Mid-Career Playwrights Struggle to Get Support in Youth-Focused Industry

Theater is often focused on the young. One would think this is only true on the stage--actors and appearance receive the bulk of attention. But behind-the-scenes it is that way too. With a few exceptions for established writers like Tom Stoppard, emerging writers are given way more attention than older ones.

"There is this system where exciting writers come out of writing programs and everyone wants to grab those writers and they are drowning in grants and commissions, but it is still not quite a living wage, so someone gets them a job in a [television] writer's room," said Theresa Rebeck. "Then, when they start writing plays again, or if you have playwrights who never stopped trying to build a body of work, there is no support for them."

This has been a problem for decades, but there simply hasn't been enough done to fix it. There are some applicable grants, but not many. One positive has come from New York's Signature Theatre. Signature currently has three residencies, two of which focus on mid-career playwrights. The Spotlight Residency, formerly known as Residency 1, which was the founding residency of the theater, starting in 1991 with Romulus Linney, is for more established playwrights. Sarah Ruhl has the Spotlight honor currently. The Premiere Residency, previously known as Residency 5, guarantees each writer three productions of new plays over the course of a five-year residency. It launched in 2012 and is more geared to mid-career playwrights that are somewhat established but not household names. Current Premiere Residency writers include Samuel D. Hunter, Dave Malloy, Dominique Morisseau and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.

"There are many opportunities for genuinely emerging writers," Paige Evans, Artistic Director of Signature Theatre, said. "Mid-career gets less sexy. They've been at it for a while--whether it is ten years or four plays or however you define mid-career. They've been working practicing their craft and their art for a number of years and they haven't hit a level of being really familiar more broadly and there's less funding and there are fewer production opportunities. So it's really important to support them."

Signature can't do it all however. Evans discussed losing playwrights to teaching or television as one of the unfortunate consequences of the community's failure to support mid-career playwrights. Women and people of color have perhaps suffered more mightily from this failure, as establishing themselves at a young age was more difficult for them. (Some of the problems female playwrights have faced were detailed in BroadwayWorld's prior series.)

But it's possible things will get better. Artistic Directors tell me they are paying more attention to having a diversity of ages in their seasons. Caridad Svich, the new Artistic Director of New Play Development at the Lucille Lortel, said she hopes to make her selections "intergenerational" because she knows the uphill battle mid-career playwrights face, being one herself.

And we are soon to have a wider launch of a theater company dedicated to older playwrights, The Tent. Headed by Tim Sanford (former Artistic Director of Playwrights Horizons) and Aimee Hayes (former Producing Artistic Director at Southern Rep Theatre), The Tent's mission is to nurture, support and produce the new works of older American Playwrights and cross-disciplinary theater makers. Playwrights involved include Kirsten Childs, Nilo Cruz, Eduardo Machado, Marsha Norman, Jose Rivera, Sarah Schulman and Doug Wright.

This support--and more like it--will do nothing but help the industry.

"If you look at Shakespeare's early plays, they are Shakespeare, but they are not that good," Rebeck laughed. "By the middle of his career he was writing KING LEAR, which is a masterpiece. My early stuff was mostly promise. Now I'm making promises I can keep."