There’s More Than One Way to Foster New Plays

After more than 12 years working as a creative producer at the Mark Taper Forum, I am baffled by Laurie Winer’s distinction between the quality of stewardship offered at the Taper and that at South Coast Repertory (“Award for Best Parent to a Play,” Calendar, March 29). I was also very concerned that the compare-and-contrast format of the article contributes to a scorecard mentality about art-making and is ultimately damaging to our endeavor.

Winer seems to be saying that one theater’s commitment to artists is superior primarily because it has commissioned works from an initial idea rather than from an actual first draft.

The premise of Winer’s article is that this season SCR has presented “four world premiere plays, all commissioned by the theater, all good.” This is, of course, an extraordinary record for any theater, and SCR is to be commended. But the article goes on to criticize the Taper’s programming by stating, “The last time the Taper put a new play on its mainstage that it had commissioned before any drafts had been written was in 1993.” This is hairsplitting of the most absurd kind when it comes to new plays.

Winer disregards the fact that, of the 31 plays produced on our mainstage since the 1992-93 season, 13 were either commissioned, substantially developed or premiered by our theater. The article creates a misleading notion of differing levels of “newness” concerning new plays that does not reflect how plays are developed and produced in American theaters.

Even for the year Winer begins with, 1992-93, she omits the fact that we produced the world premiere of “Angels in America,” which went on to highly successful runs in New York and elsewhere and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for its first part. Though we did not commission “Angels,” we worked with Tony Kushner for more than 2 1/2 years and provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in support of that project in addition to mounting the first full production of both parts of “Angels.”

In 1993-94 we presented world premieres of Luis Valdez’s “Bandido” and Lisa Loomer’s “The Waiting Room,” along with the first major presentation of a commissioned work by Culture Clash--”Carpa Clash”--all on our mainstage. Also, our New Theatre for Now festival, which begins Friday, will feature four playwrights who have been fostered by our theater. One of these plays will receive its world premiere on our mainstage.

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What Winer did not make clear about SCR’s season of world premieres was that three of them were presented on its second stage, at 161 seats, not on its mainstage, which is closer in size to the Taper. The fourth play, David Henry Hwang’s “Golden Child,” was previously produced at the New York Shakespeare Festival.

Winer infers a quantitative and qualitative difference between SCR’s “full 40-performance run and an impeccable production” for “Three Days of Rain,” in its second space, and the presentation this season of four premieres running 16 performances in our New Theatre for Now Festival, on our mainstage. Quantitatively, our 16 performances mean that a potential 12,000 people will see each of our New Theatre for Now plays, versus the maximum 7,000 people who could see “Three Days of Rain.” Qualitatively, our festival will benefit from what Winer refers to at SCR as “first-rate acting, set and direction” as much as any Taper production.

Winer made the point that the Taper has not yet found a second space, “a place that doesn’t feel ancillary in the public mind to the main nest of the Taper.” Taper Too has functioned successfully for years as a lab and a second space, and part of its virtue is that it maintains a separate identity from our mainstage.

In addition, she overlooked the fact that we did present world premieres in the last three years at that space, one of which, Marga Gomez’s “A Line Around the Block,” she praised as among the season’s best in 1995. That season we also commissioned and produced the world premiere of Yehuda Hyman’s “The Mad Dancers” in our Virtual Theatre Festival, as well as the West Coast premiere of Danny Hoch’s “Some People.”

The article implies that while SCR “fosters and maintains long-term relationships with artists,” the Taper does not. This is simply not the case. The Taper maintains long-term relationships with dozens of playwrights and supports their work through commissioning, workshops, readings and production.

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There are currently more than 40 commissioned projects in development at the Taper, 14 from the Latino Theatre Initiative, eight from the Asian Theatre Workshop, four from P.L.A.Y. (Performing for Los Angeles Youth) and 14 funded through various new-play development funds. Among commissioned artists, we are in active development for mainstage productions in 1997-98 and 1998-99 with Anthony Clarvoe, Ellen McLaughlin, Kevin Heelan, Anna Deavere Smith, David Gordon and Ain Gordon. Each of these projects was commissioned before a draft of the work existed.

It is also a demonstration of the Taper’s commitment and loyalty that we consistently produce the plays of well-established writers like Terrence McNally, Tom Stoppard, Jon Robin Baitz, Kushner and Athol Fugard. Each day, we balance our commitments between producing such playwrights and finding new voices in the theater.

Every writer needs support and every play deserves the best a theater has to offer, but the process of developing a new play is never the same. Our job is to respond to the complexity of the journey to the stage and provide the resources each talented writer needs to get it there.