Monday, April 19, 2004

 

All They Had To Do Was Be Nice

So it looks like my attempt to break in to the world of pay-for-read competitions is a bust. If you don't remember, the post about this is here (Tuesday entry). In summary, the New Works of Merit playwriting competition charges $25.00 to entrant playwrights, $35.00 if the playwright wants a reader's critique. That's for a $300 first prize, plus production. For comparison, my first paid production was $500, and that was ten years ago, by a small company in upstate NY.

These fees are supposedly to pay the readers and administrative costs. I offered my services as a reader gratis, in exchange for boosting the prize or easing up on the fees. I didn't expect them to say yes, though I would've followed through had they done so. I expected a rejection with an explanation, or a polite rejection, or at least a rejection. Instead, the company answered two emails and a letter with silence.

So, since these powers-that-be do not deem me worthy of response, I'll say what I really think about them:

What a bunch of con-artists. What a smug bunch of creeps. Twenty-five dollars? They even have a grant, and they're asking for twenty-five dollars? "Administrative costs"?! Are they paying for the readers' booze? Are they silkscreening the script onto t-shirts?

Twenty-five dollars? Why not fifty? Why not a hundred? Why not fund your whole god damn season on the backs of playwrights? Or why not go out and raise the money like NFP theaters have been doing for the last hundred years?!

"New Works of Merit." What a pompous bunch of blowhards. They have the nerve to demand twenty-five bucks out of the playwrights, and then claim to have the moral fiber to call for "peace," "social justice," and "worthy objectives." What self-important pseudo-leftist jackasses.

Where's the Dramatist's Guild in this? It's not enough to tell members not to apply for these competitions. If some producer were charging $30 a pop for actors to audition, AEA/SAG would be picketing their ass tout suite. The DG should pick one of these bloodsuckers and shut them down in spectacular fashion. Get Kushner and Wasserstein and every other bigwig that claims alliance with political left to the theater with pickets and bullhorns, and spread the swindler's name across the front page of the NYT Arts section. I've complained about AEA before, but at least they've got temerity.

Hey, New Works of Merit, don't tell me that I don't have to apply if I don't like it. You're damn right I don't have to apply. Also, I don't have to tolerate some shark on my corner suckering other writers. I don't tolerate a producer that takes advantage of desperate, frustrated people by offering a snowball's chance of getting produced on 13th St. I will call them what they are: charlatans, con-artists, no better than the guy offering timeshares in New Jersey to lonely old people.

You're not the O'Neill Conference. You're on 13th St. Twenty-five dollars?!

I've been a producer. I paid my playwrights. Not as much as I would've liked, but I paid them. And I sure as hell didn't ask playwrights to pay me a fee to read the stuff that was the Alpha and the Omega of my evening, without which I would have had nothing on the stage. Yeah, theatre is expensive. SUCK IT UP.

Twenty-five dollars. Take all that fee money to buy a gold dildo and ram it up your ass.

OK, now back to kind and fair Dan Trujillo. I'm going to send out similar offers to companies with large reading fees. I promise to keep an open mind about their competition, and hear out their reasons for the fees. Even if I disagree, I will disagree politely.

Unless they decide to not even speak to me.

Then they get bile from the bottom of my liver.

posted by Dan 2:00 PM
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