New Plays, Old Problems: Theatre Industry’s Push Doesn’t Help Playwrights

(Illustration by Debs Lim)

Opinion | Spring 2026

May 11, 2026 Isaac Butler Leave a comment

State of Play

Why the theatre industry’s new-play push hasn’t improved the playwrights’ lot.

By Isaac Butler

A little over 17 years ago , Todd London, then the artistic director of New Dramatists , began work on a study for the Theatre Development Fund  (TDF) on the state of the field for new plays and the people who write them. This kind of intensive research “wasn’t really something they did,” he recalled, but there were major questions about the lives of playwrights that had never been answered with real data. How much money did playwrights actually make? How bad was the diversity problem in American theatre? How much was the average commission? Setting out to systematically answer some of these questions, London and TDF brought in Zannie Giraud Voss of SMU Data Arts to gather the data and Ben Pesner to help London conduct interviews.

The end result was the book Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play . It was the rare study that had a transformative effect on the field and the issues it documented, both because it backed up its arguments with data and because it contained the viewpoints of both playwrights and administrators. As Victoria Bailey, TDF’s executive director at the time and the originator of a study that had originally been envisioned by the late John E. Booth, wrote in her introduction, there are new plays happening all over America, but “the ecosystem in which the new play is produced is not healthy.” Playwriting afforded only a small handful a living from their work. Artistic directors were overwhelmed by the number of stakeholders they needed to please to keep the lights on. Nonprofit and commercial theatre were becoming more and more alike. Perhaps worst of all, Bailey wrote, “Language is failing us. Writers and those who produce their plays are not talking honestly with each other…with their audiences, or with funders,” making solutions to the field’s problems all the harder to find.

The major findings of Outrageous Fortune can be roughly divided into two different, largely overlapping categories: the artistic and the financial. On the artistic side, too many theatres were taking new-play grant money to program readings and workshops but not full productions, trapping writers in an endless and inescapable hall of mirrors, a.k.a. “development hell.” While a small handful of graduate programs—Yale, Brown, Brooklyn College, and Juilliard chief among them—helped position writers to be discovered and have careers, they only took a handful of writers a year each. The same was true for the big new-play organizations like Ojai , Sundance , and the O’Neill . The field over-emphasized the idea of the “emerging writer,” which meant that mid-career writers often found funding and development opportunities evaporating at the exact time in their lives when they needed more financial stability.

Many writers complained that they had no artistic home, and that they seldom could have authentic conversations with artistic directors or literary managers. For women and writers of color, these problems were compounded by the same biases that greet them at every corner of American life. Black playwrights, for example, would often only see interest in their plays in February, a.k.a. Black History Month, and then only if the rights to an August Wilson script were not available. Playwright Lauren Yee recalled conversations with theatres early in her career where “they would read a play that called for specific casting, and they’re like, ‘Great play. We’re never going to do it because we don’t know who those actors are.’ As a kid, I was like, there’s no way I could write a story with Asian American characters and get it produced.”

On the financial front, the picture painted by Outrageous Fortune was so bleak that even London was surprised by it. “The real wake-up for me was that the payment of playwrights was based on a commercial royalty model,” London said. That model was decades out of date and premised on open commercial runs. “Once you take that same royalty basis and you apply it to three and a half weeks in a 200-seat theatre, there is no way of making a living at that.”

London was shocked when he interviewed a playwright “who by all estimates was wildly successful. She’d had productionsat two or three major regional theatres and the Public that year.” She told him that she’d never made more than $40,000 a year from writing. According to the study itself, surveyed playwrights made only 15 percent of their annual income from theatrical work, and only 3 percent of their annual income came from royalties. Or, as Pulitzer-winning playwright Doug Wright told me, “I have had six shows on Broadway. That’s not braggadocio. That is to share the staggering fact that if I were reliant on theatre royalties, I would be broke.”

Outrageous Fortune ’s most chilling statistics focused on commissions. The average commission received by surveyed playwrights was between $3,000 and $5,000 dollars, with a third of all commission rates below that range. When you take into account that a play can take years to write—or, in the case of Wright’s I Am My Own Wife , a decade—these paltry amounts felt like a cruel joke.

I attended the plenary at the 2009 TCG Conference where London and David Dower presented their findings, and the room was as spellbound as at a Broadway show. We had all known for a long time that things needed to change. The study named concrete problems and pointed the way toward solutions. Perhaps we could move, as one oft-repeated phrase at that conference put it, “from scarcity to abundance.”

Over the years that followed, many initiatives blossomed in the quest to fix the lot of the new American play and playwright. The result, for the decade prior to the pandemic, was what the agent Di Glazer calls a “golden age of new-play funding.” It was also inarguably a golden age for new plays themselves. How else should one describe a decade-plus that gave us the plays of Jackie Sibblies Drury, Amy Herzog, Annie Baker, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Rajiv Joseph, Danai Gurira, and more? Many of the pipeline and development problems were, if not solved, then addressed in the past decade with commissions, residencies, and new programming.

Much of what was built in those years, though, now lies in tatters since the pandemic lockdown. And the financial problems have not gone away. If anything, the price of housing in most American cities means that the bleak financial picture for playwrights has only gotten worse. This wasn’t for lack of trying. If we failed as a field to make it possible for more people to make a living playwriting, it is because that problem may not actually be solvable.

> We were appropriately shamed for the development hell we were putting writers through. Adam Greenfield, Playwrights Horizons artistic director

My goal here is not to provoke self-laceration. The field achieved real improvement in the new-play sector, and it should be proud of that work. As London described it, “One of the most important things to come out of Outrageous Fortune was Ben Pesner and the Venturous Theater Fund ,” which underwrites production expenses for adventurous theatre work. They weren’t alone. Money poured into the sector from many places into many initiatives. Maria Manuela Goyanes, who worked at both the Public Theater and 13P during this time, specifically mentioned the work of the late Diane Ragsdale at the Mellon Foundation , and the late Lisa Garcia Quiroz at Time Warner, as being instrumental in the Public’s new-play work. The Roy Cockrum Foundation, founded by an ex-monk who funneled his Powerball winnings to support dream projects in the American theatre, has given away tens of millions of dollars to date.

Many theatres launched new playwrights groups, building on the success of models like Youngblood at Ensemble Studio Theatre and the Soho Rep Writer-Director Lab . These gave early-career playwrights much needed community, and opportunities to practice their craft and get noticed. More funding shifted towards production. Some graduate schools became fully funded as well. While many (including me) decried the edifice complex that led many theatres to prioritize the construction of budget-busting new buildings, those new buildings had additional performance spaces, creating more production slots.

Many, like the Guthrie in Minneapolis, Portland Center Stage in Oregon, and Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., specifically created smaller spaces to help nurture new plays. In New York, Atlantic Theater Company built Atlantic Stage 2, Lincoln Center Theater built LCT3 , Roundabout built Roundabout Underground , Manhattan Theatre Club tried out less-tested writers in the smaller spaces of City Center , and Signature went from having one resident playwright with one Off-Broadway space to having three spaces and multiple overlapping residencies. Meanwhile organizations like the National New Play Network grew in prominence, and companies including the Denver Center for the Performing Arts started new-play festivals. True Colors Theatre ’s The Drinking Gourd and North Carolina Black Repertory Theatre ’s Sylvia Sprinkle Hamlin Rowling World Premiere Award sprung up specifically to nurture work by Black playwrights.

Jonathan Spector, whose play Eureka Day is currently one of the most-produced plays in America, began his career as a director in New York City in the early aughts, and worked during that decade for San Francisco’s Playwrights Foundation . “There was this confluence of all these things happening at once that really made the whole field excited about new plays, which led to more opportunities for more people,” Spector said.

And, while there remains a great deal more work to do on the diversity front, there was a concerted effort to open up the theatre to a wider range of voices and audiences. The February slot appears to be a thing of the past. According to The Count 3.0 , an ongoing project by the Lillys and the Dramatists Guild documenting diversity in nonprofit American theatre, new plays by women went from 22 percent of productions a year to 39 percent of productions a year in the last decade. For BIPOC playwrights, the percentage of productions more than doubled, from roughly 10 percent to 24 percent. When, last year, American Theatre surveyed the field about the most influential plays of the last 25 years, half of the titles had credited women authors, and white writers were slightly underrepresented compared to the demographics of the country, at 56 percent.

More production slots has also meant more productions, and a more self-conscious and specific approach to development. When Outrageous Fortune hit bookshelves, Adam Greenfield was the relatively new literary manager of Playwrights Horizons . Today he’s the artistic director.

“A lot of theatres began to think of play development a little bit differently,” he told me. “I think we were appropriately shamed for the development hell that we were putting writers through.” For Playwrights, that meant reinventing their development process and “divorcing it completely from anything that’s audience-facing. It became a lot more writer-friendly,” At the same time, he said, writers got better at using the new-play development process. Di Glazer agreed, saying, “I don’t feel like development hell is present anymore.”

One unintended consequence of that success, however, is that more and more people decided to pursue playwriting as a profession, overtaxing an already strained landscape in much the same way that building additional highway lanes makes traffic worse. Anecdotally, at least, it appears that a system with very few winners getting many productions of multiple scripts turned into a system in which a much larger number of playwrights get produced, but each gets fewer productions. As Glazer reca

_Originally reported by [American Theatre](https://www.americantheatre.org/2026/05/11/state-of-play/)._