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A Meditation on Emergence 

Emergence [əˈmərjəns] noun.

1. The process of coming into view or notice. The process of coming into being.
Have you emerged as a playwright? How do you know that you have? What are the hallmarks of emergence?

Is the yardstick the number of plays we’ve written? The number we’ve published or had produced? What if we’ve produced them ourselves? Does this count? Is the type of theatre relevant? The size of the house or audience? How many successes on the intimate stage equal one solid LORT production?
Have you emerged when Variety covers your show, or when you get a mention in the New York Times? Can we emerge at 90 as well as 30? Do playwrights have a “use by” date?

“I wrestle with this all the time,” said Jonathan Josephson, 33, co-founder and executive director of L.A.’s Unbound Productions, an immersive, site-specific theatre company that has produced his adaptations of classic works by Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allen Poe, among others. “[Emergence] is complicated and subjective, and it’s different for every writer.”
Josephson’s short play Grandpa and the Gay Rabbi was winner in 2016 of the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Theater Festival. He had a 10-minute play at the Humana Festival. He is a five-time finalist for the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Heideman Award, and a finalist for the O’Neill National Playwright’s Conference. Twelve of his plays have been published.

But even with some objectively impressive markers, he’s still not sure he has “emerged.”

“Yes, I feel like I’ve done a lot. I have a body of work. It’s wonderful! This is the most I’ve ever had and done in a year. I feel really fantastic! Then I look at this other tier of playwrights, people who are getting multiple commissions from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Woolly Mammoth, companies whose work gets written up in American Theatre, playwrights [who can] make a living meaningfully, if not completely, on playwriting,” said Josephson, who works by day as director of marketing for a firm in Burbank. “No matter who you are, or what you’re doing, everybody is on a continuum. Everybody is looking up at somebody, and everybody has someone looking up at them.”

“The central question, for me, is, do we define emergence for ourselves, or do we allow someone else—‘The Business’—to define it for us?” said Mary Crescenzo, 67, who wrote her first play, Janet’s Halloween Dream, in the fourth grade, in the Bronx. 

“They staged it, and I was like, ‘Wow! This can be fun!” said Crescenzo, who worked as a journalist—writing for the New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Playboy and the Huffington Post, among others—and as a broadcaster, actor, singer, casting director and teacher before returning to playwriting at around 50.
“We emerge when we begin to get recognized, when we have stage works produced anywhere, when our words leave the page,” said Crescenzo, whose play Planet A grew out of her work teaching the arts to adults afflicted with Alzheimer’s.

“Is [emergence] also when we get a LORT production? Maybe. When we’re published? That’s a part of it. Is it how many grants or fellowships we get? When we get an agent? Maybe it’s not about numbers or chronology at all,” she said. “Maybe it’s how you immerse yourself in the thing that you want to do.”
Amy Simon wrote her first play—Cheerios in My Underwear (and Other True Tales of Motherhood) in her 40s. The play holds the record as L.A.’s longest-running solo show.

“Motherhood completely and utterly inspired my playwriting career,” said Simon, 60, who was co-producing the all-female variety show Heroine Addicts at L.A.’s now-defunct Bang Studio when she conceived the idea for Cheerios.
“I needed to share what I learned with future mothers,” she said. “How it’s common to feel one laundry-load away from a nervous breakdown. No one was talking about the isolation and sheer volume of hard physical labor involved in taking care of miniature humans. Once I got the play on the stage, I emerged. The play resonated. And I found my voice as a playwright.”

At 51, Simon started She’s History, a play about “women who make and made history.” “I wrote it because we know more about Kim Kardashian than Abigail Adams. And that is just not right,” she said.

She’s History, like Cheerios, began as a solo show but has evolved into a play for multiple actors. In her own second act, Simon feels as though she’s just getting started.

“Margaret Edison wrote Wit when she was approaching 40. Gloria Steinem, not a playwright but a writer, is in her 80s and still kicking ass,” said Simon. “There is no use-by date as a writer. On the contrary: We live and have stories to tell. I just turned 60, and I am still emerging.”

After a career as a journalist, Lojo Simon (no relation to Amy), returned to school in her 50s, earning an MFA from the University of Idaho. After years of professional recognition as a writer, she said, it’s hard to start over, “to be considered emerging – or worse, invisible.”

“All my years of writing experience don’t count … in the theatre, where I’m still a relative newcomer,” said Simon, 55, author of The Adoration of Dora, which won the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival’s David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Award in 2012. Her play Love All premiered to acclaim at the OC-Centric New Play Festival, in August.

“I still have to pay my dues, climb the ladder and compete for attention with much younger (and less experienced) writers. That said, I come to playwriting with more life experience, more patience, an ability to see a bigger picture [and] … a better sense of who I am.”

Emergence – “coming into notice” – said Simon, suggests a certain “critical mass,” in which a playwright’s efforts are recognized by leading theater companies, festivals and reviewers.

It’s a process, added Mary Crescenzo, with highs and lows along the way.
“You’ve just got to hold on. There are blockades and barriers that fall down in front of you when you least expect it,” said Crescenzo. “But you find your way over them. You keep holding on. You do the best you can. And you march on.”

Mary Crescenzo

Jonathan Josephson

Amy Simon

Lojo Simon

jgershick@dramatistsguild.com