I'm sitting in my office at the Dramatists Guild, half-dazed from the heat beating through my window countered with the screams of some Michael Jackson imitator seven floors down on the street level. Half in one world and half in another (my natural state these days), I'm brought back to office-reality when one of our cheery office assistants slides my mail across my desk and announces, "Mail!" (Btw, I find this fascinating. Why announce what's obvious? It's not like you're sliding a pizza or an old boot across my friggin' desk and trying to pass it off as mail.)
Anyway, I'm sifting through my mail -- which generally consists of "you're doing this right" mail, and, "you're doing this wrong, asshole" mail with a few season announcements, show announcements, and gym postcards announcing the end of summer is in sight (really?), and shouldn't I lose the twenty pounds I've been meaning to lose? -- when a brochure catches my eye: the announcement for Playwrights Horizons 2009-10 season.
When you look at the cover, you see what you always see: buzz words like, "new," "voices," "ideas," etc. But it's what you NEVER see that took my breath away: the whole front cover -- indeed, the whole brochure -- is dedicated to writers. Wherein usually we'd be looking at a cover of Broadway stars to attract attention, Plawyrights Horizons FUCKIN' ROCKS the world with pictures of all the writers being produced in the season: Melissa James Gibson, Nathan Tysen, Chris Miller, Mariana Elder, Bruce Norris, Daniel Goldfarb, Annie Baker, Kia Corthron.
Okay, maybe you don't understand the big deal, but here it is. Writers are ALWAYS invisible, and if I didn't know better, I'd say there's an unspoken conspiracy to keep us invisible to the public because, really, how sexy are playwrights in the big scheme of things?
Pretty fuckin' sexy.
Writers are often missing from the landscape, whether it's the Tony Awards, or a printed program mishap, or a poster mishap or a mention in the review of your own play. So for Playwrights Horizon to put the writer front and center on page after page of their brochure, it makes me want to do something nice for them -- like buy some season tickets to their shows. I can't think of the last time I felt that for any theatre.
