State of the Art discussion

To my mind, there’s never a single factor that makes me think quel dommage! But there are numerous elements which, taken cumulatively, detract from a play’s potential. Here’s a few of them:
• Relying on lengthy or overly directive stage indications to get your readers to glimpse a dramatic vision that’s lacking in the dialogue.
• Slapping a dull title on your front page. Neil Simon may name a play The Dinner Party because people trust his brand. Most of us don’t have his cachet. Your title should intrigue us; it should make us wonder about the play without being obscure. If Cooking with Elvis was playing in your town, you’d probably go, right?
• Allowing the reader/audience to doubt that you’re in control of your story. You can do anything you want in formal terms—mess with time sequences, have five plots, prevent us from connecting the dots for three quarters of the play—so long as the audience senses that ultimately you are taking them someplace specific.
• And then there’s the contrary of the previous point—providing the audience with so much “clarity” that you’ve done all the work for them. If you let them get ahead of you in your story, they discover they have time on their hands. Trust me, they’ll use that time to critique the play.
• Making promises you don’t keep. Your opening scene will pose a problem, or present a conflict, or introduce characters who will soon be in conflict, right? Failure to get round to addressing that first thesis will leave your readers feeling cheated. It happens!
You also ask what new plays are doing right these days. By “right,” do you mean they’re getting produced? I’ll tell you what I notice in that regard. Subject matter is all over the map currently, but many plays have in common that they adeptly use stage space and they take advantage of their proximity to their audience. Two plays now doing well around the country that couldn’t be farther apart on the aesthetic spectrum are Jason Grote’s 1001, and Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure by Steven Dietz. The former is a heady political salmagundi and the latter is an outright just-for-fun romp. The first is highly presentational; the second observes the fourth wall convention. But both are canny about how they make use of the stage, and their highly entertained audiences come away feeling they had a genuine night in the theater, as opposed to the cinema or a re-run of Nip/Tuck.
I’m on the lookout for scripts that honor their contracts with their live audiences, and I think many other literary managers are, too.

— Mead

First of all, I bow to Mead for his clarity and exhaustiveness. He is right in these things (as in many, many others).
As for me, if I were to say what most plays are missing to “put them over the top,” I'd say it’s usually either:
• Confidence. Do what you want to with your play! Just teach me how to watch it. If you show me how to enter the world on your terms, I’ll follow. This follows on Mead’s advice—do what you want, but if you’re setting up a mystery story, let me know; if I’m following the interweave of a plot in the past and present, make sure the details are there, but then trust me to engage in the world as you spin it out. The kind of story you’re telling will be reflected in the way you’re telling it. So tell it deliberately and trust that I’m keeping pace.
• Ambition. By which I mean an intriguing balance of theatrical elements, be they character, theme or plot, or a particular linguistic flair or highly theatrical approach to the space and time of theater. Many of the fine-but-not-great plays I read focus on one of these elements without quite landing it with the specificity and subtlety to truly pull off, for instance, a character play that truly pays off on solely a character front. In my experience, the most interesting plays are working with great care on at least two of the three of the character/theme/plot trinity.
There are, of course, other ways to think about what makes a play multivalent and interesting, but the fact remains I like my plays multivalent and interesting. This doesn’t necessarily mean “experimental”; where Mead mentions Steven Dietz’s adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, I’ll champion George C. Wolfe’s adaptations of Zora Neale Hurston’s stories in Spunk as a play that’s smart and theatrical, complex but accessible.
It really is impossible to talk about plays in the abstract: They're wily creatures and specific onto unto themselves. I love theater because of its ease of transformation, so forgive all these generalities. Reflecting on the plays of the most recent Humana Festivals, I’d agree with Mead that many of the most interesting contemporary plays have a sense of the theatrical world in which they exist. This might mean exploiting the ways that theater can make metaphors tangible or connect ideas and people across time or culture. It may be the thrill of exploring the ways that showing an audience a character’s thought process can render a strange point of view shockingly familiar or bring an audience face-to-face with the movements of our own hearts we hadn’t quite articulated.
There are a thousand interesting ways to spend two hours, give or take, of my time. So be interesting, let me in on what you’re doing, and I’ll follow you any place you think is worthwhile.

—Adrien-Alice

I will put my weight behind a couple of points that Adrien-Alice and Mead have made about what compels me to want to produce a new play, just to give them added heft. And those points are: ambition, bravado, bravery.
When I think about the new plays I've read or seen that have thrilled me recently—and I think about Tom Stoppard's Rock-n-Roll, Deborah Stein's Wallflower, Carlos Murillo's Dark Play or Stories for Boys, Will Power's The Seven—the thrill comes from the deliciousness of the ride these plays take me on. All of these writers step up to the plate and take bold—sometimes infuriating, but always bold—positions about cultural movements or moments that they obviously feel a personal stake in but that have repurcussions for us all, and they do it... deliciously.
What do I mean by deliciously? I mean in a theatrically clever and immediate way with language that bites and roars and wears its heart on its sleeve spoken by characters whose actions throw them into a free fall, and I get to be there to watch where they land, knowing only that they're going to land somewhere drastically different from where they started.
As Adrien-Alice and Mead have said, this kind of authorial bravado can happen in any kind of play—comedy, drama, farce, poetic epic, slice-of-life, mystery, etc. It's not, for me, the style or the content that draws me to a play, but a sense that there is a brave, ambitious, wickedly confident mind at work.

— Elissa