How to Write a Producible Play

Hint: they're all producible.

There’s a lot of advice out there about what kinds of plays a playwright should spend their time focusing on and creating in order to get produced. I’ve seen it pop up as I scroll through Facebook, I overhear it as I sit in a theater waiting for a play to begin and sometimes I’m told it directly to my face.

This advice is often distilled into the false idea of ‘rules’ a playwright must follow in order to write a play that will be successful. The rules usually center production elements like having a small cast, a single-set and simple tech elements to be rooted in realism.

This advice is presented as facts. As though by following these rules, you will write a play guaranteed to be produced far and wide, and if you don’t follow those rules well. Your play will live its life stuck on a digital cloud, never see the light of day.

But really, there are no rules.

Photo by Martin Zaenkert on Unsplash

I was lucky enough to begin this month in Minneapolis, workshopping The Violet Sisters as part of The Playwrights’ Center’s Ruth Easton Series. Director Taylor Reynolds led the room and powerhouse actresses Jen Burleigh-Bentz and Elizabeth Efteland inhabited the sisters.

The Violet Sisters is a two-hander, set in a single-location and is a story that unfolds in real time. I wrote this to be a producible play. On paper, it follows the rules beautifully:

• Small cast (two women)

• Single set (kitchen)

• Simple tech (real time play)

• Rooted in realism

And yet after a literal decade, the play has still not been professionally produced. There are a lot of reasons for that, and in many ways I’m grateful I’ve had the time with it without the pressure of production. I’ve been able to grow as a human and as a playwright alongside this play. I needed to live more life in order to get into the heart of it.

Still, the play has received a lot of interest over the years – over 30 public readings/workshops, some award recognition, over 40 recommendations on New Play Exchange. But it always struggled to make it to production. Even though on paper, it should be one of my most producible plays.

Photo by Rachel Moore on Unsplash

I went to my first roller derby game in 2013. I went because I had started dating this guy named Freddy¹, and he loved roller derby. We had been together for less than a year so I was, of course, going to go in order to impress him.

I fell in love with the sport. And, like most things I love, I said I wanna turn this into a play.

And so I did.

For The Love Of (or, the roller derby play) is unproducible on paper. It features:

• Two-acts

• Multiple set locations

• Specific moments of dances/movements in order to tell the story and

• 9 racially specific intergenerational queer femme characters that are impossible to double-cast

While I was writing the play, the phrase ‘It’s good, but it’ll never get produced’ became its shadow. I was discouraged by some well-meaning and maybe not so well-meaning folks to continue writing it. They told me it was a waste of time to write, that it was a story that would never find an audience, that it wouldn’t make it to a reading let alone a production. I was told to reduce the cast size, to make the casting less specific, even to add a man or two. I was told it was too queer, not queer enough, too movement heavy, too impossible to ever be staged.

And yet it has become my most produced play. It received its first production in 2017 in Chicago before being produced the following year by Theater of NOTE in LA, directed & choreographed by the brilliant Rhonda Kohl. Rhonda asked for permission to add the understudies as part of the ensemble to fill out the world, so the cast was even larger – I believe 14? A permission I was thrilled to grant – especially since I was able to approve the derby names the understudies came up with.

Theater of NOTE’s production was so successful, it was chosen a year later to be re-staged as part of Center Theater Group’s Block Party. I got to fly out to see a full 300-seat theater rise to their feet on Opening Night, applauding a queer, multi-racial, intergenerational cast of 14 – something I never dreamed I would see.

The play was published with Original Works in 2018 and has had at least one university production every year since.

But what if I had never written it?

What if I had stopped myself from ever hitting End of play because I was convinced a theater company would never find a home for it?

That the play was too big, too impossible, too queer, too-too?

I would have never finished the play. I would have never even started.

There are no sure things in theater. Writing a two-hander or a single-set small-cast play will not guarantee you a production. Just like writing a large cast, explosive dance-based play doesn’t mean it won’t ever be produced.

When you choose to write a play, the most important element to center is your heart.

If you tell a story from love, from excitement, from curiosity, from a place of courage, you are telling a worthwhile story.

And I believe that’s one of the key differences between writing For The Love Of and The Violet Sisters. When I first penned The Violet Sisters, part of it was motivated by the myth of producibility. I’ve had to spend the last ten years of my life learning where my love for it was, excavating it from me.

But my little-big roller derby play started from love. And I do believe that has made a difference.

Again, there’s no guarantees – I have large-cast plays that have never even received a public reading and plays that I am wildly passionate about that are stuck in development hell. But because every play I’ve written since have started from a place of love, a centering of my heart, they have all found my voice. They all stories I want to nurture, stories I want to go into the depth with.

So write your producible play – however small or large it may be.

Write it from the very center of your heart.

If you’d like to watch The Playwrights’ Center’s reading of The Violet Sisters, you can register for free here. You’ll be e-mailed a link to the recording which you can watch any time April 21st-27th.

Thanks so much for reading The Rejected Writer! Paid subscribers will be getting a post about the ten year process of writing The Violet Sisters a little later this week, and I’ll see you all on May 1st for April’s Rejected Roundup.

1. Now husband!