Hey! Everyone should support the writers strike! It’s incredibly important! If you love theatre as well as television, I would like to draw your attention to another group of writers in this country (the USA, unfortunately) that desperately need help.
Playwrights only make on average ten-thousand dollars for each show they produce. This is accounting for royalties, although with incredible luck or a really nice commission those can bring it up to around twenty-thousand. To make matters worse, the average playwright can only produce one show per year. To put that into perspective, in order to make the average American yearly wage of thirty-thousand dollars, a playwright would need to write and produce two to four plays every year in high-end regional theatres. That’s a feature-length original play every three to six months. Most plays take over a year to fully develop.
On top of that, unlike screenwriters who are often employees of a company, playwrights are considered to be owners of capital, as we own the exclusive rights to produce their show. Because of that, we are not allowed to unionize. This means that our only form of protection, the Playwrights Guild of America, can’t do much other than help playwrights avoid bad contracts. This is an extremely valuable service to be sure, but it can’t solve the problem that only the luckiest playwrights in the country can make a living on this art form.
There are a lot of other issues that compound this problem. Most plays only ever receive one run, which means that playwrights don’t usually earn residuals. Many theaters will contract staged readings of a play for which they do not pay the author. While theaters expect playwrights to be present during the development of a new play, they won’t pay them for their time during early production meetings, auditions, or rehearsals. It all combines to make kind of a perfect storm.
If you like live theatre, this should concern you! If you feel like modern theatre is stale and repetitive, it’s because people who are truly passionate about play writing are forced to split their time between multiple forms. Without enough dedicated theatre writers, we lose access to the originality and novelty that set the stage apart from the screen. Don’t get me wrong, there are some extremely talented and devoted playwrights out there who are able to make things work. But how can people expect great work from us when we can’t even do this work full-time?
So what can you do to help? The first thing you can do is SUPPORT THE WRITER’S STRIKE. Because most playwrights can’t make a living writing plays, they often supplement work in the theatre with work on TV or in other spaces. Helping out Hollywood writers will help put a lot of playwrights in better positions.
You can also support theaters like Playwrights Horizons in Washington DC who provide playwrights with full fellowships in exchange for their plays. These are valuable as they allow a playwright to spend all of their time on their chosen medium rather than needing to juggle multiple jobs to make ends meet.
Other than this, it’s hard to say what normal people can actually do here. It would be nice if there could be a union for playwrights like there is for actors, but as long as playwrights own the means of production this would probably only shift the problem from our backs onto the backs of actors, directors, and designers. And budgets for new shows are already tight enough as things stand, it seems like a lot to ask to carve more of that money out for writers when things are already difficult.
Here’s an excellent article about the situation from American Theatre that goes over a lot of the information I did here in more detail (without the pro-union editorialization.) https://www.americantheatre.org/2014/12/10/paying-playwrights-more-than-play-money/
TLDR; Helping screenwriters helps playwrights too, but a lot more needs to be done before we’re out of the woods. The average playwright can’t make a living play writing, and the only writers in the industry who can are extremely lucky. Trying to solve this problem is critical for the future of theatre.
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