As satisfying as theater. Really.
EXT. LOS ANGELES TIMES — EARLY AFTERNOON
Establishing. INT. SECOND FLOOR GREEN ROOM — DAY Bowls of nuts and fruit sit beside a coffee carafe and water bottles in front of a long mirror. Fluorescent lights bleach out the room. Empty ergonomic office chairs are the only furniture. Playwright MARY LAWS enters the room and takes a seat beside a JOURNALIST with an iPhone recorder.
That’s how the pilot would start for a show about the inspirational and informative three days when 24 playwrights working in television visited The Times in downtown Los Angeles and New Dramatists headquarters in New York to have their portraits taken for a package of stories detailing their craft and careers. Mary Laws: “Playwrights are bringing a freshness to Hollywood that people are getting really excited about. Since I’ve been here, and I’ve only been here for about 2½ years, I’ve seen more and more playwrights become showrunners, and I’ve seen multiple playwrights on the same staff. It’s becoming a trend to have playwrights in your writers room.” Claire Kiechel: On the writer’s room: “Not only is it a place to get paid for what I do, but TV rooms are filled with incredibly smart, politically astute, talented writers all talking about ideas, which is my favorite thing to do. These people have different life experiences and cultural experiences, and they are really obsessed with the science of story and dramaturgy.” Laura Marks: “Playwriting is thrilling. There’s nothing better than seeing people experience your work in real time. Theater is kind of a control freak’s dream because people are watching what you tell them to watch. You’re saying, ‘Sit here and look at this right now. Don’t even get up to use the bathroom.’ That’s pretty exhilarating. But with TV, you get to play with a lot of new toys, and that’s cool too.”
David Adjmi:“I watched TV when I was little, but I became really snobby about it in college and threw out my television. So I was just completely ignorant of how great TV had gotten. Once my friends started doing TV, I began watching the backlog of ‘Sopranos’ and ‘Six Feet Under,’ and I realized that there are real narrative possibilities for long-form TV with open-ended structures and narratives that are creatively exciting and not just financially rewarding.” Eliza Clark: “Television has made my plays more theatrical. Since you can make money writing a TV show, you want to save your TV ideas for TV. If you’re going to write a play, it ought to need to exist on a stage. So that has made my playwriting stronger.” Ruby Rae Spiegel: “I wanted to carve out time to write plays, so I told my agent, ‘I’m not staffing this season, I’m gonna write a play.’ And I just finished that play and I’m like, ‘I gotta get back out there,’ and so here I am looking for work. It’s hard to find the balance.” Janine Nabers: “Some of the best plays ever written are from the perspective of people who are broken heroes, and I think TV is drawn to that. People in TV are reading a lot of plays in order to get a hold of character-driven narrative that is unique and written from a perspective of personal angst.” Marco Ramirez: “Every room that hires a playwright, just to have them around is a gift — someone who’s not thinking on the most massive cinematic scale, but is able to make something out of nothing. The thing about playwrights is they are used to creating entire worlds on their own all the time.” David Grimm: “I love dramatic structure — how one tells a story, the shape, the arc of it — and that’s so much of the process of TV writing. And being in a room with other writers, that’s something playwrights rarely experience. … But my favorite comment on why playwrights should write for TV comes from my friend, the brilliant Jami O’Brien: ‘You want people to see your work, don’t you?’”
Zakiyyah Alexander: “As a playwright, I found that my plays get more respect in the television world, mainly because you hire a writer based on their skill set, as opposed to season planning. There is also a much more overt discussion on race than there is in theater. Television rooms speak the word ‘diversity’ out loud, while theater whispers it in hushed voices.” Jordan Harrison: “Playwrights are social creatures. We can only bear so much solitary writing. Being in a writers room, you get the society you crave, even if it tends to be a society of wiseasses. The strengths of what you can write with seven or eight other minds are different than the strengths of what you can write alone. It’s an experience I think any playwright should try at least once.” Alexis Roblan: “Playwrights are often credited with character-driven storytelling, because we’re taught to derive structure from character or theme, rather than sticking to the ups and downs of a trusted formula. But television as a medium is actually a much more exciting place to explore character. You can get to know every nuance of these fictional people over the space of years, and imagine them into being through constant hypotheticals and questions in a writers room, building layers with every conversation.” Charise Castro Smith: “Theater and TV are very different mediums, but at their core I think success hinges on characters who are ravenous for life, and whose humanity we can relate to. I find the pace of TV production and the potential to reach so many different people exciting. That being said, there is a specific, intimate magic in going to the theater and sharing a physical space with storytellers — which is why I know I’ll never stop writing plays. I find great joy and pleasure in both.” Francine Volpe: “I became a playwright so that I could have the occasional chance to hang out with playwrights. The playwrights I know are potent to be around. They’re always sort of psychoemotionally vibrating. Playwrights are by definition insane and mostly also specific, charismatic, bullheaded, loyal and sexy as all getout. Now as a TV writer, I get to hang out with the lot of them all day, everyday, and call it my job.”