Since 2000, The New York Theatre Experience, Inc. (a.k.a. NYTE) - parent company to nytheatre.com - has published the Plays and Playwrights series, an annual anthology highlighting the work of new and emerging indie theater playwrights. The series, spearheaded by nytheatre.com founder, editor, and chief reviewer Martin Denton, has regularly been ahead of the curve in spotting new talent and boasts an impressive alumni list that includes such indie luminaries as Taylor Mac, Qui Nguyen, Chad Beckim, Kirk Wood Bromley, Trav S.D., Matthew Freeman, Chiori Miyagawa, Ken Urban, Marc Spitz, Kelly McAllister, Frank Cwiklik, John Jahnke, Josh Fox, Kevin Doyle, Saviana Stanescu, James Comtois, Ashlin Halfnight, and dozens more.
On the eve of the publication of NYTE’s newest installment, Plays and Playwrights 2008, I asked Martin (who is pictured above) to talk with me a bit about the new anthology, the Plays and Playwrights series, NYTE’s Play Publishing Program, and how he goes about doing it every year. Here’s what he had to say:
First of all, let’s start by talking about how you first thought up and started the Plays and Playwrights series.
I have told this story a lot, but here it is again. Sometime in 1999, Rochelle [Denton, NYTE's Managing Director] and I saw a show called Are We There Yet? (it was at the old Synchronicity Space in SoHo, now home to The Culture Project). The playwright was Garth Wingfield. As we were leaving the show, I said to Rochelle, “This was a really terrific play, and it’s a shame that it will just disappear after its 16-performance run is over. Someone ought to publish it.” Or words to that effect. So, many months later, I suddenly remembered what I’d said, and I said to Rochelle, “We should publish a book.”
So the real impetus was, and remains, to try to capture permanently some of the great work that’s done in small theatres in NYC that would otherwise be lost.
How do you choose the plays each year? What qualities, if any, do you seek out for the book?
Well the main requirement is that I must personally see the play. We don’t accept submissions for two very good reasons—first, I don’t have time to read plays, and second (and more important), I believe that there must be evidence that the plays I’m publishing will work in production. Plus a production means that someone other than the playwright has worked on the piece and had faith in it.
The other really important requirement is that the playwright must not have a lot of previously published work. Almost all of the playwrights in our series are receiving their first publications, in fact, though there have been occasional exceptions along the way. We’re seeking to introduce new talent to the world in the Plays and Playwrights series.
The book as a whole each year is meant to reflect the diversity of the NYC indie theater scene in every sense of the word, so as we choose the plays we think about all kinds of things: subject matter, genre, structure, authorship, theme, etc. I gravitate toward the political and the experimental, so I am always conscious of making sure that more personal work and less experimental work is also represented in each volume.
Ultimately, the plays all have to mean something to me. I never expect anyone else to love all the plays in my books. But I always do.
The never-before-published concept is very important, so I make a point of seeing as many plays by new or unheralded authors as possible. I try to sample as much different work as I can. Recommendations are really important. When people I respect tell me to check out a particular playwright, I make a point of doing so. For example, you, Michael, sang the praises of Ashlin Halfnight when you reviewed his play God’s Waiting Room at FringeNYC. And so I made a point of seeing his next FringeNYC play, Diving Normal, which ended up in Plays and Playwrights 2007.
What was it about the plays in Plays and Playwrights 2008 that spoke to you?
Different answers for different plays. Robert Attenweiler’s language thrills me to pieces. I have been a fan of his singular poetic voice since I started seeing his work and I was delighted to include …and we all wore leather pants, which is very funny as well as filled with his distinctive rich language. Thomas Bradshaw’s willingness to deal with important controversial subjects matters a lot to me, as does his evolution away from gross sensationalism to, in Cleansed, something a little more mature in his writing. I love the wisdom and unsentimental tenderness of the two coming-of-age tales this year, Carolyn Raship’s Antarctica and John Regis’s Linnea. I love the adventurousness and experimentation in Crystal Skillman’s work, and the challenges that The Telling Trilogy will present to future actors and directors are very exciting to contemplate. Plus she’s another master of amazing language. Daniel Talbott’s play, What Happened When, is this great tantalizing enigma of a play whose meaning and secrets are subject to so many different interpretations—I love its depth. Mac Rogers’s Universal Robots is brilliantly crafted, brilliantly plotted, and says some important things about technology and faith that I found really affecting. The two war plays in the volume—Elena Hartwell’s In Our Name and Leslie Bramm’s Marvelous Shrine have so much important to say about what’s going on in this country right now that they were obvious candidates as soon as I heard about them. And finally, Fall Forward by Daniel Reitz—it is probably the most personal to me, because it was written for a specific location that meant something particular to me, the John Street Methodist Church, which is literally across the street from where I lived at the time of 9/11. Daniel’s play is the best 9/11 play I’ve ever seen, really getting right to the crux of things—all that we are supposed to have learned from that tragedy is encapsulated in his play.
What distinguishes this year’s batch from previous years, if anything?
One thing that comes to mind is that many of these playwrights are artists I have been following for a while. Only Elena Hartwell is new to me, and she’s a true find! But I’ve been a fan of Carolyn’s work since the late ‘90s; Leslie’s since about 2001; John Regis since the late ‘90s; Crystal’s since the early 2000s. I have seen almost everything Thomas and Robert have put up since they started getting work produced in NYC. I’ve only just gotten to know Daniel Reitz from his work with Rising Phoenix, but this was the third of his plays I’d seen (in about a year; he’s prolific). And Daniel Talbott and Mac Rogers are artists I have admired for a while, not just as playwrights, but as actors, directors, and producers. So it has been exciting to get all of these folks I respect so much between the covers, so to speak.
Do the plays affect you the same way every year or differently from year to year?
Interesting question. I guess every play works a little differently on me, so over nine years that’s more than a hundred different effects… But overall, yes, the plays in our books are the ones that really got under my skin. More important, the playwrights who created them are all people who I think are going to be significant forces in American drama as years go by.
You have a strict policy of not publishing authors twice. Why is that?
It’s that never-before-published rule. The mission of the Plays and Playwrights series is to call attention to new authors. There are so many worthy new playwrights that it’s not fair to double up.
And yet you’ve had a couple of repeats anyway. How did that happen?
There are two exceptions only. The first was Edmund DeSantis, whose play Making Peter Pope is in our first book, Plays and Playwrights for the New Millennium. We also put his The Language of Kisses in our second book, Plays and Playwrights 2001. This was before we’d established the official “criteria” for the books, so there were no rules to break back then. The other exception is Kelly McAllister. Last Call is in Plays and Playwrights 2003. When the New York Innovative Theatre Awards were created, they asked us if we would publish the scripts designated “Outstanding Full-Length” and “Outstanding Short Script” and we did that first year. Kelly’s Burning the Old Man therefore made it into Plays and Playwrights 2006.
Do you have a favorite of all the plays you’ve published?
No. But Are We There Yet? remains the impetus for the series, so I will always have a special place in my heart for it.
Do you have any plans to expand NYTE’s publishing program?
We did two non-series books during the last year and a half – Playing with Canons, which is a very big book of adaptations from classic literature and drama, and Unpredictable Plays, an anthology honoring Mario Fratti on his 80th birthday. Those two extra projects have kept us good and busy in the short term.
But we’re always thinking of new stuff. When something is firm, I will tell you!
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