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I think it started with the word “Guild”. That word instantaneously drew me in. I’d always thought of it, since high school history class, as “a medieval association of craftsmen or merchants, often having considerable power”. Not a Union. Not a Club.

A Guild, which betokened masters of a craft, elders who trained and looked out for the younger and upcoming ones and whose unified power within an industry could protect them from exploitation. I’d always felt the composing of music and lyrics to be a craft, and I remember a quote from Paul McCartney likening songwriting to furniture making. It was true, I thought, sanding away the extraneous grace notes, changing the shape of an answering phrase like the leg of a chair, spending hours deciding whether it should be ‘a’, or ‘the’, or ‘his’, or ‘its’. Like a craftsman. I remember the final thing dear Ed Kleban did, before signing off on the completion of all his work in A Chorus Line, was to write out a huge chart of every rhyme in the show – and if he found he had duplicated even one with the same pair of words, he would replace it with a new pair, just to keep the ear’s experience completely fresh throughout the whole of the show.

Craft, in its highest form. But merchant? Yes, of course. The professional theater, the sea in which I’d hoped to swim, lives precisely at the intersection of art and commerce – always has. A commodity exchange like that of gold, or wheat. Do we exchange plays, songs, soul-shaking lived experiences in a two-hour evening for royalties? Absolutely. And what are the shifting standards of same? What’s usual and customary? How much do you want your work in a theater? How little does a producer feel like giving you for it? And, as their flop-insurance, maybe they want to change it without your acquiescence.

The Dramatists Guild was created by elders of the craft in order to pass it on to the next generation – all of it, the wisdom of the art and the commerce, meaning the continuing and evolving protection of a Standard Contract they had the power to negotiate, there for the benefit of the newcomers.

Eliot wrote, in Tradition and The Individual Talent: “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone…what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.” I believe that. You cannot send a character out onstage to contemplate suicide without sensing Hamlet being somehow there hovering in the wings. We’re connected to our forbears such that, as a consequence of what we do, even Hamlet might be changed a little bit thereby.

Who of us does not remember the hand of the mentor that reached out and pulled us into the boat, and thus what a privilege it is to reach out in return and pull in another. Pull in to a family, a tradition, a Guild.

MAURY YESTON is a two-time Tony Award winning composer/lyricist whose Broadway credits include Nine, Grand Hotel, and Titanic. Other works, include Death Takes A Holiday, Phantom, December Songs, and Tom Sawyer – A Ballet in Three Acts. He was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for his work in the film Nine.

[This essay was originally published in the November/December 2014 issue of The Dramatist. Illustration by Dan Romer.]