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Amanda Green’s text burned right through the screen on my smartphone as I read it with incredulity: “It’s a nightmare; I hardly recognize our musical. Songs from the first act have been interpolated into the second; lines have been stolen from one character and given to another; the act break is new, and I don’t even recognize some of the music.”

Amanda had traveled to a prominent theater in Houston, Texas to see the regional premiere of our show Hands on a Hardbody (which we wrote with legendary Phish front man Trey Anastasio); it was an especially meaningful production for us since the show is set in the Lone Star State. Now she sat in the audience, watching dumbfounded, as a woefully bastardized version of the show unfolded onstage. Almost before the closing curtain, I rang her from my apartment in New York. As she relayed the numerous unauthorized changes the director had made to our beloved text, I felt indignation and hurt rising in my chest. The show’s core themes had been corrupted and its narrative continuity undermined.

A few days later, working in concert with the Dramatists Guild, our attorneys and the timely support of the play’s licensing agent Samuel French, we obtained an injunction against the theater and the play was closed.

In our sister disciplines of film and television, changes to our work are so frequent it’s considered routine, even banal to see our scripts irrevocably altered. Directors revise scenes on set; actors often improvise dialogue. Producers and studio executives replace writers at will. But in our profession, writers have the final word, and why? As playwrights, we own our work; we carry the copyright to the scripts we scribe, and no one can alter them on the page or in production without our expressed consent.

We often take this privileged status for granted, but it’s one the Dramatists Guild protects with integrity and vigilance. It’s forever under siege, sometimes in overt ways, other times in subtle ones. Movie studios want to retain the rights to theatrical adaptations they finance; sometimes, our colleagues want to share copyright, or make claims of their own. It’s the job of the Guild to ensure we never relinquish proprietorship.

We’ve paid dearly for copyright; as owners of our material, we are not “work-for-hire” like our brethren in Actor’s Equity and SDC, and therefore we can’t unionize and offer traditional benefits like health insurance and pension funds. Instead, we’ve placed stock in the enduring idea that the characters we create, the stories we birth, and the themes we articulate belong to us; therein lies our very identity as authors.

Often, playwrights ask, “Why should I join the Guild? What’s in it for me?” To that query, I offer the following: every writer who writes with the confidence that his or her work will be produced with fidelity and respect, and that what pours forth from the writer’s pen irrevocably belongs to the imagination that sired it, has a moral responsibility to join the Guild.

Doug Wright’s work on Broadway includes Hands On A Hardbody, The Little Mermaid, Grey Gardens, and I Am My Own Wife (Pulitzer, Tony Award). Off-Broadway: Posterity (The Atlantic Theater Company), Quills (New York Theater Workshop.) Mr. Wright is President of the Dramatists Guild.

Illustration by Dan Romer.