A recent interview with playwright Tony Kushner in Time Out New York looked back on the soon to conclude season at New York’s Signature Theatre Company which has been dedicated to Kushner’s work. That interview ended up driving a lot of traffic in the blogosphere. Comments were posted on the theatre blogs of Scott Walters, Tim Bauer, Paul Mullin and the New Play Blog at Arena Stage.
Kushner’s comment that got everyone riled up was: "I make my living now as a screenwriter! Which I’m surprised and horrified to find myself saying, but I don’t think I can support myself as a playwright at this point. I don’t think anybody does." In isolation this does sound bleak, coming as it does from one of America’s most successful playwrights.
But neglected by the blogosphere was this part of the interview: ”For all the usual talk about the decline of straight theater, I don’t remember a stronger year for plays in New York. Plays without movie stars are struggling to stay afloat—but my God, the American playwriting community is producing a lot of incredibly exciting stuff. And what astonishing actors this city has! We’re suddenly in what feels like a kind of glory days of playwriting and production. If that’s not the message that people are getting from this season, it should be. We have to figure out a way to make that kind of work live on Broadway.” I wouldn’t put that in the optimism column (particularly for those of us not in New York), but it’s also not a cry of despair.
Bemoaning the economic conditions of playwriting is like a resident of Seattle complaining that it rains a lot. If you hate the rain that much, well there’s always Phoenix or Palm Springs. Where I do think there is a problem is when professors in undergraduate or MFA writing programs pretend that one can make a living as a playwright. Whether naïve or deceitful, they are doing their students, particularly those racking up piles of education debt, a bigtime disservice.
I question whether affairs were ever better. Why in the 1940s and 1950s did successful playwrights Clifford Odets, Robert Anderson, Paul Osborne and many others work in Hollywood? It couldn’t have had anything to do with dollars, do you think?
As Scott Walters notes in his blog, Shakespeare didn’t become wealthy on play royalties. He was a prominent shareholder in the King’s Men production company, a real estate investor who owned a share of the Globe, an actor, and a prolific writer who cranked out several plays a year.
And it’s not like the poverty gods are picking on playwrights. How many poets, painters, independent filmmakers, composers, stage directors or actors make a living from their art?
A broader perspective can be salutary.
