- Asking a playwright to pay to submit would be like asking a friend to pay you to bring a dish to your potluck. The play itself has intrinsic value, whether you choose to use it or not.

- The playwright has spent many hours creating this work and may never make a dime off of it. $20 is a lot of money in the life of an artist. In the world of theatre, this is as high as a fee gets the vast majority of the time and usually for full-length, not ten-minute, plays.

- Many theatres use the rationale that it covers the cost of awards, readers, expenses, etc. Ten-minute play festivals are already popular with audiences and are good money-makers for theatres. To charge a fee is asking artists to do the job of producing the show that your theatre is mounting, without any guarantees of production.

- Playwrights, if they do agree to an entry fee, are looking for an opportunity that may further their career. The vague promise of award money from a panel of unknown judges does not instill confidence in any reasonable outcome.

We playwrights often don't expect compensation for our ten-minute plays. Many of us view them as calling cards in hopes that someone will want to see more of our work. Asking us to pay for the possibility of production and the lesser possibility of reward is putting the burden on the artist without whom you, the theatre, would have no show to mount. Theatres are producing entities and it really should be their job of finding the funds to mount these shows and not rely on those who are trying to make, not lose, money off of their art.

I know many playwrights out there share these sentiments and it would be great if you shared your thoughts as well.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

John Servilio

Update: Here is their response. I think they missed my arguments, which already addressed their considerations. I also think their response underscores a more insidious view of artists as funding sources across all art forms. It's almost as if they're saying: Don't worry. We're not targeting you, just those people who don't know any better.

"John-

Thank you for your email. We have a great deal of respect for playwrights. This competition is intended to provide less experienced playwrights with the opportunity to have their work considered for production, and possibly produced, without the need to incur all of the costs of self-production, but rather a modest entry fee. Additionally they have the opportunity to have their work rewarded with a sizable prize. It is certainly common practice within other aspects of the fine arts to assess entry fees for participants. As a small non-profit arts organization, we believe this is a fair trade-off, but will certainly take your suggestions under advisement for the future.

Sincerely,

Janet Teunis

Project Director, LowellArts!"

John Servilio

June 19, 2015

theatre, John Servilio, artist statement

How to Kill Art in 3 Easy Steps...

John Servilio

June 19, 2015

theatre, John Servilio, artist statement

In 1942 over 100,000 Japanese Americans were driven from their homes and relocated to internment camps around the country. About 4,000 of them were from Oregon. Many of them lost the homes they had, and what once had been a Japanese neighborhood in Portland became occupied by the Chinese.

So you can see how the relations between these two cultures would be strained here, to say nothing of their countries' warring past.

Flash forward about 73 years. My playwriting colleagues and I have just heard the reading of a play by a White woman, based on the actual bombing of the Oregon forest during World War II by a Japanese pilot. Few people know about it because the trees were too wet to catch fire (welcome to Oregon). At any rate the play is about bridging cultures and making peace despite a history of conflict. It really is well intentioned, despite some culturally inaccurate hiccups in the script.

As an example, in the last scene of the play, the Japanese pilot quotes Confucius, a Chinese philosopher from around 500 BCE. Some in the group mention kindly that the line may require some rethinking, but one young Asian woman is more emphatic and says in a very somber baritone: "I am deeply offended." And I, coming from the east coast where dry humor prevails, guffaw, except it isn't her intent to be humorous.

Sad to say, there was no conversation beyond that. We didn't get to talk about Japanese-Chinese relations, or cross-cultural influences over the centuries. We didn't get to ask if the play's reception might have been different if it were written by a Japanese person. We didn't get to talk about what exactly the offense was about—Was it personal? Learned from family? Cultural?—because she made herself the de facto arbiter, and a Japanese soldier would never quote a Chinese man from 2500 years ago, no matter how quotable he may have been. And we didn't get to talk about the very human drama happening right there at our table reading. Why? Because her declaration was final: It's offensive and that kind of declaration tends to shut a conversation down. It was also because I didn't take her seriously, and her offense was real whether I agreed with it or not. And lastly, because none of us were present with our own emotions, we were too fearful of confrontation, to say: Hold up. Let's talk about this, and maybe we'll learn something.

Art is about finding the connectedness of human experience. It's how we communicate with our audiences who come from all kinds of backgrounds. And because of that interaction, the potential for creating that deeper, more difficult kind of art was lost.