Crew it yourself
Two Chicago writers bypass the system with self-produced plays.
By John Beer
(Nearly) The Full Cast and Crew of (a)Symmetry Cycle (photo by nk Mooneyham)
It’s hard out there for a playwright. That was the message of Outrageous Fortune, last year’s study written by Todd London and Ben Pesner for the Theatre Development Fund, which painted a sobering picture of the disconnect between playwrights and producing nonprofit theaters. Slow and arduous development processes and conservative play selections help discourage innovative new writing.
This summer, two Chicago-based playwrights are responding to such pressures by going it alone. Chelsea Maureen Marcantel is producing her (a)Symmetry Cycle at the Viaduct Theater. “I’ve never understood the idea of working on something for a year and then sending it off and hoping someone will produce it,” the Louisiana native says. Meanwhile, Laura Jacqmin will produce her Dental Society Midwinter Meeting at Chicago Dramatists under the aegis of At Play Productions, a New York–based collective she formed with other actors, directors and writers in 2007.
The urge to self-produce is in part a matter of simple statistics, as Steppenwolf’s director of artistic development Polly Carl acknowledges. “We get 300 to 500 scripts a year, and you figure we’re going to produce five of those. And maybe Tracy Letts wrote a play this year, so you kind of do the percentages.” Her take on submissions without a pre-existing relationship? “It’s a very tough route to production.” (Jacqmin has enjoyed success via that traditional route, with a First Look production last year at Steppenwolf and a recent workshop at Sundance’s Theatre Lab.)
It’s not hard to see why Marcantel and Jacqmin, both 27, might have had concerns about these particular works. The (a)Symmetry Cycle is a three-play, five-hour examination of science and relationships. And Dental Society Midwinter Meeting, which depicts a dental convention dealing with a failure of leadership, is, Jacqmin says, “a little bit funky formwise”: Actors switch between a plethora of briefly drawn figures and collective narration. “It’s not the kind of play I could just take to the Goodman,” she says.
Both playwrights observe that self-producing offers not just access but heightened control over the final result. “There’s always the fear as a playwright that someone will take your work and make something completely different out of it,” Marcantel says. “I know what the programs will look like, I know what the sets will look like, I’m there at the rehearsals.”
“When you’re in the machine” of institutional production, Jacqmin says, “there are all these mysteries that you don’t always have the pieces to solve.” If audiences aren’t buying tickets, for instance, a playwright isn’t necessarily in a position to do much about it. “With this production, we have our press agent and website, but I also have the power to go hand out postcards or to put messages out to lists of people. Accountability is a great thing.”
To be sure, self-producing comes with its own hurdles: Money’s an issue, and so is time. Marcantel has harnessed the power of Internet fund-raising site Kickstarter. The (a)Symmetry Cycle’s author, who’s been averaging 35-hour weeks on top of a 9-to-5 day job, notes that a contribution from another company’s artistic director put her over her goal en route to an $8,000 total budget. Jacqmin helped secure Dental Society’s low-five-figures budget with a $5,000 grant from the Illinois Arts Council.
Both writers praise the value of working collaboratively to bring their visions directly to the stage. And as Carl notes, it can also be an avenue to garnering the attention of established theaters (a strategy employed by playwrights such as Brett Neveu and Lydia Diamond early in their careers). “I’m a huge fan of self-production,” Carl says. “Putting work on the stage and living as artists: That’s what’s important.”
