I was type-talking with my best friend the other day and we ended up discussing theatre, per usual. The conversation turned to plays we loved, me raving about Charles Mee’s bobrauschenbergamerica and her raving about Bill Cain’s Equivocation.
When I was explaining bobrauschenbergamerica to her (a bit of a tall task) I was fortunate to be able to send her a link to the script, as Mee encourages the free purview of his work. Much has been eloquently written of the (re)making project, in which Mee openly suggests that enterprising artists take from his work and mangle it, acting as a kind of live action recycler, creating new things out of older ideas. With this philosophy comes a website that houses all of his play texts in html and pdf formats.
It is brilliant, and I only came to realize this while digging for Equivocation. I realized a lot while digging for Equivocation. I realize the word ‘digging’ implies some kind of physical action, and it felt like digging. After all of the Googling I felt exhausted, and I had to rest my hand. Anyways, though if you’re reading this blog you know this, Equivocation is a 2009 play that is relatively popular amongst theatrefolk, with nonstop regional productions and rave reviews at most.
If you’d like to read it, good luck; Dramatists Play Service is the only company that has it, and you can spend $20 (and shipping) for them to mail you a photocopied manuscript.
It occurred to me that plays are one of the few media left in which the copyright gods have not been overthrown. The industry tales of music, movies, games, and even books are all similar: industry fails to understand how the internet can aid distribution, enterprising people see this need and do technically illegal things to access these arts, people make copies of things and share them with others, companies find out and lawsuits happen, piracy becomes the scourge of the earth, the lawsuits fail to shut down any of the new distribution methods, and finally the market corrects itself and internet access is possible in a way that pays out to the producers of content, just in a way that is cheaper and more efficient than the old guard.
Remember paying $18 for a CD? $12 to see a movie (based solely on [p]reviews) once? Ever wanted to read a textbook but find yourself having the option to pay over $100 to ship the full text or to pay $60 to rent a digital file for a couple hundred days?
Right now, there seems to be no real or consistent digital play distribution that is explicitly copyright-abiding. I can’t pay $5 for the privilege of reading Equivocation for 24 hours, nor can I digitally access the text in any way whatsoever.
Some publishing houses make ebooks automatically of their works and I have seen acting editions as ebooks, but the digitization costs and timeline mean that this only happens for the most successful works in certain publishing houses (read: not Samuel French or DPS), and even then, we’re limited further by date of work (it takes years for these editions to come out).
How can we get to contemporary texts? How can we legally and quickly read the work that needs to be read, regardless of terrestrial location?
I don’t think the answers to those questions are good enough, and there are profitable solutions that don’t exist because companies aren’t forced to care yet. I wonder if we’ll get there. Industries change and set the rules or, alternatively, outsiders change industries and set the new rules. The winners write history, after all (remember when iTunes saved music? Historians do).
One final thought: if we as a society can invent a file container that erases itself in three seconds (oh hi Snapchat) or a digital queue that writes time-encoded disks and undercuts multiple industries (how are you doing Redbox) we can figure out a better way to distribute plays.
I hope we find something. I’ve heard Equivocation is pretty good.
Drama Lit Blog 2.0: BU School of Theatre 
YouthPLAYS.com has a good model for digital preview copies of plays that are available for download.
I’ve been attempting to solve exactly this problem on my website Indie Theater Now. (http://www.indietheaternow.com). ITN is a program of NYTE, a nonprofit corporation that also runs the website nytheatre.com. It’s a digital library of scripts from the world of indie theater — right now there are 531 plays published with new ones added every week. We publish contemporary work, and frequently we publish brand news that have just closed or even are still running. Plays are available for $1.29 in a proprietary JavaScript-based reader that provides protection of digital rights and playwrights receive a royalty for each digital sale. We have subscription plans available to reduce the price and special plans for students also. I hope you and others will check it out and feel free to send me feedback at martin(at)ndietheaternow.com.
Your article had me brainstorming a model that I see is close to Indie Theatre Now — something where playwrights could pool resources on a digital platform. My imagining had all proceeds going to playwrights, apart from a yearly membership fee to cover site maintenance, which hopefully would be minimal once the form was established — am I thinking BandCamp for plays? At any rate, it is good to know that there is at least one online publisher making contemporary work digitally accessible. But it’s astonishing how many contemporary plays — even well known contemporary plays like Equivocation — are impossible to find, especially if you’re working in a smaller market and aren’t hooked into an academic institution (my case as a 22-year old actor/writer currently living in NC). I don’t read enough new plays to have become thoroughly frustrated by this phenomenon — but maybe this phenomenon is why I don’t read enough new plays?
Delayed reaction on my part, but these are all excellent comments. I like the direction of youthplays and indietheatrenow (particularly the latter’s ideology) but even then you’re limited to plays targeted at youth and a cross-section of curated plays [from the FAQ: “Please do not submit scripts unsolicited. We don’t have the resources to deal with submissions. To ensure artistic excellence, participation is by invitation only.”] which is fantastic if and only if you’re already part of a predefined group.
Something particularly powerful about the advent of music’s digitization is that brilliant people can just publish without the need to be labeled as brilliant by the people who have already succeeded. Particularly for a world in which good local productions tend to spawn later ones, I’m all for removing boundaries and gatekeepers.
Bandcamp for plays might very well be my dream.
That said, it’s really good to see professionals tackling this issue, and I can only hope such a thing becomes progressively more commonplace.