Finding Your Niche

The economy of the 'Western Civilization' is based on supply and demand. Playwriting is very much a part of that. The best written play needs an audience to succeed. Therefore, it is up to the playwrights to find the production companies and publishers who are interested in their plays.

Do you like to write comedies? Dramas? Children's shows? Experimental theatre? There are markets for all of these and more. One of the playwright's responsibilities is to perform the research to find the appropriate market for each play.

Fewer things are more frustrating to a producer or publisher than to read a submission that should never have been sent. These are people who know their business and their customers (audience). When they advertise for certain types of plays, it's a business decision as much as an artistic one.

As a reader of plays for publishers, producers, contests, and festivals, I see many scripts submitted to totally inappropriate markets.

A few years ago, I was reading plays for the National Compact Comedy Contest, a festival of one-act plays. The contest ran two years, and each year I read over 100 plays in search of three or four to produce. The first year, one submission was 90 pages in length! The second year, a play was submitted that was about two Irish brothers, where one was trying to convince the other to strap dynamite to his chest and go on a suicide mission in a London subway.

Both of these entries were in answer to a call for short comedies. At $3 to $6 each, I wonder if some of these writers have unlimited funds for postage.

Playwrights should be proud of their works. But the pride needs to be tempered with reasonable business sense. In Denver, where I live, among the 30 to 50 shows playing any given weekend, variety is abundant, from Neil Simon to George Bernard Shaw to Christopher Durang to Rodgers and Hammerstein. A number of groups produce only new works; some will not produce anything at all deemed conventional, and other stay safe with classics.

Unfortunately, some playwrights have yet to discover this and complain that their heavy dramas are being snubbed. They need to learn that better research is needed, and the best written drama will not necessarily be welcomed by a group whose regular audience expects romantic comedies. These writers tend to take the rejections personally, rather than figuring out that they submitted to the wrong market.

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