Theater thread: last week, the CEO of spotify said artists "can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough”. It got me thinking about how the winds have shifted in theater, and how playwrights are now being rushed in overt and covert ways.

It’s difficult to remember now, but the trend of multiple world premieres happening at theaters of all sizes, all over the country is a relatively recent one. 10 or 15 years ago, a common season would have primarily classics and revivals and a new work or two.

Now, in many cases, it’s the opposite.

Similarly, the proliferation of summer development hubs, seasonal writers groups, residencies, and labs/workshops/etc. have exploded in the last decade or so.

Playwrights now have a second job in addition to writing: applying to things. Not only is this time consuming in and of itself (to say nothing of stressful and competitive), but it means a writer must have new work to share at least once a year in order to submit an application.

As a result, a writer who under other circumstances might take two or five or ten years to write a play is under enormous pressure to alter their creative process to fit the tempo of the industry (a word I loathe, but appropriate under these circumstances).

This is the tipping point between new plays as “art" and new plays as “content".

It’s my hope that when we come back to work, more thought is put into the needs of specific artists and their projects, and that the rate of production favors the artist and not the calendar.

In the meantime, I’d like to encourage writers to take this strange moment of limbo and stasis to learn about your pace without fear of missing a deadline or not having anything new for your agent as theaters begin to assemble their seasons.

How fast or slow would your write if you were listening only to the needs of the work right in front of you?