Group to Fund Playwrights on Broadway

Plays like “M. Butterfly” and “Speed-the-Plow” made such a good impression on Broadway this season that one forgets how few new American plays Broadway actually sees these days. Exactly six last year.

What if the Broadway theater were actually to commission scripts? That’s the idea behind the American Playwrights Project, announced this week in New York.

It’s a joint venture between Jujamcyn Theaters (Broadway’s No. 3 landlord, after the Shuberts and the Nederlanders) and three independent Broadway producers, James B. Freydberg, Max Weitzenhoffer and Stephen Graham.

They are putting up a $200,000 pool, from which funds will come to commission plays from 10 writers, including David Rabe, Marsha Norman, Christopher Durang and David Henry Hwang, author of “M. Butterfly.”

Each playwright is to receive roughly $15,000 per script, in three installments--the first installment immediately, the second halfway through the writing process and the third on the play’s completion. None of the money has to be paid back, and, remarkably, the playwright can take the completed script elsewhere.

Nor is there a guarantee that the play will get a Broadway production--though, of course, that’s the hope.

“This is more of a grant than a strict commission,” Jujamcyn’s president, Rocco Landesman, told the New York Times. “It’s very unstructured. The purpose is to get playwrights to write plays.”

The pool also will supply funds for readings and workshops of the new plays and possibly some financial help for pre-Broadway resident-theater productions.

But Freydberg was careful to say, by phone from New York, that artistic control of the production would be retained by the resident theater involved. (As applied when Lanford Wilson’s “Burn This”--produced by Freydberg on Broadway--premiered at the Mark Taper Forum.)

“Several film companies are also showing interest in the pool,” Freydberg added. But, again, the playwright retains final say as to what will happen to his work.

There are probably some bugs in the scheme, but it sounds as if Landesman and Freydberg have anticipated the major problems, and no plan that puts money in a playwright’s pocket is to be sniffed at.

“On my own, I wouldn’t think of trying to write a play for Broadway,” said Durang. “This makes me feel, oh, sure, I’ll try again.”

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: John Updike in the New York Review of Books: “Most human utterance is not communication but a noise, a noise that says, ‘I am here’--a noise that says, ‘You are not alone.’ ”