O'Neill Panel

So...I had to reread the confidentiality clause to make sure I could post this...but it looks like I can. What follows are my notes from a really good panel at the O'Neill Conference's MFA Convening. Panelists were: Liz Frankel (The Public), Ed Sobel (Philly, PlayPenn, formerly Steppenwolf), Marc Masterson (Humana), Jack Tantleff (Agent), Paula Vogel (Yale).

QUESTION: How do we create more opportunities for playwrights, rather than having us all fight for the same resources?
ANSWERS from the panel at large (not attributed – I lost track and don’t want to attribute wrong):
-Are you talking about institutional or non-institutional opportunities? Because those are two different things.
-What’s the root impulse? Is it to enshrine your work? Or…
Is our root impulse not to create new PLAYS but to create NEW THEATRES – by which we mean a new DISCOURSE with our audience.
-As playwrights, we have two options: 1) Take a number, and wait patiently 2) Say “fuck it” and start your own company (taking Clubbed Thumb and/or 13P as models). Do you want to MAKE A CIRCLE or SCALE THE PYRAMID?
Here’s another way to frame the question: What do you need in order to write and then hear your work and see it on its feet, sooner rather than later?
-The best most of us can do is to inject ourselves into a community, to find out who’s doing interesting things at our level and who might want to know us. Find our peers, FIND COMMUNITY.
(My thesis: Hard Work + Community + Something worth saying = Opportunity)

QUESTION: What Can WE DO, now that we’re leaving school, to get our work seen?
ANSWERS:
-Find and cultivate advocates in literary managers, directors, actors, other playwrights…people who are actually passionate about YOU and YOUR WORK. Nurture your own network. Not much will come to you “out of the blue” or “cold” – most opportunities happen because people know you, trust you, are passionate about you.
Nuts&Bolts Answers
-Read William Goldman’s The Season and Adventures in the Screen Trade – esp. Chapter two.
Everyone in the business wants to find the people for whom they’d lay down in traffic.
-Dramatists Sourcebook. Read it, follow every link.
-State Council of the Arts, grantwriting workshop. Take it.
-The Foundation Center. Go, and seek out grants.
-Start a theater program with a foundation or community group.
-Google the playwrights whose plays you love – where are they being produced?
-Find colonies with free room and board.
-New York Foundation of the Arts, TCG, New Dramatists, Dramatists Guild – get to know their resources

ON AGENTS
Don’t email them. Write great letters – absolutely no form letters. Research who they represent, and contact the ones who represent people to whom you compare yourself. Don’t say how inexpensive your play is to produce. Send an amazing one-act. Have a sense of yourself, and where you fall in the universe. Spell their name right. Remember you’re gonna be asking them to have faith in you as a human being.
Everyone has to find their own way.

ON LITERARY DEPARTMENTS
Pay attention to who’s there, what’s being done. Know the aesthetic conversation they seem to be having, based on what they’re doing.
Something to think about, both for which literary departments to target and to know your own voice/mind:
What are your ten “Saint Plays” and “Devil Plays” of the last FIVE YEARS? Who wrote them? Where were they developed? Where done? Research them. Update the list?
Know what you ARE and what you ASPIRE TO.
Money comes sometimes. Don’t worry about it.
Express what’s important to you.
Writers write best from EXILE. You can’t write about home while you’re there.
Playwrights are sailors with LOTS of ports. Have a brothel in every port.
Know where home is.