The Play Doctor

On Franklin Avenue, in the Seward neighborhood, sits a former church, now The Playwrights’ Center. It still looks like a neighborhood church, with a steepled roof and a second-floor bell-tower office. But now the little fence surrounding the building is inscribed with a series of words that reflect on the playwriting experience, such as "conflict," "tension," and, significantly, "money." The basement has been segmented into a suite of small offices, all thrumming with activity. Pass through these workspaces, all the way to the back, and you will come to the cluttered office of Playwrights’ Center producing artistic director Polly Carl.

She’s a smallish woman with a blunt black haircut, a wealth of tattoos, and blue-tinted glasses and dresses in what she sometimes describes as “men’s clothes.” Tough-looking duds; a military surplus jacket and boots made for walking through mud. Carl is an energetic and friendly talker. Whenever her name is printed in Playwrights’ Center literature, it is followed by a PhD, and so, as you might expect, she talks in the manner of someone who thinks long and hard about things.

You meet people like this sometimes—people who stay awake late at night thinking about their job, because they love the job, but also because they love thinking about it, turning ideas over and over in their mind, polishing them, getting the wording just right. When Carl talks about The Playwrights’ Center, it’s a crafted discussion. Superficially, her personal style might seem a bit eccentric for an arts organization. But once Carl starts talking, it becomes obvious that The Playwrights’ Center couldn’t find a better advocate—or, at least, the center as she envisions it.

In 2005, three years after Carl took over the reins after having worked there as a development director, the center experienced a transitional dust-up in reaction to her leadership style and vision for the future. The president of the board of directors complained that she was moving away from focusing on local playwrights and short-changing the center’s original mission. He sent an e-mail to the center’s financial backers, and it briefly looked as though the rift was going to create a real problem. The hubbub died down relatively quickly, and the board president resigned, but the event signaled that big changes were afoot; changes Carl was instituting. We’ll get to these in a moment. But first, let’s take a look at The Playwrights’ Center itself.

The former chapel now includes a small black-box performance space, which houses both bare-bones readings of new works by playwrights and actual productions of plays by local theaters. (Full disclosure: I have been a member of The Playwrights’ Center off and on since 1986 and have had a play read there.) But the readings are a small part of what the center does. It also offers courses in playwriting and various types of economic and artistic support for both emerging and established playwrights, many of whom—Jeffrey Hatcher, Marion McClinton, Craig Lucas, Kevin Kling, Emily Mann, Laurie Carlos, Lee Blessing, to name a few—have become nationally known.

Kira Obolensky first began taking classes at The Playwrights’ Center in 1989, after being inspired by a sprawling, six-hour adaptation of Jean Genet’s The Screens, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, at the old Guthrie. She became a Jerome Fellow at the center a few years later and has gone on to have her plays produced throughout the United States. Obolensky has worked on some of her recent scripts with Carl, and waxes ebullient about her: “Polly is such a creative thinker. Her mind seems amazingly elastic to me, and this ability allows her to think in really big ways about the center and about the American theater. She doesn’t come with any expectations or limitations in her thinking, which is what tends to happen when economic realities or an aesthetic bias leak into an artistic process. She can think as creatively about what a play can do as she can about what is best for an organization. She’s a person who makes things happen.”

And things are happening: In the past three years, the center has doubled its membership, doubled its annual budget, paid off its building debt, and rededicated itself to the cultivation and promotion of both plays and playwrights. This emphasis on getting new work produced is a subtle but important shift in the center’s mission. When Carl came aboard, it had something called an “artistic committee,” a member-run group that advised the board, often unsuccessfully. Carl shut it down, arguing for more streamlined management that put the reins back in the hands of the playwrights. It was just one of a multitude of changes she instituted, which should have surprised no one—after all, she had applied for the position arguing that the center badly needed “artistic leadership” at the top, not just a business manager.

“Having artistic leadership and being run by artists are two different things,” Carl explains. When she took over, she saw the center primarily as a “clubhouse for playwrights” with a tendency to focus on workshopping plays that were rarely produced: “We’d do a reading, but the play would get put into a drawer. Then we would do another reading, and that play would get put into a drawer.”

Carl wanted to focus on making the center a more professional lab and on creating a structure that would get new work into the hands of national producers, which is why she retitled herself “producing artistic director.” The center now regularly ferries in producers from throughout the United States to watch workshopped plays, often paying airfare and putting them up. “Not all our plays are going to get produced. This is an R & D lab, after all,” she says. “You don’t want a pharmacy manufacturer to put out every single pill it develops. Some plays just aren’t right for production, and we find that out in the workshopping process.”

But quite a few plays do land full productions, either locally (the center has an ongoing relationship with the Guthrie to develop new work) or nationally. The latter is assisted by an increasingly sophisticated Web page, pwcenter.org, where you can download the text of a play and will soon be able to see clips and movie-style previews. “Our job is to figure out how to make a play come to life,” Carl says. If a producer can’t visualize what it might look like onstage, it won’t get produced.

One that did find its way out of the drawer was Small Tragedy, by Craig Lucas, currently associate artistic director of the Intiman Theatre in Seattle. The play was co-commissioned by the center in 2003 and workshopped extensively here. Detailing a comically inept community theater production of Oedipus, Lucas’s play went on to win an OBIE award as best new American play in 2004. At least some of the credit for his play’s success goes to Polly Carl, Lucas says: “Polly is smart, constructive, no-nonsense. When I was behaving badly, she told me to stop and wasn’t intimidated by me. Then she turned right around and continued helping me work on the play.”

Playwright Rosanna Staffa’s The Interview—part of the center’s PlayLabs 2007, an intensive summer workshop and showcase for new plays—was presented this year at the Tokyo International Arts Festival. According to Staffa, the center works “by presenting rigorous work with top-notch actors, stellar local and national directors, and attracting the attention of theaters across the country.”

Merely attracting attention isn’t enough for Carl, though. “The most important metric of success for me is how many of the plays we workshop are getting produced,” she says. “In the past two months we’ve had seven productions picked up,” she points out—a number that would have been considered impressive for an entire year not long ago. Still, Carl wants to do more. Toward that end, the center recently announced a new five-year strategic plan, published on the website and, in Carl’s typically idiosyncratic manner, as an oversized deck of playing cards wrapped in a band emblazoned with the words "How To Win At Strategy Games."

Each card is printed with a different plank of the mission, coupled with a simple piece of line art. Value No. 1 reads the first. "Seeking the New" is printed above what appears to be two eye-droppers, and the text of the card informs the holder that the center is a laboratory in which the untested and unseen becomes tested and seen. An illustration of a petri dish appears on a card that says the center will serve as “an artistic home for writers,” while a drawing of two test tubes appears on a card that attempts to define the center’s essence, which is “the sum total of its characters . . . We live and die by our performance as writers, staff, and board.”

The cards and the larger strategic plan do not so much present a nuts-and-bolts list of future programs as they articulate a broad, ambitious mission—a loose framework onto which more structured schemes can later be hung. The plan is an expansion of Carl’s effort over the past half-decade to turn The Playwrights’ Center into an organization that helps playwrights develop their work, then matches them with directors, producers, and theaters, locally and nationally, with the explicit goal of getting new plays produced as often as possible.

The focus is still on playwrights, Carl insists—“We don’t develop plays,” she says. “We develop playwrights”—but unproduced plays are, to her, just pages in a drawer.

Max Sparber is a playwright and arts journalist who lives in Minneapolis.