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new plays to the stage has reached a crisis level. Arena’s initiative changes the
equation and gives writers far more prominent perches in the organization. The five playwrights, chosen by
Arena’s senior leadership, are Kron (“Well,” her comedy about illness and her mother, made it to Broadway in 2006); Amy Freed, a San Francisco-based playwright
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FRIDAY, JUNE 18, 2010 In new program at D.C.’s Arena Stage, the playwright’s the thing
and onetime Pulitzer Prize final- ist (“Freedomland”); Washing- ton-based playwright Karen Za- carias (“Legacy of Light,” pro- duced by Arena last year); Charles Randolph-Wright (most recently the director of Arena’s “Sophisticated Ladies”); and Memphis native Katori Hall, whose “The Mountaintop” won London’s coveted Olivier Award for best new play this year and is being talked about for Broadway. American theaters like Arena
have long commissioned plays and musicals: “Sycamore Trees,” for instance, an original musical running at Signature Theatre, was developed with money from that theater’s American Musical Voices Project.
Some companies have writer- residency programs to forge rela- tionships with playwrights for whom they have an affinity. But Arena — and New York’s Public Theater — are setting the pace in creating structures with some
BIGGEST OF THE SEASON! REMEMBER, FATHER’S DAY IS JUNE 20
permanency for writers. The Public Theater, also sup-
ported by Mellon, has created a Master Writer Chair position. This three-year residency, cur- rently held by prize-winning Su- zan-Lori Parks, includes a salary competitive with those of other Public Theater officials, health care, a retirement package, plus a professorial appointment and housing at New York University. “Certainly, it has been noticed that the administrators of these
organizations are paid a salary and most artists are paid on con- tract,” said Diane Ragsdale, asso- ciate program officer in perform- ing arts at the Mellon Founda- tion. “It’s hard when you have to juggle two to three part-time jobs.”
Oskar Eustis, the Public Thea-
ter’s artistic director, said, “What the theater says to playwrights is, Why don’t you do television and movies, and when you are slum- ming, come do theater.”
Arena is taking the residency concept one step beyond the Pub- lic Theater’s approach — in the number of writers getting assign- ments, compensation (in the mid-five-figure range), the man- ner in which they are being in- vited into the company and the measure of financial autonomy the theater is ceding them in guiding the projects’ early stages. Out-of-town playwrights will also receive housing. “It’s a very interesting gamble, for them and for us,” said Freed, the San Francisco playwright. “It hit in a zone for me, with my de- spair with the American theater and the pressures that are de- forming it.”
Zacarias, one in a small band of
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Washington-based playwrights, had an unabashedly emotional response to being offered a spot. “I wept,” she said. “I did. There are health benefits, which a play- wright has never really gotten. And you can join their gym! Be- cause being a playwright is a very solitary thing.”
Zacarias has begun her tenure with Arena and spent the first few months of it refining several plays she had long wanted to re- vise. Soon, she said, she will begin thinking about a new play for the company. This summer, she will be joined in the program by Freed and Kron. In January, the final two, Randolph-Wright and Hall, will come onboard. Arena assistant artistic direc-
tor David Dower said that the company will always have one resident playwright from the Washington area in an effort to keep a local focus as it looks to be- come a national force. In addition to the five chosen,
two other playwrights — David Henry Hwang (“M. Butterfly”) and Lynn Nottage, a Pulitzer win- ner last year for “Ruined” — will be given money for one new play each to be produced at Arena in what are being called “project residencies.” The thinking is, said Molly Smith, Arena’s artistic director, that each playwright has a specif- ic way of doing things that might or might not jibe with the institu- tion’s. “This will give an opportu- nity to have artists embedded in every level at Arena,” she said. “Part of what this program does is give them the tools for their best work. And it will give these writ- ers an artistic home, with all the pleasure and pain of an artistic home.” The Arena initiative was
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praised by Polly Carl, the artistic director of Steppenwolf, a region- al company based in Chicago. “This is awesome, what Arena is doing,” she said. Playwrights yearn for more involvement with theater companies, she said. “The depth of what Arena is doing is really impressive.” The playwrights will be free to work on outside projects during their tenure and can write wher- ever it suits them, although they will spend a good amount of time in Washington. In addition to the yearly salaries, the playwrights will have $15,000 budgets to spend as they see fit for the work- shop phases of their creations. Playwrights are so unaccus- tomed to having theaters respond quickly, Kron said, that she was stunned to find that after ex- pressing a need for a computer printer, an Arena aide went right out and bought her one. “It’s an amazing thing, to be able to work like this, to be able to say, ‘This is what I need,’ ” Kron said. “That’s a really big deal.”
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perts voted Thursday to endorse a new type of morning-after con- traceptive pill that works longer than existing products, conclud- ing that it is safe and effective. The unanimous recommenda- tion from the Food and Drug Ad- ministration’s panel of reproduc- tive health experts moves the pill ellaOne, which is approved in Eu- rope, one step closer to the U.S. markets. The FDA is not required to follow the panel’s advice, al- though it often does.
EllaOne successfully reduces the chance of pregnancy for up to five days after sex. Plan B, the most widely used emergency con- traceptive pill, is effective only if women take it within three days of having sex.
EllaOne has drawn criticism from anti-abortion groups, which say the drug is closer to an abor- tion pill than emergency contra- ception.
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