For me, Outrageous Fortune is above all a reaffirmation of the perils of the winner-take-all economy in the arts. Looked at from almost every conceivable angle, one can find evidence of severe stratification in the theater world, both among artists and among the theaters themselves. This stratification has implications not just for the dollars and cents but also for the kinds of opportunities available to artists, the kinds of work they find themselves doing, and the artistic vitality of theater as a whole. It is a powerful indictment of market forces and a demonstration of why philanthropic and public subsidy matters in the arts.

Since there’s a lot going on in Outrageous Fortune and it’s kind of hard to keep track of it all at times, I thought it might be helpful to lay out something like a giant map of the motivations and territorial features driving reality. It’s sort of unorganized and I’m sure it could be improved with your help, but at least it’s a start and hopefully begins to draw a clearer picture of the key issues at stake.

So here goes. Let’s first look at motivations, shall we?

What playwrights want

• Full productions of their work
• To make a living writing plays (or at least as a playwright)
• Freedom to write experimental or challenging plays

What artistic directors want

• To produce the Next Great American Play
• Plays that will bring them and their theater national recognition
• Plays that will connect with their theater’s audiences
• Plays that will not expose their organization to great financial risk
• Money from funders

What funders want

• Financial health of the theaters they support
• To support new play development
• To support wider and new audiences for theater

Now for some facts and assertions:

• The vast majority of theaters have small budgets and small audiences.
• A playwright cannot make money from small-budget productions.
• The theaters that have large budgets and large audiences tend to be concentrated in major cities, particularly in New York.
• The vast majority of playwrights have limited notoriety and have not yet written a Great Play.
• The playwrights that have notoriety and have written critically acclaimed plays are concentrated in New York.
• The media environment for new plays is concentrated in New York.
• Media reaction has a strong influence on audience interest in and financial success of new plays in New York.
• The financial and critical success of past productions has a strong influence on whether future productions happen or not nationally.
• The financial success of a show is dependent on audience reaction and the cost of the production.
• Audiences are more likely to come to shows in which the name of the playwright is familiar.
• Audiences are less likely to come to shows that feature unconventional narrative forms or challenging material.
• A greater number of parts for actors increases a play’s production cost.
• Unconventional technical or stage requirements increase a play’s production cost.
• Playwrights feel that a track record of full productions is necessary for writing great plays.
• There are a limited number of slots in any given season for full productions of new work.
• Personal relationships are very important for driving production opportunities for playwrights.
• Personal relationships are hard to form and cultivate outside of one’s geographic sphere.

So let’s put this together and consider the incentives of different parties. We see that:

• Since playwrights want to make money from their plays, they are incentivized to try to work only with big-budget theaters.
• Since big-budget theaters are concentrated in New York, personal relationships are important to play production, and personal relationships are best cultivated in person, playwrights are incentivized to concentrate in New York.
• Since artistic directors want to program Great Plays, they are incentivized to work with playwrights who have already proven that they can write Great Plays.
• Since artistic directors want plays that will connect with their theater’s audiences, they are incentivized to program plays that are written by well-known playwrights and conventional in narrative.
• Since artistic directors want plays that will not break their budget, they are incentivized to avoid plays that have budget-breaking features like large casts or technical requirements, especially if the playwright is not well-known.
• Since the vast majority of playwrights are not well known and playwrights want to have their plays produced, they are incentivized to write small-cast plays in conventional narrative forms and with conventional technical requirements.
  • This is in conflict with playwrights’ desire to write experimental and challenging plays.

And now for some consequences:

• Playwrights (of all career stages) only want to work with large-budget theaters, and theaters (of all sizes) only want to work with famous playwrights. Thus famous playwrights and large-budget theaters have all the opportunities they want, whereas small theaters and non-famous playwrights face tremendous competition for thin slivers of opportunity.
• Because New York is the center of the theatrical universe, New York-based playwrights with critically reviewed New York performances have opportunities to be performed nationally whereas non-New York-based playwrights have few opportunities for performance anywhere.
• There are consequences for actors as well; the trend towards smaller-cast plays means fewer opportunities for actors, in a field that already had far more aspiring actors than roles available.
• The plays that receive big enough productions to have a chance at a national profile are increasingly small-cast plays in conventional narrative forms with few technical requirements.
• Because artists have few opportunities to get plays produced and can’t make a living from productions at smaller theaters, a smaller and smaller pool of artists will have repeated production opportunities. The Next Great American Play will come from this tiny pool of artists or it won’t be discovered at all.
• Because new playwrights must endure years of obscurity before they might make any money from their work, playwrights who have some means of self-funding have a tremendous advantage in the marketplace over their peers who have no other means of support.

Note that these are all natural market forces at work. There are clusters and power-law relationships in evidence in virtually every creative industry. Funders could and do provide counterincentives to avoid the worst excesses of the market, but because funders’ top or near-top priority is the ongoing fiscal health of the theaters they support, they severely limit the good that these counterincentives can do. Fundamentally, we are going to see a near-total death of obscure, challenging, expensive new plays unless someone decides to make it happen and take responsibility for it financially.

The second chapter of Outrageous shines a light on the sadly pitiful economic status of most playwrights. Holy Moses, it’s depressing. The numbers as presented are pretty stark: more than 60 percent of surveyed playwrights bring in less than $40,000 a year from all sources; more than half of that income comes from sources unrelated to their work as a playwright; and a mere 15% of their income comes from actually writing plays. Even the most successful of all playwrights, we’re told, are lucky to earn as much as $20,000 a year over an extended period of time from playwriting itself.

I’m currently making my way through William Baumol and William Bowen’s seminal 1966 study Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma (note: Baumol served on the Playwrights Project Committee in connection with this book from 2001-2009), and it’s striking how similar the story was then to how it goes today. I unfortunately don’t have the book with me at the moment, but suffice to say that, back then as well, if playwrights were to strike it rich it was going to be from the sale of movie or television rights to their work, and in the meantime, they supplemented their income with money from lots of other sources (including spousal and family wealth). [UPDATE: I’ve checked the book, and indeed, the average playwright in the mid-50s earned less than a tenth of his or her income from plays, and about 40% from non-writing sources.]

As others have pointed out, the playwrights interviewed by the authors of Outrageous Fortune don’t exactly represent a random cross-section of the playwriting community in the United States. The top-down-driven sample is heavily biased (as the authors fully recognize) towards playwrights who have “made it” to a certain degree, regardless of their career stage: either by being produced regularly, winning awards, graduating from pedigree MFA programs, participating in well-known workshops, etc. I actually don’t think this is much of a problem for the purposes of the study: the point, after all, is how much it sucks economically to be a playwright, and the authors of Outrageous Fortune can point to these results and say, “see? even the successful ones can’t make a buck in this town!” It’s also pretty comparable in that sense to the Baumol and Bowen study, since I believe similar methods were used to identify playwrights.

Among the more poignant findings is that even when playwrights do get productions of their work, it can be an economic bane as much as a boon. A month is taken from their productive lives during which their compensation may not make up for the expenses they incur being in an unfamiliar place. And when they get back, they haven’t been writing or hustling for gigs in the meantime.

The chapter offers a brief examination of playwright-reported differences in earnings and productions by race and gender. Interestingly, the qualitative and quantitative data diverge somewhat here; while a strong frustration with perceived barriers to minority and female playwrights was conveyed in focus groups and interviews, the surveyed respondents reported no major differences in the actual money they earn from their professional activities. It should be noted that this sample of “successful” playwrights was underweighted compared to the United States population of African American and Latino individuals, so it does seem fair to conclude that fewer people of color “make it” as playwrights, either because fewer of them try or because of discrimination of some sort. However, the same could not be said of female playwrights, who made up nearly half of the sample; nevertheless, female playwrights were more likely to describe themselves at an earlier career stage (it’s not reported how this matched up with age or number of productions). It also seems likely that there are things not being captured by the study, such as many respondents’ perception that minority or female playwrights show up more often at venues or showcases specifically designed to highlight “underrepresented” work and less in more “mainstream” contexts; it could be the case that this is so but that the money nevertheless works out to be  more or less the same.

The chapter devotes additional attention to the problems with the professional “track” for playwrights going through MFA programs, including the now-famous stat that 90% of the playwrights in the survey who had received advanced professional training got it from one of seven schools (the total is 42% of all surveyed playwrights). A bit of lip service is given to the  moral quandary of asking aspiring playwrights to pay tens of thousands of dollars for training in a field where the remuneration potential is hardly robust. The term “emerging” comes in for some abuse, and the authors lament that there is no room for the mid-career artist.

The few bright spots appear to be teaching in academia (writers enjoy it and the schedule suits them, though it obviously feeds the beast that is the Professional Playwright Track) and working in television (where stimulating creative possibilities abound, though in a different sort of sense than the nonprofit theater).

All in all, it sounds like a pretty huge clusterfuck to me. I don’t know why anyone would try to be a playwright for a living. But then I hang out with composers, so what the hell do I know.

Okay, let’s try for some more intelligent analysis than that. This all fits in with and supports some things I’ve written before about the burgeoning ranks of committed amateurs and its implications for the sustainability of the arts ecosystem. Outrageous Fortune‘s answer for “what playwrights want” boils down to productions: not workshops, not readings, not “development,” but real productions. Preferably with the same company multiple times, so that an ongoing artistic relationship can be cultivated. Problem is, if such accommodations are made, it makes a very few playwrights very happy and shuts out everyone else in the cold. There’s no way to go both broad and deep without radically increasing the number of theaters and the resources available to them. Either that or a whole bunch more playwrights are gonna have to quit, but that doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon. This vise of competition seems to grip all artist categories, but I’m starting to think that it’s especially tight around the creators: the composers, the bandleaders, the playwrights, the choreographers, the poets. Most in this category don’t have a union or collective bargaining agreement to protect them, because the demand for their services is coming, most of all, from within. So they end up being the ones to drive movement forward on their careers, and are willing to sacrifice almost everything to do so. It’s beautiful and sad and frustrating and it’s one of the few things about the arts that makes me throw up my hands at a complete loss for how to address it.

First things first. Outrageous Fortune is, at its core, a book about new plays. It is billed as a study, but my initial sense (and I should clarify that I am still making my way through the book) is that it is closer to a work of journalism than of science. Sure, there are a couple of surveys involved, but the number of respondents is not overwhelming; most of the information presented is gleaned from in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with hand-selected participants. So it’s a qualitative investigation into the life of the working playwright and the life of the new play, examined from the perspectives both of those who write the plays and those who are responsible for bringing them to the stage.

Outrageous Fortune paints a none-too-bright picture of the environment for new plays in America. Of principal concern are the economic challenges faced by playwrights and the lack of opportunity for making one’s living through playwriting; the gap in support for mid-career playwrights; the inauthentic professional relationship between playwrights and artistic directors; and the creeping institutionalization of theater that hamstrings true artistic leadership. There’s a lot of nostalgia for bygone eras and erstwhile heroes, from Eugene O’Neill to Joe Papp, the likes of which (it’s implied) we’ll never see again. Broadway and the commercial theater has ceded responsibility for new play development altogether, we’re told; playwrights complain that unconvention in form is brutally punished at the box office, if it ever gets programmed at all; how are writers supposed to develop, the question is posed, if they don’t see their works produced?

It all sounds pretty bad, particularly on economic grounds, and my instinct is to turn a sympathetic ear, but then I put my composer’s hat on and find myself re-evaluating. Wait a minute, I’m thinking, you’re complaining that theater is hostile to new plays when, according to Terry Teachout, the top 9 and 10 of the 11 most-produced plays of the past decade were written after 1993? You’re complaining that artists aren’t nourished when even at regional theaters, a play can expect to be seen most every night for several weeks?

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the land of orchestras. A wondrous nation where you’ll find almost every concert (especially at the regional level) dominated by dead white guys, most of whom did their writing before 1893. A vast field in which there is exactly one full-size orchestra dedicated exclusively to music by living composers (the American Composers Orchestra), doing so on a shoestring budget. An environment in which a composer can perhaps hope for several hours of rehearsal time with a new work, so that it can be performed a total of three times, or twice, or once. Ever. In which union regulations often prevent said composer from distributing or even hearing the recording of that one performance for future reference. In which less than one-seventh of those who consider themselves professional composers actually make a living from their work. And for all you diversity kids, get a load of these stats for composers: 80% male and 85% white! (Actually, those numbers are for all composers reached by that particular survey – I’m sure they’re even worse for those who specialize in orchestral music.)

I don’t mean to start an interdisciplinary pissing contest about which artists have it worst off. My point, rather, is this: whatever else is said this week about the problems facing contemporary theater, let’s not forget that many of these issues are common to the arts as a whole, not just the stage. The glut of amazing work that never gets read because there’s no one to evaluate it? Talk to a composer. The rat race and ever-expanding degree requirements to make it in a field that will never pay you money? It’s the conductor’s lament all over again. And as you’re working out your frustration over the system, keep in mind that there may be aspects of how the theater works that actually do work well, and that may even serve as models for other disciplines. For example, I think it’s great that the nonprofit theaters serve (or at least used to serve) as a “farm team” of sorts for the major leagues, aka Broadway. I don’t see it as a problem at all that B’way rarely takes on risky new work; after all, they’re businesses, what do you expect? All I think is, wouldn’t it be awesome if Hollywood plucked its composers from the ranks of the concert music crowd more than once in a blue moon? And what’s so bad about having a play done in multiple locations across the country, reaching different audiences each time? Isn’t that kind of good for live theater, in that it opens up the possibility for a common, shared experience/conversation around specific works among people in different geographic areas — the way such possibilities currently exist for movies and television and books and recorded music and other mass media? Doesn’t that raise awareness of theater as a whole?