A little more than 7 years ago Jessi Burgess gathered 13 artist together to have pizza. At this gathering Jessi told us she wanted to create another new play organization. You see just a couple years earlier she and some friends founded The Hatchery Festival in which they produced new plays. As the group moved in different directions she was the only one left and still had a passion for new plays. She proposed a new festival called The Inkwell Festival. From that group of 13 Jessi, Anne McCaw, Lindsay Haynes, Melissa Blackall, and myself put together a program with help from many others for Page 2 Stage Festival at The Kennedy Center and a 4 months after that we put together our first Inkwell Festival. We produced 2 workshop productions, 3 staged readings of full plays, 1 developmental workshop of a play, 12 short twenty min readings of plays, 3 panel discussions and a class. It was insane overwhelming and one of the best learning experiences I have ever gotten.
Over the years we spent a lot of time adapting our programing (moving from a festival model to a year round model), we found new ways to lead and direct an organization, and we found ourselves drawn to the development of new works. During that second year before the next festival an article came out in the Washington Post by Nelson Presley describing "Development Hell". This term had been thrown around the theatrical world for quite a while, but it described a trend that was happening all over the country. Playwrights around the country were being asked by major institutions to have their plays read at these institutions. These seems great, an institution taking an interest in a young playwrights work and putting together a reading and possibly moving it to a production in their upcoming season???? Who wouldn't take them up on this opportunity? I mean perhaps these institutions would even do some development to help the play move forward?
What the playwrights found were that many of these institutions at the time were using their plays to fulfill a purpose in their funding. At the time there were many donors, grants, and funding opportunities that were focused on New Plays and by putting together a reading (especially of a local's work) they could tap into these opportunities and perhaps get some additional funds for other programs. Doing a reading is a relatively small cost and time commitment and the actual work can be handed off to interns or fellows or other people we are developing so they can learn in our building. Now, they weren't all evil, they were providing an opportunity for a playwrights work to be seen, to be read by some very talented artists, and for the chance for someone to see it and get super excited and produce it, but more often then not it wouldn't be the institution producing the reading.
What The Inkwell was seeing at this time was that these readings while actually great, forgot or left out something super important to the process of creating anything...actual development. They were doing readings and spending a day or two in the room reading and asking questions or telling the playwright what they liked or didn't like about the play, but not much else. The playwrights were rewriting based upon a single moment of someone's opinions, they were trying to decode information from talkbacks with no context, and guess what audiences were feeling from when they laughed or didn't laugh during the reading. Many playwrights became caught in a cycle of development that we often see in Hollywood. One where scripts are passed around to many organizations and a reading of it is done and then passed to another org and another reading is done and so on and so on and so on....
The Inkwell wanted to do something different. Let me amend that...I wanted to do something different. I wanted to actually focus on the artists development as well as the development of the product.
Development is important. It is. To take the time to focus on how something works and why it works the way it does, to take time to try things and have room for those things to fail, to be in a room with other artists focused on nothing more than trying something is (I truly believe) beyond important. From my limited point of view, In America or in western culture we often focus only on the goal. "What is the point of this?" "What is the eventual outcome?" "What is the eventual goal?" are phrases thrown around when working on a project. We constantly look towards the end and glance at the present and think if we just keep moving forward we will eventually hit our target. While that may be true it feels like we are missing something. It feels like we are missing what is essential to the process of theatre, and I have heard almost everyone say this, to be in the moment. To experience something now and for this moment and to live in it wholly and fully. This is the essence of what I believe should be in the world of development. The goal of having your play produced should be there and you should be using development to get the play ready for that, but when you are developing that should be the focus to develop to get the thing, whatever it is, to a place where you want it to be.
Now it is 2014. The Inkwell is 7 years old and the landscape has changed greatly. Producing institutions great and small have been giving time to develop playwrights, plays, and artists in new ways. Woolly Mammoth months in advance of Stupid Fucking Bird took the whole artistic team up to NYC to spend a week (or perhaps a weekend) working on the script and the amorphous play. Theatre J created their own festival called Locally Grown, where playwrights could have 6 months to a year to work on their plays with workshops/dramaturgical discussions/other assistance sprinkled in. Flying V puts together readings and workshop weekends a year in advance of many of their new plays. With all the changes, is there still a need for a place like The Inkwell?
I get asked this question a lot. I get asked why I still think development is so important? Why don't I just produce the play if no one else is producing it yet? Isn't that more important and better for a playwright? perhaps.
But perhaps not.
I am not completely sold on it yet. Maybe that is because I have seen plays rushed into production before the playwright felt ready or the producer felt ready and seen how dangerous that first production can be. Maybe its because there are already so many that produce that I think someone should focus on the process and not split focus on the process and product. Maybe its because I think that a well put together development process can be more beneficial, can be more invigorating, and can be more than anyone would ever hope for.
Really ask the question: Why do you, Lee Liebeskind, develop? Because I love it and I still feel it is needed.
Over the years we spent a lot of time adapting our programing (moving from a festival model to a year round model), we found new ways to lead and direct an organization, and we found ourselves drawn to the development of new works. During that second year before the next festival an article came out in the Washington Post by Nelson Presley describing "Development Hell". This term had been thrown around the theatrical world for quite a while, but it described a trend that was happening all over the country. Playwrights around the country were being asked by major institutions to have their plays read at these institutions. These seems great, an institution taking an interest in a young playwrights work and putting together a reading and possibly moving it to a production in their upcoming season???? Who wouldn't take them up on this opportunity? I mean perhaps these institutions would even do some development to help the play move forward?
What the playwrights found were that many of these institutions at the time were using their plays to fulfill a purpose in their funding. At the time there were many donors, grants, and funding opportunities that were focused on New Plays and by putting together a reading (especially of a local's work) they could tap into these opportunities and perhaps get some additional funds for other programs. Doing a reading is a relatively small cost and time commitment and the actual work can be handed off to interns or fellows or other people we are developing so they can learn in our building. Now, they weren't all evil, they were providing an opportunity for a playwrights work to be seen, to be read by some very talented artists, and for the chance for someone to see it and get super excited and produce it, but more often then not it wouldn't be the institution producing the reading.
What The Inkwell was seeing at this time was that these readings while actually great, forgot or left out something super important to the process of creating anything...actual development. They were doing readings and spending a day or two in the room reading and asking questions or telling the playwright what they liked or didn't like about the play, but not much else. The playwrights were rewriting based upon a single moment of someone's opinions, they were trying to decode information from talkbacks with no context, and guess what audiences were feeling from when they laughed or didn't laugh during the reading. Many playwrights became caught in a cycle of development that we often see in Hollywood. One where scripts are passed around to many organizations and a reading of it is done and then passed to another org and another reading is done and so on and so on and so on....
The Inkwell wanted to do something different. Let me amend that...I wanted to do something different. I wanted to actually focus on the artists development as well as the development of the product.
Development is important. It is. To take the time to focus on how something works and why it works the way it does, to take time to try things and have room for those things to fail, to be in a room with other artists focused on nothing more than trying something is (I truly believe) beyond important. From my limited point of view, In America or in western culture we often focus only on the goal. "What is the point of this?" "What is the eventual outcome?" "What is the eventual goal?" are phrases thrown around when working on a project. We constantly look towards the end and glance at the present and think if we just keep moving forward we will eventually hit our target. While that may be true it feels like we are missing something. It feels like we are missing what is essential to the process of theatre, and I have heard almost everyone say this, to be in the moment. To experience something now and for this moment and to live in it wholly and fully. This is the essence of what I believe should be in the world of development. The goal of having your play produced should be there and you should be using development to get the play ready for that, but when you are developing that should be the focus to develop to get the thing, whatever it is, to a place where you want it to be.
Now it is 2014. The Inkwell is 7 years old and the landscape has changed greatly. Producing institutions great and small have been giving time to develop playwrights, plays, and artists in new ways. Woolly Mammoth months in advance of Stupid Fucking Bird took the whole artistic team up to NYC to spend a week (or perhaps a weekend) working on the script and the amorphous play. Theatre J created their own festival called Locally Grown, where playwrights could have 6 months to a year to work on their plays with workshops/dramaturgical discussions/other assistance sprinkled in. Flying V puts together readings and workshop weekends a year in advance of many of their new plays. With all the changes, is there still a need for a place like The Inkwell?
I get asked this question a lot. I get asked why I still think development is so important? Why don't I just produce the play if no one else is producing it yet? Isn't that more important and better for a playwright? perhaps.
But perhaps not.
I am not completely sold on it yet. Maybe that is because I have seen plays rushed into production before the playwright felt ready or the producer felt ready and seen how dangerous that first production can be. Maybe its because there are already so many that produce that I think someone should focus on the process and not split focus on the process and product. Maybe its because I think that a well put together development process can be more beneficial, can be more invigorating, and can be more than anyone would ever hope for.
Really ask the question: Why do you, Lee Liebeskind, develop? Because I love it and I still feel it is needed.