Playwrights, We Need to Talk about High School
I am someone who makes a modest and consistent living as a playwright. Most years I have only one or two productions in TCG theaters but I will have over 200 total productions of my plays this year. Who are doing my plays? Community theaters, indie theaters, small professional theaters, colleges and high schools.
As theaters across the country shut down or decrease the sizes of their seasons, or go safer, with already well known plays, playwrights should look to diversify. The high school market is the biggest theater market by a lot and it's the only one getting larger right now. New schools are being built every year and almost all of them do plays. There are over twenty six thousand high schools in the US, not to mention Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, etc.
The best way to make a consistent living year in and year out as a playwright is to write plays that are done at high schools. High school teachers find new plays by word of mouth and on publisher's sites. A play that is done a bunch at high schools this year will probably be done a bunch next year and the year after and the year after that.
Many playwrights I know who have a hit off broadway, only get a few productions after. If they are lucky they will get a bunch for a couple years and that's a couple years they can live off their royalties. Most plays aren't done much after ten years or so. I think a lot about what plays have longevity. There aren't a lot of them that do well after five years. Even fewer after ten.
I've been writing plays for over twenty-five years and I have written a lot of plays but overwhelmingly, especially early on, they were not appropriate for high school. About twelve years ago, I made a concerted effort to write plays specifically for high schools and also plays for adults that could be done at high schools.
My play Kodachrome, which has been done over 275 times now, including both the full length and one act versions, can be done by a cast of five or a cast of sixteen. Theaters of various sizes all over the country do it. Colleges do it. And lots and lots of high schools do it. In terms of cast size, sixteen is kind of as low as I would go for a high school play. Twenty-five is better. Some schools want forty or fifty. I have a few plays for that size cast too.
High schools don't love kissing so much but that play has kissing in it. Obviously no sex, no drugs, no alcohol, no guns. No cursing. When I did a high school version of my play Marian or The True Tale of Robin Hood, all I did was take out the sex and the sex jokes and left the rest of the play, including kissing intact. That play has been done 150 times.
Lots of schools want one act plays 25-35 minutes long for competitions. Sometimes I will write plays to that length or other times I will cut down one act versions from full length plays.
I would say I'm only a moderately successful high school playwright. I am also a moderately successful playwright in the indie theater scene. If people know my name, it's probably because their students found my monologues online and are performing them for auditions or classes.
The playwrights who are really good at writing for high school are or used to be high school drama teachers. Or they are married to one. They pay attention to what schools want, to what isn't already out there. They read the hit high school plays and they care about writing plays that will make student actors successful.
I have a play called Clown Bar about mobster clowns that is a hit in indie theaters and in colleges and now has sequels. I recently wrote a play called Clown High School that is a prequel to Clown Bar. My hope is that kids will get hooked on the noir clown world and then go off and do my other Clown Bar plays. Maybe it will work. You got to try stuff.
Lots of playwrights I came up with went to film and TV, but that world has contracted just as much if not more than theater has. There used to be a lot of TV jobs and a lot more slots in seasons. A consistent living for script writing is way harder than it was a few years ago.
So my advice is to think about writing a play this year for high school or middle school. Kids need quality plays. Find a school maybe and ask what they need and write something for them. Or write what you want but make it work for the kids too. And maybe next year write another one. And another. The high school game is a numbers game. You never know which play will hit and which play won't. But if you keep writing and keep getting them out there, they add up.
Maybe I shouldn't tell you this. Because I sure don't need more competition. But I don't want to gatekeep this information. Writers should know about the high school market. I feel like also writing for high school should be legitimized. Twenty years ago playwrights were looked down on for writing TV and I think playwrights are looked down on for writing for kids now. But kids need good art too. (And maybe people just like to be snobs and we should ignore them.)
Not to say that, like every market right now, the high school market isn't flooded, because it definitely is. Anyone who applies to the O'Neill knows at least a thousand other people are doing that too and the same is true in the high school market. But people drop out and the theater rewards persistence. Do we need more playwrights writing for high school? No. But we all always need more good plays. We need the good play you are going to write. Why not write one for high school? Your career might thank you.
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