On Saturday, October 7, playwrights Christopher Durang and Pulitzer Prize-winner Marsha Norman sent an email to their students at The Juilliard School urging them not to submit their scripts to the 2007 O’Neill Theatre Conference. The statement alleged that The O’Neill Board “is determined to demand a percentage of the playwright’s subsidiary income IN PERPETUITY from any play accepted for presentation at the O’Neill.” A practice the playwrights deemed “patently unfair” and “clearly against [The O’Neill’s] mission statement.”
In just a few hours, the message was disseminated to thousands of playwrights across the U.S. by concerned writing teachers and theatre professionals, causing a firestorm of confusion.
The O’Neill National Playwrights Conference offers writers the opportunity to engage in a month’s residency that includes 4-6 days of developmental rehearsals and two script-in-hand readings of their play. Throughout the conference’s 42 year history, countless struggling playwrights have been fostered into American visionaries, including John Guare, David Henry Hwang, and the late Wendy Wasserstein.
Wendy Goldberg, the artistic director of the Playwrights Conference, apparently learned of the email from respected theatre blogger “theatreboy” (“Tboy” for short), who attended the O’Neill’s critics program in the summer of 2002. The blogger called Ms. Goldberg upon receiving the Durang/Norman email. According to his website, Ms. Goldberg said she had “not been contacted about [the issue] directly by either Chris or Marsha.” Ms. Goldberg went on to say she was “concerned that something like this was sent out before talking to me or to our Executive Director or Board Chair for that matter.” She concluded: “For the record, the O’Neill does not ask for any subsidiary rights. We did not take any last year, we have not taken any in 42 years, and we will not be taking any this upcoming summer.”
But Ms. Goldberg’s statements contradict those of Christopher Durang and Marsha Norman, who iterated in their message that “many of us have tried talking to [The O’Neill], and they are not listening.” Additionally, playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis says he was asked to grant The O’Neill subsidiary rights in perpetuity prior to last summer’s conference. But Mr. Guirgis’s agent, John Buzzetti of The Gersh Agency, promptly rejected the condition.
Following her conversation with the blogger, Ms. Goldberg contacted Mr. Durang and Ms. Norman. The result was another mass email from Durang and Norman with the subject line “Good News re O’Neill.” In it, the duo said that, “After conversations with representatives from the O’Neill Playwrights Conference…we have their assurance that they will not this year, or in the future, be asking for a percentage of future royalties from the plays they accept for development. They are looking for other sources of funding, but those monies will not come from your subsidiary rights.” Mr. Durang and Ms. Norman concluded: “So it is with great relief and happiness we once again encourage you to submit your application to the valuable O’Neill Playwrights Conference.”
But in a statement to Kate Taylor of The New York Sun, O’Neill General Manager Preston Whiteway seemed to contradict the sentiment of the second Durang/Norman email, saying that the proposal on subsidiary rights was “one of a number of changes” the board was considering to assuage the theatre’s financial woes. But that “no decision had been made.” He further acknowledged that the theater had written the proposal into a “first draft” of contracts sent to playwrights last summer,” but that “nobody was too happy about it.”
Quite possibly, no one was less happy than the aforementioned playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis, who did not participate in last summer’s conference following the theatre’s request for his subsidiary rights.
When contacted about the continuing confusion, Ms. Goldberg sated, “It is true that there was an attempt to ask for [subsidiary] rights, [but] that clause was taken OUT of the contracts. There is a discussion on the table about how artists can give back to the O’Neill for the support [the company] has provided over history to countless writers, but we haven’t moved very far in that conversation, mainly because of everyone’s schedules.”
As a result of the second Durang/Norman message, The O’Neill has extended its submission deadline by a week to Monday, October 23.
According to statements in The New York Sun by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright John Patrick Shanley, who had several plays presented at the conference in the mid-1980s, The O’Neill has been floundering in recent years due to a lack of funding and a “vacuum in leadership,” calling the current theatre “rudderless.”
In the conference’s heyday, playwrights were fostered by founder George White and the longtime artistic director Lloyd Richards. While Mr. White is still on the board, he resigned his post as artistic director in 2000. Mr. Richards, who was also the Dean of the Yale School of Drama, died on June 29, 2006, his 87th birthday, after a brief illness.
Gary Garrison, who teaches alongside Marsha Norman at New York University, Tisch School of the Arts and who helped to fire the emails into countless inboxes across the country, expressed the feelings of innumerable writers and educators when, in his preamble to the Durang/Norman retraction, he restated an old adage. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire (of some sort),” he said. “Seems like there is a happy ending, or at least a peaceful resolution — of some sort. Still, I think about the smoke and I worry about the fire…”
For more on the conference, CLICK HERE.
