Stage Directions Interview with Martin Denton by Tim Cusack
March 2010 Issue Show Business
Not the Same Old
Every year American Theatre magazine compiles its Top-10 list of the most
frequently performed plays for the current producing season at Theatre
Communication Group’s constituent members across the country. These data
always provide a fascinating snapshot of the collective mindset of decision
makers at the nation’s established not-for-profits. For example, between
2006-2010 John Patrick Shanley was the undisputed King of the Playwriting
Hill, with close to 50 productions of Doubt going up during that
time. David Lindsey Abaire was second with 33 productions of Rabbit Hole,
and while none of her individual plays racked up anywhere near those
numbers, Sarah Ruhl ruled L.O.R.T. She made the list each of the past three
years with a total of 31 productions of three plays. And then there’s
Tennessee Williams—apparently the Wingfields of St. Louis haven’t smashed
that crystal unicorn for the last time just yet, as The Glass Menagerie
has received nearly 20 productions since 2006.
While in some respects the lemming-like mind-meld of the administrators
at our nation’s larger theatres is deeply depressing (although, I suspect,
the fortunate few playwrights and their agents feel differently), for indy
theatre producers, this cookie-cutter programming represents an opportunity
to differentiate ourselves from our big brothers and sisters. One dependable
source for the intrepid producer to find interesting, quality new work that
nobody else in town (or likely your region) is doing is the Plays and
Playwrights anthology, published annually since 2000 by The New York
Theatre Experience. This month the organization is coming out with the 2010
edition, and to mark the occasion, I sat down to chat with editor Martin
Denton.
What led you to want to take on this kind of project,
Martin? The real story is that we saw a show called Are We
There Yet? written by Garth Wingfield and produced by a company called
New World Stages. As we were leaving, I said to my mother Rochelle, “That
was a really great play, and someone ought to publish it because if no one
does, it’s going to disappear after 16 performances, and no one will ever
know it happened.”
What was it about that particular play that gave you the idea for
the book? It’s a lovely play about a woman who’s in her early
thirties who finds out she has breast cancer. It’s a very funny play, not a
sad play. Very heartfelt with beautiful characters you really like, and
there’s wisdom in it. So at the end of the year, I said to Rochelle,
“Remember when I said someone ought to publish that play? We should publish
a book of plays.” And instead of saying the sensible thing like, “Why? Are
you crazy? We’ve never published anything before!” She said, “Okay.” So we
did, without having any idea how to do that. And the impetus, besides this
particular play, was that I knew that we knew enough plays at that point
that deserved to be in this book, and we were starting to know some
playwrights and how to get to them. But beyond that was the fact that in
1999, the only books featuring new American plays were those written by
famous people. It turned out to be very successful for what it was. And
every play in the anthology had at least one—and some many—subsequent
productions because of it.
What playwrights/companies will be included in the 2010 edition?
This year we’re publishing The Talking Band for the first time—Flip Side
by Ellen Maddow. We put it on the list sort of whimsically, and then we were
going through it and saying “Well, surely she’s been published, and so we
can cross this off,” but we researched and checked, and she’s NEVER been
published. Brian Parks [Arts and Culture Editor at The Village Voice] is
another person who’s surprisingly never been published. His play The
Invitation is probably the best thing he’s ever written. It’s about the
greed that caused the recent economic collapse, except it premiered in
September ‘08, so it was very prescient. Then we’ve got Nat Cassidy’s play
Any Day Now, which is a lighthearted, three-act family drama-comedy
like August: Osage County, only the characters are zombies. And we
have Gyda Arber’s Suspicious Package, an interactive play on the
iPod. It’s the most interesting use of this technology I’ve seen in the
theatre.
What other resources would you recommend to producers seeking new
work? There are now many more collections than when we started.
Smith & Kraus has gotten much more regular with its New Playwrights: The
Best Plays of a Year Series. Then there’s Eric Lane, Artistic Director
of Orange Thoughts Productions and a playwright himself who has edited
several anthologies for Random House [e.g., Laugh Lines, Leading Women
and Take Ten: New 10-Minute Plays —ed.]. And the New York
Theater Review is also a dependable annual compilation of alternative
play scripts. All of these books can be found on Amazon.com.
This article was published in March 2010 in the online magazine Stage Directions.