Playwright - New Play Development

New Play Development

In an effort to develop new American voices in playwriting, a phenomenon known as new play development began to emerge in the early-to-mid 1980s and continues through today. Many regional theatres hired dramaturgs and literary managers in an effort to showcase various festivals of new work, or bring in playwrights for residencies. Funding through national organizations, such as NEA and TCG, encouraged the partnerships of professional theatre companies and emerging playwrights. Play development as a term has a variety of applications. It usually defines the period after an initial draft has been written, when the play is workshopped with a group of actors and director, and prepared for a reading. The latter is called a staged reading which suggest the play has been rehearsed several times prior to the "reading" although there is no hard and fast rule about this. New Dramatists in New York, for example, will often have a "cold" reading of a script in an informal sitdown setting. A cold reading means that the actors haven't rehearsed the work, or may be seeing it for the first time. Festivals of 10-minute plays, popularized by the Humana Festival in Louisville, KY, have become a staple of many play contests. Many plays can be rehearsed in a brief amount of time, and usually, the technical requirements are minimal. Shenandoah and the O'Neill festival offer summer retreats for playwrights to develop their work with directors and actors in a totally "devoted" setting. There has been a backlash over the past ten years with the formation of Playwriting Collectives like 13P and Clubbed Thumb who have gathered members together to produce, rather than develop, new work. This has been a reaction to the "developed to death" notion in which the play never gets produced, but goes through endless readings and critiques that after a certain point, are counter-productive. In this decade, many literary departments have been eliminated in regional theatres as the result of a difficult economy. Nevertheless, most new plays that are produced in New York go through some kind of assiduous development process, and rare is the play that shows up on a producer's desk and gains any traction. On Broadway, this has happened in the past year with Martin McDonagh's "Behanding in Spokane" and Mamet's "Race" although these shows were packaged with stars (Christopher Walken in the former) and with playwrights who are well established in the profession.