The Development Sceptic

‘ … perhaps the greatest threat to the playwright in today’s theater comes from not those greedy and ignorant, but rather from those who want “to help.”’

Like American playwright Richard Nelson, from whom that quote comes, I’m a development sceptic.

Last week I received a request to complete a survey about script assessment, and it got me thinking about those sectors of the theatre industry dedicated to ‘script development’. Are they really about getting more and better new performance scripts into production, or are they about exactly the opposite?

I’ll come back to this topic in a later post, but in the meantime, here’s the text of Richard Nelson’s 2007 Laura Pels Foundation keynote address, which asks: Why do playwrights’ need so much ‘help’?