It’s an unfortunate responsibility to have any affiliation with a playwright. The necessary support level is high. It’s like having some exotic pet. Or a boat. Apparently they say the two happiest days in a man’s life are the day he takes ownership of a boat, and the day he sells it. In the performing arts community, there is a perilous ongoing dance between obligation, desire, responsibility and friendship that can have some severely negative consequences if someone’s foot flattens another’s toe. So let me offer some thoughts on this dance from the playwright’s perspective.
In my opinion, playwrights are on the line for their work in a way more closely aligned with painters, composers or novelists than screenwriters, even though many playwrights also work as screenwriters (big screens and small). Just as with every note you hear in a piece of music, or every word you read in a novel – every word spoken in live theatre is controlled by the playwright. I think it was Coppola who said that most movies are written on the hood of a car – lines are improvised and changed between “action” and “cut” over multiple takes, and that’s after several writers were hired over many drafts. In the theatre, the words have been dissected and doubted, tossed aside and resurrected, agonized about over a couple years by one writer in solitary confinement – it takes at least two years to develop a decent play, and many great plays out there have taken far longer than that.
