Us Playwrights Are The Lucky Ones: Fighting Covid 19 One Scene At A Time

To say that theater artists are suffering during these endless months of Covid-19 may be the understatement of the century.  For starters, every theater in the world is closed.  Every actor, director, designer and stage hand is out of work.  Sure, there’s a bit of Zoom performance here and there – and perhaps we are somehow creating new art forms that are performance-based but more intimate and electronic.  But the fact of the matter is, everybody in the theater is raring to go:  we want to work and we want to make a living.

How is it for playwrights?  I’d say it’s a two-edged sword.  On the one hand, like most of our fellow theater artists, playwrights are suffering financially.  (Another one of those monumental understatements.)  When I talk to friends in other professions, I explain to them that the closure of theaters means that playwrights have no income.  No, not a little income.  No income.  Playwrights get paid by getting a percentage of the money that goes into the box office – essentially a percentage of ticket sales – and when there are no ticket sales there are no royalties.  My friends are usually shocked.  They didn’t understand that that’s how playwrights make their living.  What did they think?  That the Theater Pixie flew by every week and threw money down at us?  ‘Twould it were so.

The other side of the two-edged sword is this:  we playwrights are luckier than many fellow theater artists.  I can sit down at my desk every day and ply my craft.  Artists need to keep creating.  Painters paint, sculptors sculpt, and when I’m not following the toxic political landscape and trying to change it, I sit quietly in my study every day writing plays.  Actors and directors and stagehands and just about everybody else in the theater don’t have this luxury, and my heart aches for them.  

So now what do we do?  Now, in October 2020 with months and months of more closed theaters and lockdown ahead of us?  

I think the answer is that we hold on by our fingernails and stay as creative as possible.  I have no doubt that all this will end – and within a year or two from now, we will be back to a semblance of normal, with plays in theaters with growing audiences.  Until then, like characters in a Beckett play, we just go on.