Next April, I will have a play opening in Chicago.
How it came about is a rather simple story. I ran across a call for scripts, answered it with a query, and snagged the attention of a director. Probably the play's subject matter (reporters in Vietnam), the director's personal interests, and possibly the strength of my query letter led to a successful outcome. There's only one difference between my experience and hundreds of others occurring every day in theatre or publishing.
The Internet.
The call I answered was in a writer's group on an on-line network. I responded with an e-mail query. The response asking for the script was by e-mail, and I then sent a paper copy of the script by regular or "snail mail." The rapidity of the initial exchange was astonishing, falling from the usual weeks to days, and in this time of channel switching, who can say that this quick transaction didn't add to the momentum of the project?
Nevertheless, the director (Lisa Abbott) and I have been corresponding for almost a year, been through two staged readings with subsequent script conferences and rewrites, and only now have secured a production. The Internet, for all its access to strangers and thestrange, cannot speed up the inherently slow process of rehearsing actors, negotiating script changes, rewriting, and occasionally bending arms. It can, however, create opportunities, and it gives you a chance to leapfrog some of the institutional barriers erected between writers, directors, and artistic directors. With time, as the on-line community grows, one hopes some of those barriers will be eased internationally.
If nothing else, the sheer expense of submitting scripts could fall...dramatically.
For a couple of years, I worked in a literary agent's office, and one of my jobs was to sort through the "slush pile," marking scripts and queries for the agent's attention and flagging ones that obviously didn't have a chance (in crayon, for example). I've since thought about what it would be like to receive submissions on-line, tagging the bounces the way one does files, so a response could be quickly generated. The process would greatly speed the process for both writer and agent, and would reduce the frustrating waiting times all writers face. If that could be expanded world-wide, the market would demonstrably open, and the artistic community could benefit from the collaboration of people who otherwise might never make contact.
There is also a paradoxical intimacy on the Internet, with an e-mail serving as something between a letter, a phone call, and a memo. Although it's possible to be brusque in an e-mail, it's somehow difficult to be stuffy, and one more moat between fellow artists has ever so slightly blurred.
A caveat, or perhaps a streak of cynicism: barriers have a tendency to rise naturally, partially to protect the decision makers from being overwhelmed and partially to enforce their authority. I have no doubt that as the on-line community grows, new kinds of walls and ladders will appear to divide the known from the unknown, the experienced from the beginners, and, of course, the connected with the unconnected. But for now, the frontier is still relatively unsettled, and it's probably a good time to strike a claim.
For me, an on-line user far less involved than many of my peers, it turned out happily. "Waiting on Sean Flynn," a play originally developed in part by Portland's Stark Raving Theatre, will go on to a life in Chicago, staged by Tanstaafl Productions as a benefit for Chicago's Vietnam War Museum. (Incidentally, if you're interested in knowing more about the play, the war museum, and museum benefit, you can contact Tanstaafl at 312-463-4199, and I understand Tanstaafl will eventually have its own web site.) The opportunity was opened by the Internet, but the initiative was taken by the playwright and director, and nothing will ever replace that formula for possibility.