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.  

I am not a writer.  I am often asked if I am a writer.  I run a new play development company, I often talk in both public and private places about the state of Theatre in DC and the Country, and I have written a couple blogs for 2amt (that one awesomely got picked up by the NEA's blog).  Even with all that, I state that I am not a writer.  In school I never learned grammar or spelling or phonics.  I write like I speak and that is all I really know how to do...but I have been thinking a lot lately and those thoughts are clogging my head so I thought it would be good to start this blog and write them down.  Perhaps no one will ever see them or perhaps everyone will, I don't know.  Its scary writing something when you don't consider yourself a writer, but you know a ton of fantastic and intelligent writers all over the country...but here I go.

Over the years I have done a number of things.  I have been a camp counselor, I have worked at an ice skating rink without knowing how to ice skate (it was very amusing), I have worked in box office, I have been a driver for theatre patrons, I have been executive director of an outdoor summer drama, I have ran the front of house for a major Equity theatre and developed new programs for them, I have been a Production Assistant/Associate Producer/Editor/Casting Director and 2nd AD for a film company.  I have been a actor, a director, a producer, a stage manager, a dramaturg and an advisor.  I have tried to come at life with the same idea that Kurosawa talks about in his Oscar speech or Jim Henson spoke about in many interviews, or my directing professor and one of mentors at Towson University, John Manlove, instilled in my every day of my college career.  The idea that we are constantly searching, that we are always the student, and that we never have a grasp on anything...that when we have felt we have grasped something or mastered something it's either time to teach (which allows you to learn so much more) or its time to move on to the next thing.  That one of our jobs in life is to be constantly learning.  With that I have tried to do many things and learn from them all, but most of them focus on the act of creating theatre.

Creating theatre is not only my passion, but its really what I know how to do.  It's what I have been trained in, its what I have studied, its what I have spent countless hours thinking about.  It is the thing I know and hopefully its not boasting to much, but I think I know it really well.  I am beyond proud of the work I have done and beyond excited of the work I will do in the future.

Here is the difficulty.  What is next?

I am at the eternal struggle we all hit at some point.  How to balance the work I want to be doing, with the work I can be doing, and make a living at the same time?  Is it possible for me?  I know many people are able to do this and have been doing this for a long time...I don't question that there is a way to do this, but I question can I do this?  I hope so.

This question has lead me to an interesting realization.  There is almost no middle class theatre in America.  I shouldn't say in America, I haven't done the research, but there is almost no middle class theatre in the community I work within.   In DC, the community in which I work, there is the Kennedy Center and a number of Regional Theatres that work under SPT contracts.  Those theaters tend to have budgets of about $1MIL or above.  After those theaters the next tier down is what I am calling the Independent Theatres.  These theaters do not work under any equity contract or perhaps get special contracts based upon need, but tend to do shows with very few if any equity actors in them.  These theaters tend to have budgets of about $200,000 or under (most of them under).  There are many questions that people have and the big ones are where does this money go and all of that sounds like a lot of money what are people doing with it?  All the questions are good ones and I totally get it.

Here is the question that I have.   Where are the theaters that are in-between these budgets?  In the DC area there is only one Adventure Theatre's annual budget is around $500,000 according to Guidestar.  But why is there no others, what happened that there is a jump from $200,000-$1MIL?  I don't know the real answer, I assume it has to do with donor relations and the ability to get your board excited about the growth of your theatre and the way that donors think about donating in large sums or quantities.  I think it has a lot to do with the ambition of the theatre and the way they could convince donors in donating more or getting more people on board with their mission during the 90's and early 2000's was to talk about massive capital campaigns.  Seeing it as successes from others seemed to work for lots of people.  So, we saw a huge growth in the Regional theatre system and giant institutions were built run by individual companies.  Is this a good or bad thing?  I don't know...I have thoughts I will probably discuss later but I feel like have tangented enough.

What does all this mean?  Not much really other then it feels to me that we are missing an important stepping stone in the non-profit theatre sector.  I know I am still young at this game, but in my limited time I have seen either small theaters take this big leap to the next level only to find massive debt or to not be able to maintain it for more than a couple years finding that they constantly needed the same amount of money they were getting during their capital campaign, but were now not getting that much.  Or I have seen theaters that were doing great at this couple hundred thousand dollar a year level but couldn't find a way past it and got too tired to continue on and faded away.  What this does is leave little growth for arts managers or artists to continue to build.  They must either take huge financial risks to themselves and their families to create the thing they believe in or they must take the leap to run the risk of not being qualified to run the multi million dollar theatre they have created.  Instead of having the time and learning of growing the company and step by step learning to lead a larger organization.


I don't know if this is possible but its where my thoughts are at right now.  Can we build companies that consistently grow?  To not have to triple and quadruple budgets ever year but to steadily increase growth over a 10 year period?  To create a community with room for artists at many different levels to work at many different levels?  I hope so.

Well back to me.  I am still struggling to find my place.  I love doing what I am doing, but I want more professionally.  So as we grow Inkwell I continue to think about these questions.  As I work with other companies and see them growing I continue to think about these questions.  As I find my place as a leader of my community I continue to think about these questions.  And as I try and blog now, I hope to bring some people into the conversation with me.