@dramatistsguild @GwydionS

When I last wrote about The Welders – the playwrights’ collective of which I am one of six co-founders – in this space, we had really only just begun our work in the DC community. We hadn’t had a single production yet. We hadn’t yet raised any money. Few people even knew we existed, though we’d been working and planning and meeting in secret for nine or ten months. Everything was new.

Fast forward to this moment, and we’re just about to close our third production of five. We’ve been written about, reviewed, generously funded, thoroughly supported, and enjoyed more than our fair share of what feels like success. But that success isn’t really for US, per se. It never has been. It’s all being stashed away in some metaphorical escrow for the next generation of artists to whom we’re giving away The Welders when we’re done.

Yes, those of you who are new to The Welders, you read that correctly. We’re giving away the whole thing: website, checkbook, board of directors, audience base, and logo. Every single bit of the infrastructure we’ve built these last two years – and that we’ll keep building for one more – will be passed on to a new generation of playwrights: Welders 2.0, we call them. Building this company was our way of paying forward all the support we’ve been given throughout our careers in DC.

We’ve devoted the last six months or so to a very thorough process by which we determined the group to which we’d pass the torch. (We actually HAVE a torch, by the way. An acetylene torch. We are welders, after all.) We got to know a great many artists in the process, and we feel even more deeply connected to our community than we did beforehand. DC is a terrific place to be a playwright… and to be among playwrights as well.

As I’m writing these words, we have yet to introduce the world to Welders 2.0… but by the time you’re reading them, you may have already heard about Ronee Penoi – who will be taking over for our Executive and Creative Director, Jojo Ruf – and the seven artists she’ll be working with: Stephen Spotswood, Alexandra Petri, Hannah Hessel Ratner, Deb Sivigny, Annalisa Dias, Brett Abelman, and Rachel Hynes. They’re a diverse group of artists, and I’m proud to be able to know them and support them in this rare and (at least for me) joyful way. I hope they feel as warmly as I do when they pay it forward themselves a few years from now.

What’s really important to note about them, though, is how they’ve historically been defined as artists. Some of them identify as playwrights, but a few prefer to think of themselves as devising artists. Annalisa calls herself a playwright sometimes, a dramaturg at other times, and a director at still other times; Hannah works mostly as a dramaturg, too, and Deb is a designer. (This is a far more diversely-skilled group of artists than the original Welders are, I can tell you that.) Yet as members of Welders 2.0, they are all going to serve as authors of theatrical experiences. They are all going to be playwrights… because in DC, like everywhere else in the country, the definition of the term “playwright” is getting broader and more inclusive than ever. And this, we believe, is a very good thing.

gsuilebhan@dramatistsguild.com