- OTHER MEDIA
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- Publish or Perish
Why don't more theatres in the United States print the plays they produce?
By Eliza Bent, American Theatre Magazine March 2011
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- Challenge: To give new plays a life after the first production.
- Plan: Publish plays with on-demand technology via groups like
CreateSpace and Lulu.
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- What Worked: Visibility for playwright and theatre, distribution
made easy-as-pie.
- What Didn't: Still a niche market, a lot of human labor involved.
- What's Next: E-books! Short stories by playwrights.
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- Does the academic adage "publish or perish" apply to theatre?
If you're a theatre artist, you are more likely to perish before you publish
anything. But theatre people are perennial optimists, so let us ask not,
Why publish your play? but rather, Why publish through a theatre and not
a proper publishing house?
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- "There's this thing that happens in other countries," says
well-traveled playwright Caridad Svich, "where you see a play and
afterwards you can buy a copy of that play in the same theatre—on
the same night!" Why don't more theatres in the U.S. publish and sell
the plays they present? It's an idea with clear-cut advantages for both
artists and audiences. And with the digital age thumping along at an exponential
rate, self-publishing is now easier than ever before.
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- For San Francisco's 27-year-old EXIT Theatre, the decision to publish
plays came as a no-brainer—albeit a thoughtful one. EXIT's commitment
to premiering new work manifests itself in roughly 600 performances of
100 shows per year—"more than any other theatre in San Francisco,"
EXIT's managing director Richard Livingston attests.
- For Livingston and his tiny team (EXIT has a full-time staff of just
three, including founding artistic director Christina Augello and production
manager Amanda Ortmayer), publishing new plays jibed with the mission of
presenting new work. "We wanted to figure out ways that a show would
have a longer life span than just the performances it receives at our space,"
Livingston reasons, hinting at the "premiere-itis" trap new plays
often fall prey to. "We thought publishing plays would make it easier
for a play to get produced a second or third time—and at the least,
publishing a play provides a historic record," says Livingston. Furthermore,
he believes that having an eponymous press helps EXIT be seen as a center
of new-work activity.
- EXIT published Ten Plays by Mark Jackson in 2010. Six of the ten Jackson
plays in the 500-page tome had premiered at EXIT. For Livingston, it made
sense to start with a book by a playwright with whom he'd worked in the
past and who already had a large body of work.
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- Instead of going with a vanity press, which often calls for high fees
while limiting layout and formatting choices, EXIT decided to do business
with an on-demand publishing group. The company settled on CreateSpace,
a subsidiary of Amazon.com. EXIT pays CreateSpace $39 per title. Livingston
prepares the digital files with InDesign software and sends them to CreateSpace;
the title is subsequently sold and distributed through Amazon. "Apart
from the human labor on my end," says Livingston, "the cost is
fairly small." Most expensive is the ISBN number that EXIT purchases
for about $200. When he tallies everything together from cover graphics
to design work to review copies, Livingston estimates that he spends about
$1,000 per title.
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- EXIT Press is inventory-free. "I don't pre-order 1,000 copies
of a book and then have to deal with selling those," Livingston explains.
Instead, when a copy of Ten Plays is purchased via Amazon (at $19.95),
the book is made to order and shipped to the buyer in about a week's time.
When Jackson recently directed a play at Shotgun Players in Berkeley (where
Faust Pt1, which appears in Ten Plays, had premiered), Livingston was pleased
that Shotgun could order copies of the book and have them delivered directly.
So far 100 copies of that inaugural title have sold.
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- It's worth noting that EXIT has sought to make the process as artist-friendly
as possible. To that end, playwrights retain the rights to publish their
plays elsewhere.
- Livingston does not have grand illusions of taking over corporate booksellers.
"It's hard to get shelf space," he says. "You go to a Borders
in San Francisco and in three floors there is one shelf that's five feet
wide for plays—most of which are by deceased authors or Pulitzer Prize-winning
playwrights—so we aren't naïve about how this works." On
the other hand, Livingston believes that if EXIT continues to print plays,
it may eventually partner with small independent distributors. He also
looks forward to an in-progress, yet-to-be-titled book of short stories
by playwright Mark Romyn. "Books of plays never get reviews,"
says Livingston, "but short stories?" He pauses expectantly.
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- Looking ahead, Livingston imagines that EXIT will go the route of e-books,
despite potential setbacks. "It's another labor-intensive step,"
he concedes, due to file conversions that result in gobbledy-gook.
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- "Plus," Livingston adds, "you can't photocopy an e-book—and
you usually want to photocopy a play!" Indeed, doodles, notes and
marginalia aren't possible on an e-play.
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- For NoPassport, a listserv that exists mostly in the virtual sphere,
sending along electronic PDFs of plays is par for the course. NoPassport
started off as a ragtag group of artists engaging in word experiments,
but has grown to a 600-member arts service organization whose fifth annual
conference will take place in New York March 4 and 5. According to founder
Caridad Svich, NoPassport "devotes itself to cross-cultural expressions
of diversity with an emphasis on advocacy, mentorship, publication and
public interventions—i.e., conferences." Naturally, NoPassport
members often ask each other where they can find certain plays. "It's
great that we share these files," says Svich, "but it's still
only we who know about these plays."
- In hopes of reaching a larger audience and serving an under-represented
population of artists (most notably U.S. Latino playwrights), NoPassport
set up an advisory team and an editorial board in 2008. "All the work
we do is vetted," says Svich, who describes a proposal phase where
the advisory and editorial boards work with artists to ensure that their
plays are well represented. "We usually have a scholar or theatre
professional write an introduction," adds Svich, emphasizing the importance
of contextualizing difficult work. "These books also become teaching
mechanisms," she says, citing a few NoPassport titles that have gone
onto the syllabuses of university courses.
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- Like EXIT Theatre, NoPassport uses on-demand print technology (the
latter opts for Lulu) and embraces easy distribution. Svich seems thrilled
to have taken over the means of production, and cites Virginia Woolf's
Hogarth Press and the modern-day indie musician Sufjan Stevens's Asthmatic
Kitty label as prime inspiration. She recalls that playwright John Jesurun,
whose Deep Sleep, White Water, Black Maria—A Media Trilogy was published
in 2008, wryly compared NoPassport's publishing branch to "a cool
indie label that publishes artists."
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- The economics of NoPassport's press is trickier than EXIT's—since
NoPassport is unincorporated, does not have 501(c)(3) status and relies
solely on member donations to fund the publishing program. (EXIT Press
receives additional support from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation.) "If
you're modest about it," says Svich, "you can spend as little
as $300 to $500 per title, including distribution." The purchase price
of the books ranges from $10 to $30, depending on book size. The group
is currently breaking even. That's not the case for all groups who try
this. Salvage Vanguard Theater in Texas has published plays in the past,
but does so less regularly. "With the economy plummeting and our funding
cut, we have to make decisions about printing on a show–by–show
basis," says artistic director Jenny Larson.
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- Like EXIT, NoPassport has non–exclusive rights to titles. "I
realize the practicality of the marketplace," says Svich. "If
a playwright has an offer from Simon & Schuster, I'm like, 'Of course,
go with them!'" NoPassport has teamed with a number of theatres to
sell NoPassport books, such as Kara Hartzler's No Roosters in the Desert
at Borderlands Theater in Arizona, David Greenspan's Go Back to Where You
Are, now playing at NYC's Playwrights Horizons, and Carson Kreitzer's Behind
the Eye, which opens next month at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.
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- Perhaps most important is that groups like NoPassport and EXIT are
keen on celebrating the artist with a flexibility and sensitivity a larger
publisher might not offer. "John Jesurun wants his plays to be read
with as little space as possible because that's how he wants them to be
performed," says Svich. "That book will look a lot different
than one by Octavio Solis, whose work requires a lot of space for breath
and the feeling of gravity. We really want to help express the uniqueness
of each writer."
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- So playwrights, don't despair. Though you will one day perish, if you
pair up with a group of likeminded theatremakers who work scrappily, innovatively
and efficiently, you just might get published after all.
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