If one looks around the website of The Neil Simon Festival, a yearly theatre event held in Cedar City, Utah, there’s a list of donors to the company. On that list are seven entries at the $100+ level. But the list is perhaps some 30 short, because that’s the approximate number of unlisted individuals who sent $150 to the Festival last year.
While the $150 sent by those people isn’t described by the Festival as a donation, it effectively is one for all but a single person. The $150 figure is derived from the submission fee playwrights are asked to provide as their entry fee to the Festival’s New Play Contest, now in its ninth year. While the Festival notes that every submission receives a written evaluation as part of the company’s response, it is not a fee for service. Playwrights are not offered the opportunity to submit and not receive an evaluation.
Richard Bugg, founder and executive producer of the Festival, said in a call with Arts Integrity that the $150 submission fee was new as of last year, markedly increased from their prior figure. He said it has had the effect of decreasing the submissions, from nearly 100 scripts to somewhere in the 30s. The deadline for the 2019 contest is 11:59 pm on February 1, so there is not yet a final count for this year.
Asked about the fee, which is notably high compared to other play competitions and workshop programs, Bugg explained that the fee is waived for any college or university that chooses and submits a single selection, though he said that none had done so. The Festival’s website states:
The entry fee is used in three areas: a) to help defray the cost of travel and lodging for the playwright, b) payment to our contest readers for their professional expertise, and c) contest administration (photocopying, advertising, etc. but not salary).
Bugg specifically said that the fee helps to underwrite payment to Douglas Hill, who reviews most of the scripts and writes the critiques. Bugg said that Hill is, “magnificent in looking at the structure of scripts and making suggestions.” The payment also helps to pay other reviewers engaged by Hill as needed. Bugg said he also reads all of the finalists’ scripts.
Hill also spoke to the effect of the submission fee, in an e-mail response to questions from Arts Integrity. “We have received as many as 120 submissions in some years, and as few as 20 in other years,” he wrote. “Unfortunately since the contest is less than 10 years old, and with the recent changes to the contest, it’s a little difficult to provide you with a good approximate number.
“We use it to some degree to weed out,” said Bugg. “We get a higher degree of script that way.” However, Bugg allowed that perhaps some worthy scripts might not be submitted due to the expense.
The season at The Neil Simon Festival, an independent not-for-profit organization, is short, only three weeks this coming year, with two shows a day five days a week, and with most actors performing in multiple roles akin to classic repertory format. The winner of the new play contest first receives a six-day staged reading in the year in which it is selected, and is then produced, for three performances, during the subsequent season. In 2019, that play will be I Left My Dignity in My Other Purse by Shelley Chester.
Asked whether the Festival was familiar with Dramatists Guild guidelines regarding play festivals and contests, Bugg said that he was not. Ralph Sevush, Executive Director for Business Affairs of the Guild, when informed of the $150 submission fee, provided the following guidance from the Guild’s best practices guidance:
BEST PRACTICE: The organization does not require a submission fee. Furthermore, the organization imposes no other obligation on the author or encumbrance on the work (e.g., ticket sales, participation fees, technical rentals, hiring fees, marketing, or other selling obligations), except for do-it-yourself (“DIY”) productions. The Guild has long disapproved of excessive submission fees, which not only undermine the benefit of any “award” or “royalty,” but also impose financial hardship on the author. Any other authorial obligations should be clearly noted up front; this is particularly true for DIY and similar festivals that require authors to self-produce their works.
Regarding payments to the authors when their winning works are performed, Bugg said that there were none. The playwright receives transportation and housing during both visits. Bugg explained, “There’s no royalties. Just being in the season is reward in our eyes.” Bugg did make clear that other playwrights in the Festival, including the Simon estate, are paid royalties.
The Neil Simon Festival, now in its 17th year, is admittedly a small company, operating on a budget of roughly $300,000 per Bugg. While Hill wrote, “We’re probably best defined as a professional non-Equity company,” that assertion is undermined by a casting notice from the Festival. The notice stipulates availability from June 3 to July 29 in Cedar City and 4-5 weeks of subsequent performance in Park City and Ivins, also in Utah. Regarding compensation, the website says only that, “Housing is provided along with a modest stipend.” Bugg noted that while he and several of the other leaders of the company are members of Actors Equity and do perform in the Festival, “We don’t do contracts for ourselves.”
That the Neil Simon Festival operates a new play contest in which playwrights are asked to pay a fee far above the typical competition, that the selected playwright receives no royalty for their work being presented to a paying public, and that actors are essentially volunteering for an entire summer’s engagement stand as three red flags about the company. These simply are not prevailing industry standards. Professionals are paid for their work.
That the company leadership – Bugg, Hill, and artistic director Peter Sham – all teach at the university level (Bugg and Sham at Southern Utah University and Hill at University of Nevada Las Vegas) also raises questions about the professional standards they are imparting to their students, separate from their Neil Simon duties. The encouragement to “work” for little or no pay runs contrary to the practices and expectations that should be instilled in aspiring artists. The suggestion that playwrights of new plays should be rewarded simply by virtue of being produced undermines the perceived value of authors’ creations. Actors shouldn’t be grateful for a place to sleep, petty cash, and stage time. High submission fees emphasize economic disparity among artists, making it possible only for those of means to enter competitions that require a significant outlay (very possibly diminishing the range and caliber of submissions and the program in the process).
When the clock strikes midnight on February 2, the Neil Simon Festival’s Play Contest entry period will close. But hopefully with some serious thinking resulting from outside scrutiny, the leadership of the company will rethink the economic model under which they function and the messages they communicate through their operating model. Perhaps they can use it to leverage more funding, locally or nationally. Because however great the experience may be for those involved, exorbitant fees for contest entrants and free labor by actors don’t add up a professional experience. It ends up costing the artists to be involved, even as audiences pay in order to see that work. And that’s no laughing matter.
I was asked to deliver the Keynote Address for BroadwayCon, a three day expo for fans of Broadway theater. The theme of the Opening Ceremony was “Home,” and included performances by Susan Egan singing “Home” from Beauty and the Beast, Hailey Kilgore with “Home” from The Wiz, as well as Ethan Slater, Ben Cameron, and Anthony Rapp contributing other songs and an opening group performance of “BroadwayCon Today,” set to the tune of “Bikini Bottom Day” from SpongeBob SquarePants – The Musical.This is what I shared with the audience at the Opening of BroadwayCon on Friday, January 11
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Okay, I want you to take a moment to yourself to finish this sentence: Home is…. Blank.
If you even could fill in that blank and we all said our answers aloud there’d probably be as many different answers as there are people in this room. In fact, there’s probably no other word that conjures so many meanings except for Love.
I’m obsessed with the word Home and have been since the years of moving from New York to California in high school where we kept switching homes to my various college dorm rooms then back to New York before two years at ART (the American Repertory Theater) followed by a stint at Trinity Rep before moving back to New York where I blazed through several too expensive or rat-infested apartments which resulted in a period of 17 years in which I moved 19 times. I’m also one of the people who’ve made The Wizard of Oz the most watched movie of all time, and if you look at my bookshelves you’ll find one entirely devoted to titles like The Meaning of Home, Home: A Short History, Place and Identity: The Performance of Home, The Poetics of Space, The Zen of Oz – and my favorite poem is T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in which he says “Home is where one starts from,” and sometimes at night to help me fall asleep I watch the show House Hunters which is about people searching for homes – and in high school I wrote a song called “Take Me Back Home” and in my musical Dream True, I wrote lyrics for a song called Finding Home – and last season with SpongeBob SquarePants I made a show that was ALL about home: SpongeBob trying to save his home, Pearl wanting to run away from home, Sandy missing her home but coming to find a new one in the community of Bikini Bottom, and Squidward who only truly feels at home with his name in lights on the Great White Way.
Danny Skinner, Lilli Cooper and Ethan Slater in “SpongeBob SquarePants – The Musical”
But what interests me most these days is not feeling or being at home, as much as missing home and the search that results from it, which I believe is the catalyst for great human activity and achievement across centuries and cultures. Home is both “our place of origin and our ultimate destination,” so its identity is two-fold: the home we remember – which causes the missing – and the home we dream – which causes the searching. And the search is what brings us poetry and relationships and men on the moon – and Broadway shows.
When I was in my twenties, I was sick in bed one day and started watching the ten-hour marathon of a show called The Family, hosted by the self-help guru John Bradshaw, in which he led viewers through an extended series of exercises. I was asked to close my eyes and recall one moment from when I was a toddler, age 3 or 4 – and I remembered for the first time being outside in the playground at our house, sitting on one of those toy horses with springs that rock back and forth. I remembered the sunlight, the exact angle of its rays as it warmed me – but most vividly I remembered the feeling: free, safe, at home. Then Bradshaw asked me to recall an image from ages 6 to 9. What came was a memory of standing outside the kitchen door to my house, and trying to get in as I always did, but finding the door locked. And again, I remembered above all the feeling: alone, confused, rejected. There were only several years between those two moments but somehow in that time my experience had shifted from feeling at home in the world to feeling displaced in it.
Now I, like most in this room, am beyond blessed to have had that feeling arise from a locked door, as opposed to the millions on our planet who experience it due to eviction, deportation, exile, imprisonment, or destruction of physical homes due to natural disaster, war, or poverty. But I do believe that, though our physical realities may vastly differ, whether we’re born into privilege or poverty, whether our childhood was happy or brutal, we all share at our core a kind of spiritual or emotional homesickness – a longing for Home.
What is this thing, Home? Home is… Blank. What?
Last night when I asked my girlfriend what home meant to her and if she’s experienced the theater as a home, she answered Yes, she felt that way in high school when she joined the drama club and, to quote her, “suddenly felt I had a place.” She went on to say that, as an actor, she felt at home on stage because she could express parts of her self that she couldn’t express in her physical home – she could be angry or mean or jealous on stage, but not with her parents at home.
Is Home the space to which you can bring all the parts of yourself and not just the pretty ones? Is Home the space – physical or emotional or spiritual – in which you’re most dimensional and least defined by others? Is Home a feeling of safety – knowing you will be cared for and protected there? Is Home the experience of being seen and known and, above all, accepted – not only by others perhaps but also by your self?
Yes And. At least for me. The word I keep circling back to is Belonging. Home as the experience of belonging. Belonging in a family or relationship or cast or, in the rare moments you’re truly at home in your own skin and the stars align, the experience of belonging in the universe itself.
But when do we ever feel this? Maybe never or occasionally. But we all want to feel this right? Because on some cellular level we carry a memory of it within us already – the feeling of belonging and being protected in our first home – yes, I’m talking about being in the womb – the enclosed, dark, safe space from which we emerge… Sounds a bit like a theater, huh? Just saying.
So we go through our lives longing to return to or find for the first time this space, this feeling. And the desire for the feeling becomes the motive of our actions. We walk on roads and go on journeys and make art and make musicals and go to the theater and listen to cast albums as we search for Home. We travel, we read, we find lovers, make families, build structures, create communities, tell stories as we search for Home.
Which brings me to the theater – the place we tell stories. Most often, stories of the search.
According to Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, there’s only one story – it’s called the Monomyth – and it’s told over and over in all cultures, in all times, but through varying specifics. It’s the story we need to tell because it’s the story of our search for meaning, for wholeness, for Home. And the need for this story is what defines us as humans. It’s the story of Seasons, from death to rebirth, and the story of Night turning to Day, from dark to light – it’s the Hero’s Journey and it’s a story about going away from and returning back to Home. (Also, keep in mind, the “hero” may be a man or a woman, a child, a creature, a community…)
Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz”
It’s here we find Odysseus and Aeneas, Dorothy and Luke Skywalker, Ishmael searching for Moby Dick and Alice going into Wonderland. It’s here we find most any show playing on Broadway right now, all versions of the Monomyth and Hero’s Journey: Harry Potter, Wicked, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Lion King, Hamilton, Book of Mormon, Kinky Boots, the list goes on. And here too we find in Broadway’s history versions of the Monomyth in The Sound of Music, Death of a Salesman, Cabaret, Man of La Mancha, The Miracle Worker, Oliver, How to Succeed, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Hairspray, Billy Elliot – I better stop. (Of course the danger in our use of the Hero’s Journey template to write a show is that we end up with shows that are more formula than fresh… but that’s for another day.)
As audiences for these shows, we connect to something mythic and subliminal – the Monomyth provides the familiarity of a home terrain. And when we connect with the specifics of story or character and are able to identify our self in the drama – when we see representation that includes who we are – when we see lost or hidden parts of ourselves brought into light with compassion or love… Then too we find Home.
As people making these shows, we hope for connection as well – to reach across the footlights and feel something back. And in the meantime, we put ourselves in rooms with collaborators we quickly call Family, we establish familiar routines (how we sign in, warm up, set up our dressing rooms), we operate in a space where everyone’s contribution matters, from the director to the props master to the second electrician, and when we go into a theater, most anywhere in the world, we recognize its signifiers as our own: the stage, the house, its architecture, its shadows, its aisles and fly rails, its ghostlight…. These we know intimately though we may be in a foreign city.
So we make theater and we see theater as a search for Home, and often it becomes one. The theater is home when it offers us familiarity and intimacy – when it offers us safety as we attempt the impossible and splay open our souls and expose our vulnerabilities and fall on our faces only to discover it’s all okay – It’s okay to do that here. The theater is home when it’s a space where ALL, including the me riddled with shame or doubt or self-loathing, yes ALL, including neurotic me and lonely me and bullied me and isolated me, are welcome. When ALL are welcome.
Today I ask that we continue to share and expand this home of the theater – that we offer to others, not in this room, the refuge and comfort that we’ve all surely found here at times.
May Broadway be a home for an ever-larger family of theater-makers of every race, class, religion, country of origin, immigration status, (dis)ability, age, gender identity, and sexual orientation who are making stories about and for audiences and fans of every race, class, religion, country of origin, immigration status, (dis)ability, age, gender identity, and sexual orientation. May our home be open, and grow ever larger in size and love.
May you search for and find a home in the theater.
May you find a home, here, today, at this conference –
And know that when we say “Welcome to BroadwayCon,” we are really saying, “Welcome Home.”
© Tina Landau, 2019, used by permission
