NURTURING THE FLEDGLING PLAYWRIGHT

Not everyone will believe this but, believe it, the American theater has done more to foster new playwrights than any other culture in the world.

Why not? It’s a worthy cause. Commendable. And championed. (What the American theater hasn’t done--and the shambles of the Broadway stage is living proof--is foster its creators of musical theater with nearly as much zeal. But that’s another story.)

American playwrights, if they have any talent, should have no significant trouble getting it diagnosed by the growing numbers of play clinics that dot the nation.

Some of these clinics, such as the National Playwrights Conference and the Midwest Playwrights Unit, are more perspicacious than others. The Humana Festival of New Plays at the Actors’ Theatre of Louisville has had the most enviable track record overall with plays that have moved on to other stages. Largely because of so much success, the trend is towards more, not fewer, workshops where playwrights can get together with each other, with dramaturges, directors and critics to refine their work.

Has so much focus become too much of a good thing? Has it taken on a veneer of self-righteousness? Is it, in some cases, more self-congratulatory than useful? And has it, in other cases, assumed the aspects (and proportions) of a trade convention?

The answer to all those questions is yes, which is also a little disconcerting. New-play festivals/workshops/units vary enough to elude generalities, but there is a creeping danger of devaluating the craft itself in the mass effort to improve it. In a cottage industry of such a deeply personal and fragile nature as writing for the stage, where the uniqueness of a “voice” is prized above all else, it is terrifyingly easy to lend importance to the unimportant or, conversely, to deaden the truly original by subjecting it to less than enlightened judgment.

And yet. Theater being the three-way collaborative process that it is (from writer to actor to audience) makes playwriting the only kind of writing that clearly benefits from early validation through exposure and critique. But exposure where? Critique from whom? Those are the perils. The form is so loose (there are no rules) and the pundits so various, that commentary just as easily can be confusing as constructive.

Aside from the immediate and obvious difficulty of sorting good work from bad (whose idea of “good” and whose of “bad”?), much subtler issues manifest themselves. In making selections, what standards does one apply (ultimately, one’s own) and to whom does one pledge the primary commitment--the playwright? The play? The event?

If the commitment is to the playwright or the play, of what kind shall it be? Help and support for the duration of rehearsals and performance/readings--and the prayer that someone will come along to pick up the ball? Or a commitment to try to carry the play through, perhaps to a second production? While this usually depends on how the event (or the organization behind it) is structured, the time may have come to pay much more attention to follow-up, so that plays, once discovered, don’t just lie there on the shelf.

When the primary commitment is to the idea of a festival so-called (and that can take over, when you consider the funding, scheduling and structuring requirements of most of them), the dangers multiply. Most festivals or workshops, operating on an annual basis, feel under some obligation to top (or at least repeat) their achievement year after year. Persistence in tracking the great American play means slogging through a vast amount of mediocrity. That can lead the healthiest intellect to early burnout. The room for error is enormous.

And there are other traps. Festivals often are locked into a specific number of plays announced ahead of time. Pressure on organizers to “deliver” increases proportionately to the amount of attention paid (media and other). But what if not enough worthy plays can be found? Do dates and quotas prevail? They usually do--at the expense of art.

(In this regard, Louisville has just announced a change in policy that will make its annual festival, formerly devoted to new work, focus on second productions of recommended plays. Smart thinking, not only because it fills a need, but also because, after 15 years of original scripts, the festival was showing serious signs of battle fatigue.)

Compounding other problems is a much touchier issue: the natural desire to support playwrights one has nurtured to success (as in Louisville over the years). Outwardly, it’s an exemplary idea. Realistically, it can be the right commitment to the wrong play at the wrong time--an excellent way to undermine the soundest of professional relationships and try the patience of an audience.

Locally, Padua Hills and the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre’s annual Festival of World Premieres (each offering products of their own playwriting workshops) have supplied evidence that, over time, loyalty and family spirit can lead to quality-blindness. Both festivals, undeniably, have had their share of victories (I’ll take Martin Epstein’s plays anywhere, any day), but they have also nursed along some whopping bores.

“Necessary!” will shout passionate defenders of the process, yet, while the popular view is that it is important to support a good playwright’s bad pieces to get to the good ones, the evidence really doesn’t support it. It is easier--and, in the long run, kinder--to tell a playwright when a piece doesn’t cut the mustard. Also clearer and cheaper.

Did the 1979 Goodman Theatre production of David Mamet’s “The Long Canoe” serve any useful purpose other than to enrage the playwright, who reacted violently (and too long) to his unfavorable reviews? Doubtful. Nor would rejecting that script have stopped him from delivering his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Some things just have their own internal timing.

(Not included in this appraisal are long-time professional associations such as the Lanford Wilson/Marshall W. Mason alliance, the Stephen Sondheim/Harold Prince and Sondheim/James Lapine collaborations or Sam Shepard’s choice of San Francisco’s Magic Theatre as his personal crucible--with or without director Robert Woodruff. These arrangements and others like them optimally served the individuals involved, but they experienced a different birth than the process under examination here.)

In theater, where the word is wedded to individual vision, where thought and intent thrive on difference and where the most eloquent language can be tongue-tied (Pinter and Beckett) or invented (Ionesco and Shepard) or profane (Mamet and any number of others), enough conventional people measuring other people’s work by their own less imaginative yardsticks could (horrors) homogenize theatrical art.

Genius continues to be born, not made and certainly not molded by committee. But for every genius whose talent would pierce through twelve-foot walls, there are at least a dozen very gifted artists who could fall through the cracks and shouldn’t. They are the ones who’ll benefit most from a supportive system of trial and error.

There is no questioning the value of the concept of the lay workshop/unit/festival, but the time may have come to rethink it. It is not enough that these workshops exist, but important to ensure that they exist creatively-- that they don’t merely become ingrown and self-important and topple of their own weight.

Recommendations? As with most problems, a healthy measure of discrimination and flexibility. If something that once worked doesn’t any more, change it. Louisville is doing that. The Mark Taper Forum’s New Theatre for Now always, smartly, eschewed fixed schedules, formulas and numbers--another sensible idea. The watchwords are keep it fresh, small (i.e. manageable), simple and useful. And if a program refuses to do any of those things, don’t be afraid to scrap it.

Some things are cyclical. Sometimes they need to die to be reborn. There is no shame in that. Now if only we could marshal this sort of energy into the development of the American musical. . . .