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Just over a year ago, our local chapter of the Dramatists Guild invited the artistic directors from six professional theatres in Salt Lake City to discuss with us what they were doing with new play development.

This report is about what might very well have been the result of that meeting.

Pioneer Theatre at the time of the meeting had just announced Play by Play, a new play development project that would devote a week of work to each of four new plays involving professional directors, actors and dramaturgs. At the end of the process, the plays would each be given two public readings. Playwrights lauded the idea, at the time, as a model for what new play development might be. That project was successful last season and continues again this season. What’s more, one of the plays developed last year, is scheduled for production on Pioneer’s season this year.

Salt Lake Acting Company has also recently announced a new weeklong development laboratory based on the Sundance model and managed by its former director, David Kranes. The lab will focus on two new plays using professional directors, actors, and dramaturgs, also inviting assorted professionals to augment the experience. Taking seriously the idea of development, the lab process will not result in public readings. Rather the focus is to be on the plays and only the plays, nothing more, nothing less.

On a simpler model, Pygmalion Theatre recently devoted a week of work to a new play by a local writer, involving local professional actors, directors, and the producer. The process was freewheeling, allowing the playwright to design much of the experience, the director, producer, and actors to ask questions and probe the possibilities of the play. This model might easily be adapted to any theatre; it puts the focus on the play and not on a reading, and it invites experimentation.

Gradually over the years Plan-B Theatre has evolved a unique mission: to produce new work by local writers. To augment that mission, it now has a Playwrights Lab to help develop that work. Local writers join the Lab by invitation. Their plays are given a cold reading by local professional actors then critiqued by members of the Lab, the producers and the actors. Most of the plays read in the group have gone on to production at Plan-B, an astonishing promise that gives the discussions added importance and value.

Did the DG event cause this sudden interest in new play development? I don’t know. But I do think producers listened when playwrights argued for more than just ten hours of rehearsal culminating in a staged reading. “That’s not development,” they insisted, “that’s an audition that seems to satisfy no one but granting agencies.” What playwrights wanted was simply more time with actors, directors and dramaturgs, that does not necessarily result in a public reading. It’s an uncomplicated request that’s easy to meet. And who knows what wonders could follow!

jjensen@dramatistsguild.com