Here is the second in a series of interviews that will be devoted to people involved in the new play development sector. On Deck: Todd London, Artistic Director of New Dramatists, NYC
Vijay Mathew: What is New Dramatists? How does it differ from a new play development organization?
Todd London: New Dramatists is a 60-year-old center for the support and development of playwrights. It’s a playwrights laboratory. It’s a generating theatre without production. Notice I didn’t say “play development center.” There are so many things that we do similarly, but the central difference is the duration of the residency of the writers here and their participation in the oversight of the organization itself. New Dramatists offers playwrights a seven year residency. Once they are here, they can essentially do whatever they want. Unlike some other organizations, we do no curating of what happens in the building. The writers are selected by a panel of our current or alumni writers and outside people in the field. So in no time does the staff do any kind of selection of the writers who participate. The seven year residency is a very different concept which creates a different kind of participation and engagement and responsibility on the part of the writers. The writers are involved in our Board and we have an executive committee of the writers that is involved in anything that we do programmatically and anything that we do even in terms of fundraising and staffing. The writers are involved in every position in the organization at some level. We never hire anybody without writers on the committee to help make decisions. We never create a program without the writers being part of the process of developing the program It’s a community; it’s actually a community of artists which almost functions like an ensemble where everybody is part of the governance of the organization. Another way that New Dramatists is different is that there is no dramaturgical process. Each writer determines what they want to do, when they want to do it, how they want to do it -- they design their own process. If they want help or guidance or advice from the staff they ask for it, we are available for it. But there's not the sense of the organization saying that you read a play, you workshop the play, and then we sit down and talk around the table.
Vijay Mathew: And give feedback.
Todd London: Yeah, there's no feedback. There's only the feedback that the writers ask from whomever they are asking. Two of our two-week professional development studios have a built-in critical response component, but even this is built around the artists’ questions and is entirely peer-to-peer, no audience or dramaturgy experts. An essential premise is that they are here in a community and that they are each other's greatest resources. So a lot of the work we do is just to get them in the room with each other so that they can talk to, support, and inspire each other. And it’s very rare for our writers to work with a dramaturg. They serve as informal dramaturgs for each other, to the extent that they’re invited to.
Vijay Mathew: So unlike some other play development centers, is the focus on developing a play so that it’s ready for production not necessarily an objective of the organization or of the writers who comprise the organization?
Todd London: I think that’s absolutely right. I think if we are going to use a term for New Dramatists a more appropriate term would be that it’s a playwright development center rather than a play development center. So it’s not really focused on somebody's work, it’s focused on the lives of playwrights and their bodies of work. And the plays are part of that, but they are not the central focus of that. We do however advocate for plays, we send plays out for production but this place is not focused on it. We have no organizational, institutional investment in finishing, fixing or promoting plays except when asked to by the writers.
Vijay Mathew: Why is it that the playwrights choose to rarely work with dramaturgs and rely more on their fellow resident playwrights for that kind of support?
Todd London: My sense is that, it has nothing to do with the way this place is setup. The literary managers and dramaturgs’ association was founded in the basement of this building so it’s not like dramaturgs are not welcome here. They come to readings and so on. But the truth is that if you put fifteen writers in a room and you ask them what they feel about dramaturgs, they'll all say two things: they'll say we have our own personal people who we like to get feedback from and then they'll say that as far as dramaturgs as a profession or as a group -- we have no interest. That’s just what we hear again and again as the generations of writers change. So this sense that theaters assign dramaturgs to people or that there's a dramaturgical process that must be followed is something that I find that playwrights don't agree with. David Grimm was working here last week and he had Morgan Jenness by his side as dramaturg the whole time -- and he chose to do that -- but I can’t count on one hand the number of times in the last thirteen years that the writers have done that.
Vijay Mathew: How would you define a successful residency for a playwright?
Todd London: Each one is different. So I guess the only definition would be, if the writer feels it’s successful. There are writers who go through here and they never work on a play. Kia Corthron was here seven years, she was on our executive committee, she was in the building if not everyday, at least a couple of times a week. She used it as a home base, a community base and she didn't develop plays here. She didn't do a reading of a play from the day she got in until her graduation. When she left, she did a reading of play that she was working on – the first she had done in seven years and she was one of our most active members. So that was a successful residency. Then there are people who work here weekly or do three or four readings a year and don't participate in the community except to come to parties and writers meetings and things like that – and those can be successful residencies too. And then there are people who do it all. So it’s really hard to say. We have writers from out of town who come here twice a year, and they are heartbroken when they're time ends. And there are very occasionally people who are here, living in the city, who we hardly ever see. It’s really difficult to define an unsuccessful residency which is actually quite rare, maybe two or three playwrights out of every seven years, who kind of squander it and just don't show up and don't use the resources that are theirs.
Vijay Mathew: Since the time you've been there, have you noticed any differences in the focus of the playwrights or in the way their careers have changed?
Todd London: The most striking difference that I see in the thirteen-year span of my time here is when I came in, there was a group of playwrights that were really focused on getting productions. Maybe they weren't getting many productions and they were using New Dramatists more and more as a showcase. The writers who have been here more recently -- I think it’s partly because of the changes that have been made in the programming -- they use this place much more as a laboratory. There was a period of about five or six years ago, led by people like Dominic Taylor and Brooke Berman and some others who started to do more closed door readings, private readings and workshops. And now we have just received money from the Mellon Foundation to do these five day workshops whenever the writers want to -- that’s happening more and more and suddenly, profoundly, it feels more like a laboratory than a showcase. The whole period between September 11th and our entry into the Iraq War was almost like a whole generation onto itself. These writers were completely reevaluating why and what they were doing. And that was the start of the emphasis on more laboratory work because people were asking themselves sort of fundamental questions about what were they writing and why and what was next. And so it became much less about having these great plays in drawers and let’s see if I can get people to produce them.
Vijay Mathew: What are some of your programs that enable writers to do more than a reading?
Todd London: We now have two programs that enable writers in an ad hoc way to do longer workshops, one is the Creativity Fund which allows workshop time for up to five days and the other is called Working Sessions which allows people once a year to come back and do one, three, five days on a musical. Basically, it gives them a set amount of money and they can work as many days on it as they want as long as they don't go over 29 hours for actors. Or they can do a five day reading with actors or they can spread that out over a couple of weeks and do writing sessions in between.
Vijay Mathew: Do you think The Creativity Fund is going to encourage different aesthetic approaches to the playwrights’ writing?
Todd London: It already has. It’s done a radical thing here in the last few weeks, this place feels like an experimental laboratory in a way that it never quite did. It had felt that way periodically, there'd three readings happening on the same day or something. But now it’s like people are working in different spaces, simultaneously for a week. So one of the things that happened in that first week was that Sheila Callaghan was working on a collaboration with this company called the Fool’s Fury from San Francisco which is a physical theater group. And they were writing in the room and doing improvisations and she was feeding them text, they were feeding her improvisations, and physical gesture work, and that was a really new kind of thing. Similarly we have writers like Taylor Mac and Young Jean Lee who create work in the room. And they've never been quite able to do that before with just the one day reading situation. Or a more naturalistic playwright like Lucy Thurber can spend a week working backward through her play before going into production somewhere else. So I'm not sure it will change the way writers will write so much as it will allow writers to work in lots of different ways in the building—to explore more deeply and freely their writing.
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