How We Curate
Our vision for Indie Theater Now is that it will be a wildly comprehensive source for contemporary American indie theater, in all its extraordinary variety and diversity. We hope that, soon, we’ll have hundreds of playwrights and thousands of plays online. We are counting on the indie theater community to help us make that happen.
Participation in Indie Theater Now is by invitation only. Through my work at nytheatre.com and NYTE Small Press I have come to know well a number of playwrights, and so naturally it was to them that I first reached out as I hatched and developed the initial idea for Indie Theater Now. Now that we’re launched, I have started reaching out to other indie playwrights whose work I know, respect, and admire, asking them to be part of our project.
So your question is: How do I decide who to reach out to? Here’s a somewhat long-ish (but, I hope, complete) answer.
Indie Theater Now is a project of The New York Theatre Experience, Inc. (NYTE), a nonprofit corporation whose mission is to provide tangible support for the theater community in New York and across the USA. In curating Indie Theater Now, we start with the basic premises of NYTE’s existing publication program, NYTE Small Press, home of the Plays and Playwrights anthologies and a few others. Officially, our publishing mission is as follows:
The purpose of our play publishing program is to call attention to worthy new work and to promote new productions of this work, and other work by the playwrights, outside of New York City. We select the plays to be included each year using the following criteria:
- It must be of high quality, as evidenced by production, with something cogent to say to the theatergoing audience.
- It’s written by an author whose theatrical work has not generally reached a wide audience, and has not been published (or if it has, has had limited distribution).
- The play expands or changes the ways that audiences experience theatre.
The most important ideas here are that the plays we publish deserve to reach a broader audience; and that they have been produced, providing evidence that they work in the theater.
It’s easy to figure out whether a play has had a bona fide production; whether a play “deserves to reach a broader audience,” though, is trickier and much more subjective. For Indie Theater Now, our plan is to apply this idea pretty liberally. I’ll be relying on my own judgment, for sure, and also on the judgments of indie theater artists I know, admire, and respect. That includes all of the playwrights who are already participating in Indie Theater Now; it also includes a host of directors, producers, actors, designers–and, I trust, a lot of folks I haven’t even met yet.
What this means is that I’ll be keeping my eyes and ears (and mind) open to conscientiously expand the roster of playwrights in Indie Theater Now. I’ll be seeing a lot of work myself, as I always have done. And–because I can’t be everywhere at once–I’ll be relying on the aforementioned group to help me identify others who should be part of this project. It’s kind of a viral thing: as the group expands, each new addition will likely have more new names to recommend to add to the list.
Right now, I’m doing all the inviting myself–we don’t have a big staff here–so the invites are going out just a few at a time. If I haven’t gotten to you yet, please email me and remind me! If I don’t know your work yet, please email me and let me know when you’ll have something that I can attend in the NYC area. (My email is martin@indietheaternow.com).
Please do not submit scripts unsolicited. We don’t have any resources to deal with submissions.
Most important–if you have suggestions of plays/playwrights that you think ought to be part of Indie Theater Now, let me know! This program is all about new voices. We intend for Indie Theater Now to encompass the great variety and diversity of contemporary American indie theater, and we’ll be relying on the broad community of theater artists and audiences that we serve to do that right.
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