How Do Playwrights Make a Living?

Author(s): Holly Hill

Source: Theatre Journal, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Dec., 1981), pp. 517-526
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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HOLLYHILL

How Do PlaywrightsMake a Living?

An assignment from director Louis Malle to write the script for Atlantic City,
which won the 1980 Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, came none too soon for
John Guare. In spite of several regional theatre productions of his 1979 Broadway
flop Bosoms and Neglect, Guare admits: "Ireally didn't know just what I was going
to do for money."'
Eve Merriam has an international hit in The Club, but her Broadway musical Inner City ran for five months and she "didn'tmake a dime out of it." Christopher
Durang made "about $2000 from the Broadway production of A History of the
American Film." Samm-Art Williams pumped gas in Brooklyn for five years before
writing Home. He speculates that his Tony-nominee play "isprobably 75-80 % of my
income this year. I've never made more than a few hundred dollars from
playwrighting before. I don't know if I've left the gas pump yet. I still dream about
it. Some people count sheep. I count cars."
Shakespeare did not make his living as a playwright. Nor did Moliere, Goethe,
Chekhov, Strindberg, or Pirandello. They took on additional theatrical, literary,
academic, or civilian tasks to help fill their larders. So must their heirs and heiresses
in America today, even in an era of international copyrights, burgeoning regional
theatre, and foundation and government arts funding.
John Guare recalls Robert Anderson's comment that "The theatre is a place where
you can make a killing but not a living." The only way to make a killing is with a
Broadway long run, particularly one which branches into touring companies,
regional, stock, and amateur productions. Glance at any week's Variety and count
on one hand the number of playwrights who may be, or may have a chance at, making such a killing.
The 29 October 1980 Variety listed grosses and audience capacities for seven plays
which had been running for at least several months (pp. 93-4). Only two had been
Holly Hill is Assistant Professor in the SEEK/Speech and Theatre Departments of John Jay College of the
City University of New York. Her reviews have appeared in TJ, Performing Arts Journal, Wall Street
Journal, Christian Science Monitor, New York Theatre Review, and elsewhere.

1 Except where otherwise noted, all material gathered from interviews with the sixteen playwrights and
with David LeVine and Robert Kamlot, in New York City between 25 August and 7 October 1980.

517

518

TI,December1981

playing a year or more, and three with less than six-month runs were playing to considerably less than capacity. Still, if the authors were earning the standard ten percent of gross box office receipts, the least one took home that week was some $5000,
the most was over $15,000.
Of course, it isn't that simple. When a play is not making money, producers often
ask playwrights to waive royalties to help keep the show running. The reason that
Eve Merriam and hosts of her colleagues make little or no money from a New York
production is that Broadway and Off-Broadway contracts guarantee them nothing
they are not free to give up. Television and film writers with contracts are, by contrast, guaranteed minimums listed in the byzantine twenty-two page booklet of the
Writers' Guild of America. For a network primetime story and teleplay, for example, minimums range from $5,564 to $11,127, depending on the length and budget of
a program-even if the scripts are never produced.2
David LeVine, Executive Director of the 3500-member Dramatists' Guild, the only
professional association of playwrights, composers and lyricists, comments: "In a
nation of over 200 million people, there are perhaps two or three dozen men and
women -perhaps -who make a good living writing plays." Of sixteen playwrights
interviewed for this article, only four-David Mamet, Robert Patrick, Doric
Wilson, and Lanford Wilson-have been making their living writing for the theatre
for three years or more. The others-Julie Bovasso, Ed Bullins, Jane Chambers,
Christopher Durang, Harvey Fierstein, John Guare, Corinne Jacker, Jim Leonard,
Jr., Romulus Linney, Eve Merriam, Wendy Wasserstein, and Samm-Art
Williams-ride the seesaw of most produced playwrights-now up, now down.
These facts might not tug at many heartstrings; everyone knows that a career in
the arts is a gamble. But teachers and students of playwrighting, directors searching
Samuel French and Dramatists Play Service catalogues or perusing new play anthologies for prospective productions, and all interpretive artists and craftsmen of
the theatre for whom playwrights are a primary source, might be sobered to know
what sustaining a playwrighting career today requires besides talent.
"The chronology of compensation for playwrights is different," explains David
LeVine. "A person who writes a television or a series script goes on salary and gets
paid while doing the work. That's the American habit-you get paid weekly or
monthly. A playwright writes a play and it can be sometimes two or three years
before any money comes in from it." One playwright told in confidence of two
award-winning plays which ran Off-Broadway in one season: "Iworked on one play
for three years and it cost me $250. The other took two years to write and made
$300- so that year I came out $50 ahead." As David LeVine comments, "They'vegot
to have something coming in while they're writing or they're not going to be able to
do it."

2 "Scheduleof
Minimums, Writers Guild of America, 1977 Theatrical and Television Basic Agreement,"
booklet published by the Writers Guild of America, pp. 6-7.

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MAKEA LIVING?
HOW DO PLAYWRIGHTS

The first struggle playwrights face is surviving while they write and seek productions for their first plays; the second is getting enough fees from productions to
enable them to write fulltime. Most don't make it, but the stories of how they try
rival any starving artist's. There are traditional versions - David Mamet drove cabs
and worked as a waiter; John Guare was an office temporary worker and an advance man for summer stock packages. Wendy Wasserstein went from the Yale
Drama School to auditing plays for the New York State Council on the Arts and
worked in the New York office of the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center until she decided to submit her Uncommon Women and Others to the O'Neill Playwrights Conference. Lanford Wilson spent ten years in such chores as waiter, furniture store
worker, hotel reservations clerk, and "along with all the new young playwrights,
working in the subscription departments of the Phoenix Theatre and the New York
Shakespeare Festival."
Then there are comic variations like Robert Patrick's typing autopsies for the City
of New York and decorating banks and churches for Christmas. In the year after
receiving his M.F.A. from Yale, Christopher Durang typed envelopes for the Yale
Medical School: "We were writing people who had donated their bodies to science
telling them we had too many bodies and they should make alternate plans." Durang
also helped a psychiatrist index his book, "so I spent a long time putting terms about
schizophrenia in alphabetical order."
The youngest interviewee, 24-year-old Jim Leonard, Jr., combines traditional and
comic elements in his pre-production struggles, even though he has been lucky, like
Wasserstein and Durang, in enjoying some success soon after college graduation.
His play The Diviners opened the Circle Repertory season in October, 1980, after
winning first prize the previous spring at the American College Theatre Festival.
Leonard'sfirst play, And They Dance Real Slow in Jackson, won second prize at the
1979 Festival.
Both were originally presented at Leonard'salma mater in Indiana, Hanover College. There, Professor Tom Evans-the only college instructor in the country to
have taken four productions to the Washington, D.C., Festival finals-was
Leonard's mentor and sometime landlord. Between graduation and winning the
Festival's first prize, Leonard "borrowed money from my father, took food stamps,
chopped firewood, washed dishes, and worked in a bakery and as an orderly in a
nursing home." When The Diviners was in rehearsal at Hanover, Evans allowed
Leonard to live in the theatre for six weeks "becauseI couldn't afford rent anymore. I
slept in a stage bed and snuck a meal ticket and ate in the dormitories."
Doric Wilson had two unusual jobs, one of which changed the direction of his
career. He was an ordinary Time/Life researcher when his first plays were presented
at Cafe Cino, but then spent some five years as a high ranking New York City
tourist guide, escorting visitors such as Soviet Premier Kosygin around Manhattan.
Then he worked ten years as a star gay bartender, which he describes as "someone
whom the owner thinks brings in business. You make a fortune - $4-500 a week in
tips alone. I pumped that money back into my theatre."TOSOS, which Wilson supported for several years, was New York's first serious gay theatre. Wilson founded it

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TI,December1981

partly because "Irealized that I was making all this money every week from gay men
in a gay social situation and I thought maybe I should return it."
Though she started with a series of odd jobs-map painter for a Standard Oil
petrographic survey, proofreader for Time, college sales correspondent for Oxford
University Press, science book editor and author -Corinne Jacker eventually made
a contact at PBS and found a career complimentary to writing such plays as Bits qnd
Pieces, Harry Outside, and My Life. Two Adams Chronicles and three The Best of
Families, 75 Bicentennial Minutes, and several other television scripts since, Jacker
estimates that she makes "perhaps10% of a modest living as a playwright, a bit from
teaching" (she currently teaches playwrighting at Yale), and the rest from television
writing.
Eve Merriam, with forty-one books published and two more due this year, is the
most anthologized poet for young people in the country. "I'ma sport, a departure
from the regular plant," she comments. "Ihave always made a living and have raised
two sons from my writing. My books led me to the theatre -Inner City was based
upon a volume of my poems. Out of Our Fathers'House was based upon Growing
Up Female in America. I began writing plays in 1970, and by now about half my income is from them. It took ten years, and I'm lucky."
Jane Chambers and Julie Bovasso began their careers as actresses, partly because
of hostility in the 1950s towards women's interest in becoming playwrights. "Igot
out of college and tried to participate in the coffee house theatre Off Off-Broadway,"
Chambers recalls, "butat that time it was even harder than today for a woman to get
anything done. Primarily I worked as an actress and I also wrote." Chambers was
the first theatre critic for the trade paper Backstage, worked as a writer for two
television soap operas (she won a 1973 Writers' Guild of America Award for Search
for Tomorrow), and wrote twenty paperback novels under pseudonyms.
"Istarted Tempo, the first experimental theatre in New York, and introduced the
works of Genet and Ionesco to this country in the fifties," says Julie Bovasso. "Back
then acting was really about the only area a woman was encouraged to pursue. I'm a
damn good actress, but I got bored with it, so in the early sixties I started writing.
My plays don't make money, though some of my one acts which have been published
bring in royalties. Shubert's Last Serenade is done all over the country. But the most
I ever made was from a production of Gloria and Esperanza at the Annenberg
Center in Philadelphia." Bovasso, whose Angelo's Wedding was a runner-up for the
Susan Smith Blackburn Award during the 1980-1981 season, supports herself by
acting (she was John Travolta's mother in Saturday Night Fever; her latest is Willie
and Phil), by running her own acting workshop in Manhattan, and by teaching at
Sarah Lawrence.
Another teacher is Romulus Linney, a former actor and three-time novelist who
has held visiting professorships at Brooklyn and Connecticut College, the Universities of Pennsylvania and North Carolina, Columbia University, and the Manhattan School of Music. He sometimes teaches while one of his dramas, including The
Sorrows of Frederick, Holy Ghosts and Childe Byron, are presented on campus. Linney adds that "Ihave a very lovely and able wife, Margaret, who is an associate pro-

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HOW DO PLAYWRIGHTS
MAKEA LIVING?

fessor of drama at Brooklyn College, and one way this particular writer has been
able to survive is that he has a wife who makes a living too."
Also admitting to some support is Harvey Fierstein, who lived at home with his
parents while simultaneously earning a degree at Pratt and getting his starts as an actor and author. In Other Stages, Tish Dace noted that at twenty-six, Fierstein is
"pretty young to have written a trilogy of plays both popular with the public and
regarded by critics as expertly crafted. Already he's one of the country's best
playwrights."3 The trilogy - International Stud, Fugue in A Nursery, and Widows
and Children First-began separately Off Off-Broadway, with each play moving
Off-Broadway.
While several playwrights work as actors - Samm-Art Williams was the subway
policeman in Dressed to Kill and will be in Ragtime - Ed Bullins has earned much of
his living behind the scenes, first as an associate director of the New Lafayette
Theatre in Harlem and currently as the Writers Unit Coordinator and a press assistant at the New York Shakespeare Festival. Bullins, who has also taught at several
universities, comments that "It'sbetter to make a living in some way in the theatre. I
would rather be a janitor in the theatre than a lot of other things outside of it."
The major reason why many of these playwrights have not been forced to take on
more survival jobs is grants. "Since 1969 I've had grants from the Guggenheim and
Rockefeller Foundations and the New York State Council," says Julie Bovasso.
"They kept me alive. When I had a grant I really worked and did some of my best
writing. It gave me a kind of freedom early in my development that was very
necessary and good." Lanford Wilson has received two Rockefellers and a Guggenheim; Ed Bullins three Rockefellers, two Guggenheims, a Ford, an NEA, and a
CAPS (Creative Arts Program of the New York State Council). "Themost I received
was a Guggenheim for $12,000," Bullins recalls. "The NEA is $10,000 now and was
around $3500-4000 when I was getting it. The CAPS was $3500." One of the original
O'Neill Playwrights Conference participants, John Guare "got a series of three grants
from things read there. My first two grants-an ABC-TV in 1966 and a Rockefeller
in 1967, both for $5000, I stretched and lived on for four years. A Rockefeller for
about $7-8000 in 1977 was a lifesaver."
Jim Leonard was thrilled to receive his first grant of almost $2000 from the Indiana
Arts Commission in 1979, and an NEA grant for $2500 in 1980. A CBS Playwriting
Fellowship and a Rockefeller, both for $8000, helped Christopher Durang through
two difficult years, and Harvey Fierstein wrote Widows and Children First on a Ford
grant. Durang had a Guggenheim last year and Romulus Linney has been able to
take a year off from teaching with his current Guggenheim. Corinne Jacker says
wryly that "Igot a Rockefeller for $9000 last year, but until then I was turned down
for every grant I applied for. It was funny. I applied for a CAPS with Bits and Pieces
and got turned down. The next year, which was the year Bits and Pieces won the
OBIE, they called and asked me to be on the CAPS selection committee on the
strength of Bits and Pieces."
3 2, 7 (13-27 December 1979) 3.

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TJ,December1981

Romulus Linney praises another form of grant -the artists' colonies of Yado in
Saratoga Springs, New York, and Macdowell in Peterborough, New Hampshire:
"They don't give you money, but a place to work and utterly undisturbed time. Not
too many playwrights use these places, which I think is a shame because I found that
I could get a great deal of work done in a very short time. The great thing about
them is they're career savers. They save you right at the point when you're almost
ready to say 'the hell with it. I'llgo work for General Electric.'I'mnot so sure I would
still be writing if it weren't for Yado and Macdowell when I really needed them."
Aside from grants and elusive Broadway killings, playwrights can hope to make
part or all of their living from fees and royalties. At the Circle Repertory Company,
playwrights-whether Jim Leonard, Romulus Linney, David Mamet, or Lanford
Wilson-are paid $1500 for a mainstage production. Christopher Durang, Wendy
Wasserstein, and Romulus Linney were each commissioned to write a play for the
Phoenix Theatre. They were paid $1500 for first refusal rights, and will receive
$2000 when their plays are produced. The Public Theatre, where such John Guare
works as Rich and Famous and Marco Polo Sings A Solo have been presented, pays
6% of gross box office receipts against a guaranteed minimum, explains New York
Shakespeare Festival General Manager Robert Kamlot. "The playwright never
makes less than the guarantee, and we've never done a play, whether in workshop or
full-scale production, in which the playwright didn't receive some compensation."
After struggling with civilian jobs for a decade, Lanford Wilson was able to start
making a living from his plays in 1973, partly because of a windfall of about $40,000
from The Hot L Baltimore Off-Broadway (at $600 royalties a week) and in three
regional theatres (at a fee of $1000 a week for five-week runs). His income went back
down to an average of about $10,000 a year until Talley's Folly, "but I never went
back to work anywhere because of regional theatre productions plus the amateur
royalties on The Rimers of Eldritch, which have been about $4000 a year since it was
published."
"Publication is the way to success," according to Doric Wilson, for it makes possible the professional and amateur productions which can support a playwright. Jane
Chambers, whose Off Off-Broadway summer sellout Last Summer at Bluefish Cove
reopened Off Broadway in 1981, relates that a previous play, A Late Snow, "was
done in 1974 at Playwrights' Horizons and optioned for Off Broadway. But in '74 no
one was ready for a play about five lesbians, so we didn't get the backing. I just
assumed the play was dead and then in 1978 Avon published a volume of gay plays
which included Snow. Suddenly from all over the world I was getting royalties from
the play's being done. It certainly hasn't made me rich, but it has significantly added
to my income." Last Summer at Bluefish Cove was published in Contemporary
Women's Plays this year. "Unless you're a Broadway hit or fit into the Samuel
French/Dramatists Play Service format, which most of my plays do not," says
Chambers, "it'sextremely difficult to get published. You're dependent on anthologies
to give you a chance at an income from production royalties."
Also benefitting from the acceptance and publication of gay plays is Doric
Wilson, who relates that income from his plays is "around$20,000 a year-less than

523

MAKEA LIVING?
HOW DO PLAYWRIGHTS

JaneChambersin her play, LastSummerat BluefishCove, 1981, with CarolineAaron (at

right).
I made as a bartender. The income is jumping yearly, however, because the more
plays I write, the more I get produced and published. There were only about two
gay theatres when I started; now there are some forty around the country that will
do gay scripts, and the number is growing." Not exclusively a writer for gay theatre,
Wilson, whose best-known works are A Perfect Relationship, The West Street Gang
and Now She Dances, is "working on three plays with gay characters and two
straight plays. In twenty-one years I've written some forty plays, and there'snot one
that hasn't had at least three productions. Mind you, some of those were in barns,
but I've only done one freebie in my life."
Robert Patrick, the most prolific of the playwrights making a living, credits the
sheer volume of his plays as a principal reason they have supported him since 1969,
after a five-year struggle with odd jobs. "Imade myself so conspicuous that someone
had to publish my plays. I had sometimes twelve to sixteen plays in production at a
time." Samuel French publishes thirty-two Patrick plays; Dramatists Play Service
handles two others; twenty-three plays appeared in Michael Feingold's Robert
Patrick's Cheap Theatricks, and there are others available. "A little play, Camera
Obscura, that Ed Parone published in Collision Course around '68 or '69 pays my
rent to this day. I just got a check for it from New Zealand. My first play, The
Haunted Host, written for the Cino in 1964, is being done in South Africa in
November. The farther the books spread the better-in other words a play one
wrote sixteen years ago can make one's living now.

524

TJ,December1981

"The living varies wildly from year to year. When you're on Broadway or the
West End"-and Patrick was on both with Kennedy's Children-"you make great
drooling, dripping hunks of money. Even in a small Broadway theatre, an unknown
playwright can rake in from $2000-$4000 a week. That's a nice shot in the arm for
one's income, but it's no different from what one rakes in from, say, 100 productions
a week of a one-act in schools."
Patrick puts most of his money back into Off Off-Broadway showcases of his
plays, explaining, "If I put on a play in New York this year, that will generate
anywhere from five to ten to a hundred productions next year around the country. I
produce my plays and always have. That's one thing I learned at the Cino."
Patrick, Doric Wilson, and Lanford Wilson began their careers at Cafe Cino, and
Doric Wilson feels strongly that their training in the coffee house-theatre which
fostered the Off Off-Broadway movement is a reason why they are making livings
from their work now: "At the Cino really nobody had a role. Everybody did
everything. Because there was so much crossover, most of the original Cino vets
don't think of theatre in terms of actors, directors, playwrights, producers,
designers. They think in terms of simply making theatre. I look at it first as a profession, and probably Lanford and Bob feel the same way, which is why we make
money at it. I also look at it as making theatre.
"Iguess what I'm saying is that I think playwrights who go about the business of
making theatre, whether it be street theatre, feminist theatre, gay theatre, whatever,
probably do end up living on royalties if they have anything to offer. The
playwrights who wait at home while producers and agents do what they do
sometimes are lucky and sometimes are not, but that's an awfully passive position to
get into, I think."
Samm-Art Williams describes the process of waiting and working towards getting
a play done: "I took Home around two years trying to get it produced, and it has
gone through rewrite after rewrite, so by the time it got on I was tired. It wasn't like
a gift - I started writing it in 1976. To be a writer you've got to be a tough soul. I've
got a stack of rejection slips up to my front door. By the time a writer gets a production, he's so beat that everybody can bask in his success but him. I think I'm lucky in
that I got to Broadway young - I'm thirty-four. I feel that God has blessed me. But it
was kinda rough."
Success itself doesn't necessarily generate more success, as Ed Bullins, a "hot"and
award-winning playwright in the 1960-70 decade for such works as The Electronic
Nigger and Others, In The Wine Time, and The Fabulous Miss Marie, has found:
"Upuntil a few years ago, about a third of my income came from royalties from my
plays and books and also from lecture/readings I did. I still get $3-4000 a year from
stock and amateur productions. I haven't been writing less, I've just been produced
less. Every once in awhile I get a chance to write a television or film script, which is a
considerable help." Television has also been a boon to Wendy Wasserstein, who
made around $2000 from the Phoenix Theatre production of Uncommon Women
and Others and some $9000 from its sale to PBS. She has dramatized a John Cheever
story for PBS and a novel for producer Robert Geller, and she and Christopher

525

MAKEA LIVING?
HOW DO PLAYWRIGHTS

Durang are collaborating on a film idea for the Alan Ladd company, hoping they
will be allowed to turn their idea into a treatment and then into a script: "We're
working on a step deal," says Durang, "where we get paid for each step but can get
dropped before the next one." John Guare is working on a new film project for
producer-designer Jules Fisher.
A perennial difficulty for those whose works are done on or Off-Broadway is
royalty waivers. Durang discloses that during a well-received run of Das Lusitania
Songspiel at the Chelsea Westside in 1979-1980, "Sigourney Weaver and I were paid
as actors but we were asked to waive our co-author royalties, and did. Everyone
thought we were raking it in, but we weren't."Harvey Fierstein, who kept some $300

SigourneyWeaver and ChristopherDurang in Das LusitaniaSongspiel, Chelsea Theatre

Center,1980.

526

TJ,December1981

a week acting salary while giving up royalties of a like amount when attendance fell
late in the Off-Broadway run of International Stud, comments: "It'sworth it down
the line because the longer a play runs the more it's worth to the little theatres
around the country, and those are worth $8-900 a shot."
While agreeing that long runs enhance their plays' value, most authors long for action which could prevent royalty waivers. This is not likely to come for, as John
Guare, who is on the Council of the Dramatists' Guild, explains, "Playwrights don't
have a union because we're never employees, we only lease our work. Union
members aren't allowed to waive their salaries. The playwright is always the first
who is asked to give in and to go home with nothing while the ushers and stagehands
and everyone else are receiving their salaries."
With movies, television and other forms of writing beckoning some, academia or
acting or even bartending offering better livings to others, why do playwrights endure such slings and arrows? "Iguess the truth is that I became a playwright knowing I wouldn't make a living at it," says Corinne Jacker. "It'snever upset me particularly that I haven't. It's almost a relief knowing you're writing plays for other
reasons. It takes some of the pressure off. It's a joy-it's the buzz in my life." David
Mamet agrees: "Youdon't write to make a living in the first place. You write because
it makes you happy."
Romulus Linney reflects, "I'mfifty years old, and the main of twenty-five years of
my life have been spent writing and having productions, many of them not working.
I don't know. You tell me what it's all about. The only thing I do know is that
somewhere down in the bottom of me there is a very stubborn streak that says 'I
don't give a damn what happens. I'm going to keep on doing this.' And maybe it's
because there's nothing else I can do."
"Thegreat quote about being a playwright is from Sam Shepard at the first O'Neill
Conference, and God knows good quotes from Sam are few and hard to come by,"
says Lanford Wilson. "At the height of an argument with a set designer, Sam said 'If I
say I want it this way then I want it that way,' and the set designer replied 'Good
God man, you don't understand that it's a collaborative art and my contribution has
to be important too. How did you ever decide to be a playwright' and Sam screamed
at the top of his lungs, 'I didn't decide to be a playwright. It's a maladjustment'."