the classes became more like masterclasses with the aim of completing a play. The classes were then more workshop-based. It was an undergraduate course and as such the emphasis wasn’t on output. By the end of the course the idea was to have an ‘almost finished play’. My focus was on playwriting. I had no intention then of being a screenwriter. In terms of how they taught playwriting, there was an emphasis on structure. The Aristotelian structure. They read the Poetics. I was lucky to have teacher Paul Selig who was an experimental playwright. I think at a lot of art schools you really hook into the teachers that speak to you and Paul was the one. You felt like that you read, you know a ton of Arthur Miller. A ton of Ionesco, Chekhov, Shakespeare. You studied the well-made play to death. As young writers you were like, ‘How do I break convention in addition to how do I make the well-made play’? So it was like you were doing both at the same time’.

Jason GroteJason has a MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. ‘My professors were teaching more traditional dramatic form and things that were a little bit more literary. But there was no uniform pedagogy between them. It was a really wide variety, which had its strengths. I learned mostly by doing. At NYU they had us writing constantly. It was a dramatic writing course. It was playwriting, screenwriting and television. 2 years. The playwriting teachers that interested me there were the ones that were doing the more unusual stuff and were non-traditional. To my teachers’ surprise I ended up doing theatre immediately afterwards. It wasn’t surprising at all to me. I felt I needed to learn more in screenwriting and less in theatre. I also availed



myself of all the professional contacts I could make while I was there. I had already been doing downtown theatre in New York before I started graduate school. It was what propelled me to study. So, I just started doing it right after my MFA, working with Soho Rep. And I had an internship at New Dramatists, where I later became a member and of which I am a current alumnus’.

Tony KushnerTony taught for around 4 years for NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts MFA program. Ultimately he had to stop teaching because when he critiqued student’s plays he couldn’t get any of his own writing done as ‘It made the process of writing very conscious. The students were all in 3rd year about to get their Masters degree.

At one point I handed out a fairly complicated essay on political theatre. It was dense and difficult. All of my students came back to the next week’s seminar and said they had read it. But they hadn’t read it, they had dismantled it. Everyone came back with a sentence here or there that they liked the best. There was no sense that when you write an essay you have to try and construct. You have to try and follow the architecture of the essay and the thought as it develops. The students were just skipping the parts that were too hard and picking the parts that they liked. So, I made them go back and read it together and talk it through. And they did that and it took a long time. Many, many weeks. And in the end the picking apart line-by-line was very helpful. I told them that the deal was that I would meet with every one of them at the end of the semester and talk about the



play of theirs that they wanted me to read. I would make notes and tell the students what I thought. I told them that was all I was going to do in regard to their playwriting. That in class we were going to talk about Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History and works on ideology. I also asked them to memorise difficult poems and recite difficult poems because I wanted them to get a sense of the way language can sometimes say things that it is almost impossible for language to say’.

Theresa RebeckUniversity of Houston’s School of Theatre and Dance

Theresa serves as the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Playwriting at the University of Houston’s School of Theatre and Dance. ‘It’s an undergraduate program. I have the juniors and seniors and there are maybe 2 to 5 students doing their majors. I work with them for a year. With the juniors I do a full-length play and some shorter plays and then at the end of their 2nd semester they do an evening of their shorter plays, where they read the plays to each other and discuss. After that they go through a couple of drafts and then I come in for the rehearsal of the final production. In the seniors, one of them gets a full production and the others get shorter productions. For the full production I work on the show when it’s on its feet. These sessions are especially beneficial to the playwright as we finesse the script. The students experience 1st hand how a show can come together. Another teacher takes them through structural paradigms. Mostly I cover practical things like: action rises out of character, story rises out of action. Also, how to build dialogue that has a sound in it. How to see dialogue as action. And how to write character from the inside out. So, it’s much more moment-to-moment tools of playwriting.

I am trying to get them to write plays that really focus on character, action, dialogue. So that they have those building blocks, they understand them and the tools are in place when they are ready for something bigger’.

Simon Stephens Royal Court Young Writers’ Program Tutor

In the early stages of Simon’s career the Royal Court was setting up the Young Writers’ Program and they needed a tutor. Simon took on the challenge and he worked there for 5 years as the tutor. I asked him how he structured the class. ‘I would have the students read plays and then unpick them. I decided it would be a 10-week course. It ran once a week for 2 to 3 hours. And this is how I broke the weeks down. 1 week would be a guest. Another week a plenary. The rest of the course I broke down into 7 areas of playwriting that I wanted to look at. These included: dialogue writing, dramatic action, location, narrative, structure. I chose 7 plays that fed into each of those areas’.

‘You studied the well‑made play to death. As young writers you were like, ‘How do I break convention’ in addition to ‘how do I make the well‑made play’? So it was like you were doing both at the same time’. Liz Flahive



In Australia we have very few organisations charged with the charter to develop playwrights. Those that do exist are undervalued and under-resourced, a situation that severely limits their reach and ultimate success.

Playwrights in the countries that I visited are regarded as the primary artist. There is an understanding of the solitary nature of playwriting. Many times I heard the refrain ‘Playwrights need a home’. Companies actively seek to develop relationships with playwrights. They recognise that a play is an expression of the playwright’s voice.

Canada’s Nationalist awakening of the 1960s provided the catalyst to develop the voice of the Canadian playwright and on Canada’s east coast, Canadian playwrights continue to be at the centre of Canadian theatre decades on. In Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. there is a deep respect for the playwright and the playwright is placed at the centre of the theatre community.

Playwrights in the countries that I visited are regarded as the primary artist. There is an understanding of the solitary nature of playwriting

Playwrights in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. are supported through a range of initiatives and activities delivered by theatre companies along with dedicated script-development organisations. These initiatives and activities include but are not limited to: commissions, competitions, conferences, one-act play

festivals, dramaturgy, festivals, public readings, residencies, retreats, writers’ groups and workshops. Some of these initiatives are not delivered under the umbrella of a company but are writer-initiated.

In Australia we have very few organisations charged with the charter to develop playwrights

In the U.S., playwrights are proactive in forming writers’ groups, which are beneficial in engendering a sense of community and creating a culture for informed feedback in a supportive environment. Writers’ groups further serve the playwright by providing deadlines. They create an opportunity for writers to hear their work read and appraised in the company of other playwrights. Writers’ groups help the playwright to gain confidence and form long-term collaborative creative relationships.

Development amongst peers is a keystone principle to programs such as The Juilliard School, which is a Fellowship and the New Dramatists, an organisation with the sole purpose of developing playwrights. In this 7-year residency playwrights drive their own development. In Canada, the Banff Playwrights’ Lab residency is integral to the development of Canadian playwrights.

There are currently a number of playwrights-in-residence at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto. Playwrights have use of an office. There’s no funding attached to the residency. Just an understanding that Tarragon is the playwrights’ ‘home theatre’. This gives the playwrights a sense of security, confidence and community in an often solitary profession.

DEVELOPING PLAYWRIGHTS AND THEIR PLAYSkey findings

key findings


1-year residencies were extremely beneficial to the playwrights who undertook them at the Royal Court Theatre. Playwrights found that ‘being immersed in the life of the theatre’ had a major impact on their writing careers. Having access to the rehearsal process, analysing scripts and evaluating performances outside of the theatre company: these activities provided the training for a suite of playwrights who have gone on to be internationally recognised.

One-act play festivals were referenced by a cohort of interviewed playwrights as a stepping stone from amateur to professional theatre. They imposed deadlines and afforded the playwright an opportunity to develop from a short-form narrative to a long-form narrative. Other stand-out development activities include regular readings of writers’ work in a public forum. One of the add-ons of this activity is the cross-pollination between writers and actors.

The role of the dramaturg does not have the uptake in the countries that I visited to the extent that it does in Australia

Responses to the notion of dramaturgy were varied. It was generally considered there is no ‘one size fits all’ dramaturg and that the depth of the relationship between the playwright and the dramaturg is important. Many of those interviewed proposed that rather than a separate dramaturg, the role should be absorbed into the job-spec of the director. The role of the dramaturg does not have the uptake in the countries that I visited to the extent that it does in Australia.

Theatre companies and writers view production as one of the major methods of developing playwrights. Productions can be

small scale. Productions also encourage long-term relationships between the primary artist and their key-collaborators.

Echoed many times was the belief that playwrights should be allowed to fail. Also reiterated often were protocols relating to feedback playwrights are given on their developing plays. At The Juilliard School feedback after play-readings is monitored by guidelines. At New Dramatists the playwright drives the feedback session.

Development amongst peers is a keystone principle to programs such as The Juilliard School, which is a Fellowship and the New Dramatists, an organisation with the sole purpose of developing playwrights

Theatre companies considered playwrights’ trajectories and offered avenues for development past an initial reading or workshop. This pays tribute to the amount of time a new work takes to develop. Paines Plough develops the playwright by stepping them through the process of writing for smaller spaces to larger ones. The RSC has a number of stages and playwrights pen works for specific theatre spaces.

Often the RSC immerses playwrights into the culture of the company before commissioning them. This process, which can take a number of years, serves to develop a relationship between the playwright and company. The RSC’s writers’ groups offer another avenue for forming relationships with playwrights.



Many of the companies and institutions that teach playwriting have affiliations with and are associated to universities. Through these connections the companies and universities stage activities such as script-development conferences. The New York Theatre Workshop have 2 very successful out-of-town events. One of them targets new scripts and there are no performance-outcomes. The other is for developed scripts. These receive an in-progress presentation. The university provides work-spaces and accommodation ensuring these activities are cost-effective.

Consistently my study uncovered that behind major-developing companies and initiatives was a person with vision, passion and tenacity. At the Royal Court Theatre, a company responsible for nurturing generations of playwrights, George Devine pushed for new work to be enshrined in the Royal Court charter. Joseph Papp founded the famous Public Theater with the intention of staging new works. New Dramatists was established by playwright Michaela O’Harra whose aim was to develop plays in the company of fellow playwrights.

In Canada, playwrights are supported by the Ontario Arts Council Recommender Grants for Theatre Creators. Theatre-creators apply to theatre companies that are designated program ‘recommenders’. The recommenders then assess the applications before submitting to the Ontario Arts Council. On receipt of grant funding, theatre companies then disperse money to the theatre-creators to ‘seed new works’.

The takeaway from U.S. tertiary institutions is that they offer a scope of performance writing concentrations including playwriting, screenwriting and writing for TV. Currently university playwriting graduates, Juilliard fellows and New Dramatists’ alumni form a very valuable piece of the booming television

industry, affording playwrights the possibility of a sustainable career.

Playwrights found that ‘being immersed in the life of the theatre’ had a major impact on their writing careers

In the U.K., tertiary-level playwriting courses are virtually non-existent and playwrights are self-developed and/or developed by theatre companies. In terms of student numbers the NTS of Canada Playwriting Program accepts only 2 students a year. This ensures individual attention.

At NYU, Juilliard and the NTS of Canada the writing and acting departments complement each other, with the acting students performing and reading the writers’ new plays. At Juilliard and the NTS of Canada there is a strong emphasis on output. Participants in the Juilliard program are expected to write 6 full-length plays over a 2-year period. At The Juilliard School the weekly meetings where participants’ plays are read and discussed are the focus of this fellowship. The participants only have a 1 or 2 formal ‘lectures’. The emphasis is on practical outcomes.

As regards writing practice. While the majority of the playwrights interviewed celebrate the eclectic form of playwriting while responding negatively to the formulaic approach to screenwriting, most conceded that their screenwriting practice had a positive impact on their playwriting practice.



recommendationsalso found on pg 10

In order to create a consistent, transparent and strategic approach to the development of playwrights across Australia, it is recommended that

an on-going, well-resourced development organisation for playwrights be supported in each state and funded by the state arts agencies (this organisation herein called ‘state play-development organisation’)

theatre companies in receipt of federal funding support their state play-development organisation by providing either financial and/or in-kind resources

the state play-development organisation be artist-led, empowering the playwright to lead their own development in the company of fellow playwrights

the state play-development organisation and the theatre companies endorse a charter to serve playwrights at all stages of their careers including but not limited to emerging, mid-career and established playwrights

the state play-development organisation consider long-term residencies modelled on the New Dramatists

the state play-development organisation consider offering a program based on the New Dramatists’ Composer-Librettist Studio initiative to assist the development of musicals

links be established between the state play-development organisation and universities towards resource-sharing for a range of script-development initiatives including state-based playwriting conferences

drawing from the Tarragon Theatre model, theatre companies offer a number of residencies, which provide resources for the playwright-in-residence but without the theatre company bearing hard-costs

further to these residencies, theatre companies offer a 1-yr residency, where the playwright is paid

based on the Royal Court model, theatre companies offer a 1-yr paid attachment/internship for entry-level playwrights where the intern is immersed in the theatre culture, reads submitted scripts, reports on local shows and has access to rehearsals

theatre companies consider including festivals of one-act plays in their seasons towards providing a stepping-stone for the developing playwright

drawing from the Tarragon Theatre model theatre companies consider developing audiences for plays-in-progress showings towards promoting an understanding of playwriting

drawing from the RSC and Paines Plough models, theatre companies consider a 2 to 3 layer approach to assist the development of playwrights, where playwrights write for a theatre company’s smaller space progressing through to larger ones

drawing from the RSC model, theatre companies consider immersing playwrights in the culture of their theatre before commissioning them as well as developing relationships with playwrights through writers’ groups

drawing from the U.S. model, playwrights become proactive in shaping their own development by forming on-going writers’


groups as well as partnering with venues towards regular readings by local actors of short excerpts of their developing works

in the understanding that play development is a long-term process and the artistic leadership of a theatre company changes, that theatre companies make play development of playwrights including locally-based playwrights, one of their core on-going functions and that this objective is mandated in their company charter.

In order to create career pathways for sustainable careers in playwriting, it is recommended that

Australian universities and organisations that deliver playwriting courses also offer concentrations in writing for TV and screenwriting to broaden the skills base of their graduates

Australian universities and organisations that deliver playwriting courses broker relationships with TV broadcasters towards creating career pathways for their playwriting graduates.

Clearly we recognise playwriting talent from the U.K., Canada and the U.S. This study recognises the expertise and experience of these countries to develop playwrights and their plays. By investing in the development of our own playwrights we are investing in pathways towards sustainable careers for our playwrights; both current and future. We may even dream of our plays crossing borders to other countries the way we have been producing plays professionally from other countries since 1953.

DEVELOPING PLAYWRIGHTS AND THEIR PLAYSrecommendations


spreading the wordDeveloping Playwrights and their Plays will be directly emailed to the relevant personnel at the following organisations

Arts funding organisations including but not limited to

– Arts Queensland

– Arts South Australia

– Arts Tasmania

– Australia Council for the Arts

– Create NSW Arts, Screen & Culture Advisory Committee and Executive

– Creative Victoria

– DCA WA

– NT Arts

Theatre companies across Australia in receipt of federal grant-funding including but not limited to

– Bell Shakespeare Company

– Black Swan State Theatre Company

– Company B Belvoir

– La Boite Theatre Company

– Malthouse Theatre

– Melbourne Theatre Company

– Queensland Theatre

– State Theatre Company of South Australia

– Sydney Theatre Company

Playwriting development organisations

– Playlab

– Playwriting Australia

Universities and organisations where playwriting and/or performance writing is taught, including but not limited to

– AFTRS

– Curtin University

– La Trobe University

– National Institute of Dramatic Art

– RMIT

– University of Newcastle

– University of Notre Dame Australia

– University of Queensland

– Victorian College of the Arts


list of images1st page collage L-R

– Royal Court Theatre London

– National Theatre School of Canada signage

– Mercury Theatre London detail

– Atlantic Theater Company door NYC

– Playworks Horizons’ building NYC

– New Dramatists’ building NYC

– Sally McKenzie

– New Dramatists’ building detail

Mercury Theatre London ........................... pg 4

Sally McKenzie ........................................... pg 5

Royal Court Theatre ................................... pg 7

Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O’Neill Melbourne Theatre Company production February 1981 theatre review written by Leonard Radic .......................................... pg 12

Playworks Horizons’ building ................... pg 16

Playworks Horizons’ building ................... pg 17

New Dramatists’ building ........................ pg 20

Once in a Lifetime by George S. Kaufman 3rd year NIDA student production 1977, L-R: John Francis, Robert Menzies, Anthony Prehn, Sally McKenzie, Mel Gibson, Dawn Jones .......................... pg 21

Atlantic Theater Company door .............. pg 22

New Dramatists’ building detail .............. pg 23

collage: Churchill Fellowship on-the-journey questions/research diary entries ............. pg 24

Top Silk by David Williamson. Script with notations by David Williamson updating dialogue from premiere production. Queensland Theatre Company production with Sally McKenzie as Jane Fredericks 1990 .. pg 25

collage of photographs taken on the Fellowship, L-R pgs 26/27

– Cusi Cam, Michel Marc Bouchard, Jason Grote, Emma Tibaldo

– David Lindsay-Abaire, Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman, Christopher Hampton, Abigail Katz

– Lucy Morrison, Simon Stephens, Theresa Rebeck, Philip Kan Gotanda

– Terry Curtis Fox, Clare Slater, Sheila Callaghan, Lizzie Stern

– Colleen Murphy, Nina Steiger, Robert Lepage, Jean Andzulis

– Bekah Brunstetter, Enda Walsh, Judith Thompson, David Henry Hwang

– Abigail Rokison-Woodall

– Emily Morse

– Clare Slater, Kenneth Lonergan, Nina Lee Aquino, Chris Campbell

– Adam Rapp, Hannah Moscovitch, Mike Leigh, Andrea Romaldi

Bekah Brunstetter .................................... pg 28

Paramount Pictures ................................. pg 29

Sheila Callaghan ....................................... pg 30

Jason Grote .............................................. pg 31

Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman ...................... pg 32

Hannah Moscovitch; Colleen Murphy ..... pg 33

coffee at café meeting interview; Judith Thompson ..................................... pg 34

Michel Marc Bouchard; Robert Lepage ... pg 35

David Henry Hwang ................................. pg 37

David Lindsay-Abaire ............................... pg 38

Kenneth Lonergan ................................... pg 39


Lynn Nottage ........................................... pg 40

Adam Rapp .............................................. pg 41

coffee & donut Toronto’s Pearson Airport > Montréal; Theresa Rebeck ....................... pg 42

Christopher Hampton .............................. pg 44

Mike Leigh ............................................... pg 47

Simon Stephens ....................................... pg 48

Enda Walsh .............................................. pg 49

Nina Lee Aquino ...................................... pg 51

Joanna Falck ............................................ pg 53

Tarragon Theatre, Toronto ....................... pg 55

Abigail Katz .............................................. pg 60

Lizzie Stern ............................................... pg 62

Clare Slater; Nina Steiger ......................... pg 65

Paines Plough Roundabout pop-up theatre .................................................................. pg 66

Lucy Morrison; Chris Campbell ................ pg 68

Pippa Hill .................................................. pg 70

Maureen Labonté .................................... pg 72

Emma Tibaldo .......................................... pg 74

Churchill Fellowship on-the-journey questions/research diary entries .............................. pg 75

graphic: dramaturgical notes from work-in-progress ................................................... pg 89

Emily Morse; Michaela O’Harra ............. pg 100

New Dramatists’ playscripts library ....... pg 102

New Dramatists’ building signage: readings of resident playwrights .............................. pg 104

New Dramatists’ building exterior dedication ................................................................ pg 108

The Juilliard School building exterior ..... pg 126

National Theatre School of Canada interior signage ................................................... pg 128

Churchill Fellowship on-the-journey questions/research diary entries ............................ pg 136



referencesAtlantic Theater Companyhttps://atlantictheater.org

https://atlantictheater.org/about/history/

Bedlam Theatre Edinburgh University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedlam_Theatre

Camberwell College of Arts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camberwell_College_of_Arts

Columbia University School of the Arts Dramaturgyhttps://arts.columbia.edu/theatre/dramaturgy

Columbia University School of the Arts Playwriting https://arts.columbia.edu/theatre/playwriting

Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique du Québechttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatoire_de_musique_et_d%27art_dramatique_du_Qu%C3%A9bec

Corcadorca Theatre Companyhttp://www.corcadorca.com/website/

Creative Australiahttps://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/FlagPost/2013/April/Creative_Australia__National_Cultural_Policy_2013

Donmar Warehouse https://www.donmarwarehouse.com

Ex Machinahttp://lacaserne.net/index2.php/

Factory Theatrehttp://www.factorytheatre.com.au

Manhattan Theatre Club https://www.manhattantheatreclub.com

Naked Angels https://www.nakedangels.com/tuesdays-9

https://www.nakedangels.com

The National Theatrehttps://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/about-the-national-theatre/new-work

National Theatre School of Canada Playwriting Programhttps://ent-nts.ca/en/playwriting

Necessary Angel Theatre Company http://www.necessaryangel.com/home-five

New Dramatists https://newdramatists.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Dramatists

New York Theatre Workshophttps://www.nytw.org

Ojai Playwrights Conference https://www.ojaiplays.org

O’Neill National Playwrights Conference https://www.theoneill.org/npc

Ontario Arts Council Recommender Grantshttp://www.arts.on.ca/grants/recommender-grants-for-theatre-creators

https://atlantictheater.org

https://atlantictheater.org/about/history/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedlam_Theatre

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camberwell_College_of_Arts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camberwell_College_of_Arts

https://arts.columbia.edu/theatre/dramaturgy

https://arts.columbia.edu/theatre/playwriting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatoire_de_musique_et_d%27art_dramatique_du_Qu%C3%A9bec



http://www.corcadorca.com/website/

https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/FlagPost/2013/April/Creative_Australia__National_Cultural_Policy_2013




https://www.donmarwarehouse.com

http://lacaserne.net/index2.php/

http://www.factorytheatre.com.au/

https://www.manhattantheatreclub.com

https://www.nakedangels.com/tuesdays-9

https://www.nakedangels.com

https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/about-the-national-theatre/new-work

https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/about-the-national-theatre/new-work

https://ent-nts.ca/en/playwriting

http://www.necessaryangel.com/home-five

https://newdramatists.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Dramatists

https://www.nytw.org

https://www.ojaiplays.org

https://www.theoneill.org/npc

http://www.arts.on.ca/grants/recommender-grants-for-theatre-creators

http://www.arts.on.ca/grants/recommender-grants-for-theatre-creators


Padua Hills Playwrights’ Festival https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padua_Playwrights

Paines Ploughhttps://www.painesplough.com

Playwrights Horizonshttps://www.playwrightshorizons.org

Playwrights Workshop Montréal https://www.playwrights.ca

Public Theaterhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Public_Theater

https://www.publictheater.org

Royal Court Theatrehttps://royalcourttheatre.com

https://royalcourttheatre.com/about/history/

Royal Shakespeare Company https://www.rsc.org.uk

Shaw Festival https://www.shawfest.com

Steppenwolf Theatre Company https://www.steppenwolf.org

Stratford Festival https://www.stratfordfestival.ca

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratford_Festival

Tarragon Theatrehttp://www.tarragontheatre.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarragon_Theatre

Theatre Passe Muraillehttps://www.passemuraille.ca/wp/50th-anniversary/

Tisch School of the Arts Department of Dramatic Writing https://tisch.nyu.edu/dramatic-writing

Williamstown Theatre Festival https://wtfestival.org

Young Playwrights Festivalhttps://www.theoneill.org/ypf

DEVELOPING PLAYWRIGHTS AND THEIR PLAYSreferences

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padua_Playwrights

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padua_Playwrights

https://www.painesplough.com

https://www.playwrightshorizons.org

https://www.playwrights.ca

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Public_Theater

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Public_Theater

https://www.publictheater.org

https://royalcourttheatre.com

https://royalcourttheatre.com/about/history/

https://www.rsc.org.uk

https://www.shawfest.com

https://www.steppenwolf.org

https://www.stratfordfestival.ca

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratford_Festival

http://www.tarragontheatre.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarragon_Theatre

https://www.passemuraille.ca/wp/50th-anniversary/

https://www.passemuraille.ca/wp/50th-anniversary/

https://tisch.nyu.edu/dramatic-writing

https://wtfestival.org

https://www.theoneill.org/ypf

Report by Sally McKenzie, Churchill Fellow 2017 Churchill Fellowship · 2019-05-02 · screenwriter...

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