What Makes Sanctuary Different — and Necessary

The Issue

Theatre people regularly intone, “The Theatre is Dead,” with a knowing wink. Like all humorous clichés, it contains truth. But with between 15-25 productions opening a week across the United States, how can it be said that theatre is dead?

First, let’s look at what’s currently onstage.

• 70% of play productions in the United States are revivals of works by playwrights who died more than thirty years ago. (25% of this 70% is restaging of Shakespeare).
• Of the remaining 30% - ostensibly the modern work – 75-80% are revivals of scripts by living writers. Most new plays onstage are follow-on productions of recent material by an established writer after financial or critical success in a major market. Bankability figures highly in the new plays market.
• Fewer than 4% of play productions are plays by lesser-known new but worthy playwrights.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the economics of theatre permitted the premieres of hundreds of plays each year. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, 45-60 new plays are premiered in the US professional theatrical markets each year and fewer than ten truly succeed.

The Potential

When you ask people who love theatre, many will say the most satisfying theatre tends to be adventurous work by a bold new playwright, a new voice discovered for a generation.

Millions of dollars are spent each year to workshop plays; still it remains rare for groundbreaking voices to make it to the stage. The medium cannot move forward without these breakthroughs, yet theatres are not supporting our most intrepid young writers as well as they could.

Constrained by large budgets and led by non-writers, today's major theatres -- even those dedicated to new writers -- are institutionally afraid of risk. Staging work that appeals to existing tastes, they fail to take the form past current horizons, giving the boldest new voices sustaining grants in lieu of crucial productions. This starves the theatre and its writers of the excellence, daring, and progress needed to remain vital and relevant. American Theatre Magazine reports that companies are more likely to produce work that has been successfully staged elsewhere, even than plays developed in their own workshops, reflecting a crisis of artistic self-confidence.

This puts the power of wider exposure for plays in the hands of smaller theaters. But as playwrights have succumbed to the specialization endemic to modern theatre, they less frequently start companies or become producers and artistic directors, leaving these roles to non-writers. So even among smaller theatres, plays are largely picked to satisfy the interests of the directors and actors who run the company. And the boldest new scripts, which might break ground and so require unfamiliar staging and performance techniques, often go unproduced. In this manner playwrights (through self-selection) fail to curate of the future of the Theatre by abdicating the power and responsibility to produce material they believe in.

To regain the opportunity is a privilege requiring hard work, which Sanctuary: Playwrights Theatre is willing to undertake.

The History

Before the Twentieth Century, the most common producer was the playwright. Playwrights are uniquely suited to recognize powerful new material for the stage. The script is their product. Today they typically lend their talents to development workshops – there are dozens of these scattered across the United States (New Dramatists, Chicago Dramatists, NY Play Development, Austin Playwrights, Philadelphia Playwrights, etc.). These companies nearly always eschew production in favor of readings and discussion.

The workshop process typically leaves play development just short of its most essential step - production. Not even the most brilliant among us can learn aeronautical engineering with paper models in a classroom. Dramatists grow based on feedback from the stage. Without it, they learn to write for the page alone. The playwright’s capacity for identifying and developing groundbreaking scripts is thus rarely paired with the power and responsibility of production.

Over the past ten decades, writers have deviated from their historical position in theatre, retreating from direct involvement with producing entities, and ceding control to third-party producers, thereby leaving the artistic future of playwriting to others whose understanding of and dedication to the most bracing new writing is not the same.

While self-production occurs, very few writers have the stamina to sustain it over time, and fewer still band together. The economics of theatre tend to prohibit the dramatist from bankrolling their own productions. Very few exceptional companies have bucked this trend.

But great theatre existed before large budgets, and can exist now without them. Big budgets become a trap – stifling artistic innovation, biasing choices toward the least fiscal, artistic, and institutional risk. Throwing lavish sums at one potentially popular play is more financially but less artistically expedient than dividing the same money among three daring new works. The best counterbalance for the big-budget impulse is the passion for innovation, which producing groundbreaking plays represents. Because of playwrights’ passion for their discipline, they are well suited to create an operations model that puts producing daring plays first.

In that model, playwrights must create new theatres with small budgets, dedicated to original plays and run by writers, in order to nurture new voices, produce their best material, and demonstrate that it can succeed.

The Mission

Among the hundreds of theatre companies that produce annually, few possess a truly distinct mission, and fewer still embody it in their charter, name, and structure. Sanctuary has a definitive mission describing a unique structural and artistic focus. This sets Sanctuary apart from dozens of other companies that start each year or operate currently. Additionally, its mission is one many in the theatre community endorse and support, so Sanctuary is already receiving significant interest and support from the theatrical community.

Through Sanctuary, donors wishing to encourage new work are given the compelling opportunity to support artists directly; who channel funds to what most agree is the best development technique - production.

The Scope

Sanctuary: Playwrights Theatre started small, and will remain small. This will ensure its flexibility, adaptability, and that the economics of production do not become a disincentive to risk. Sanctuary will produce plays without regard to a traditional "season;" in other words, plays are produced when the playwrights decide they must be.

Sanctuary: Playwrights Theatre offers stage writers an opportunity they find uncommon – to stage their work as the primary decision maker. This will attract playwrights and collaborators of note, and stimulate audience growth as it brings newer theatrical forms, springing from the minds and pens of 21st century dramatists, to the fore.