vvjl For Playwrights, Making It to Midcareer Is a Cliffhanger

“Absolutely not,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins declared.

Leslye Headland chuckled. “Oh never, no.”

“I don’t know anyone who could!” was Samuel D. Hunter’s astonished response.

“Not really,” hedged Bess Wohl. “Until maybe last year.”

Among national universities, Princeton was ranked No. 1 again, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Stanford, which tied for third last year, fell to No. 4. U.S. News again judged Williams College the best among national liberal arts colleges. Spelman College was declared the country’s top historically Black institution.

The question that brought such universal denials from four frequently produced, much-awarded American playwrights was: “Have you ever made enough to live on from your plays?”

To win audiences and awards for your efforts is undoubtedly affirming, but the financial returns for dramatists are slim. Even after the premiere of “An Octoroon,” which would later win an Obie Award for best new American play, Jacobs-Jenkins was living in a “horrible sublet on an air shaft,” with a possible case of whooping cough and a definite lack of health insurance. Headland considered herself a success not when her play “Bachelorette” made a splash Off Broadway in 2010, but when she no longer had to work at Rocket Video to make ends meet. And Hunter told me that the most he’d earned in any one year from his plays — including “The Whale” and “A Case for the Existence of God” — was “less than $30,gold99 games000.”

Playwriting has never been a golden ticket, or even, for most, a subway pass. It’s hard enough to get a first play written and produced; getting a second and third off the ground, let alone a 10th, has in recent decades seemed just about impossible. Who knows how many rich voices we never got to hear in maturity?

Especially since the Covid pandemic wiped out a host of emerging artist programs and career development grants, the problem has reached existential proportions. Theater, after all, depends on good plays, and good plays depend on authors with long professional horizons. Many of the greatest works of dramatic literature are neither early nor late but in between. (“Hamlet,” “Twelfth Night” and “Othello” are dead center in Shakespeare’s professional timeline.) But how can playwrights have a midcareer if they can’t survive the start?

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Or so I have often worried.

ImageKatherine Waterston, Tracee Chimo and Celia Keenan-Bolger in Leslye Headland’s 2010 play “Bachelorette.”Credit...Joan Marcus

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