<span style="font-size:120%;">ONE of the strangely enduring laments of the American theater concerns playwrights leaving for television. Critics and theater people regularly sigh about how the lure of riches hurts the growth of playwrights and contemporary drama. But is going to work on acclaimed shows like “Mad Men,” “In Treatment” or “The Wire” really selling out? The question seems almost beside the point, since writers who compose only for the stage have become all but obsolete. “Richard Nelson might be the last one,” said Marsha Norman, who has taught playwriting at Juilliard for 17 years. (Mr. Nelson’s “That Hopey Changey Thing” just finished a run at the Public Theater.)

The successful young playwright who doesn’t take time off to work on a TV series is the exception. Cable networks like HBO, AMC and Showtime now provide a kind of second education for our best theater writers. And with the rise of ambitious series led by show runners with voices as distinctive as any film auteur, this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Craig Wright, who has written and produced for shows like “Six Feet Under,” “Lost” and “Brothers and Sisters,” said working in television has made him a better playwright. His new comic drama “Mistakes Were Made,” now at the Barrow Street Theater, is a taut work in which Michael Shannon plays an opportunistic Broadway producer, loosely based on the multiple Tony-winner Kevin McCollum. That it’s a sympathetic portrait of the usually demonized producer, Mr. Wright says, is partly because of his work in Hollywood. “One of the things you experience creating television,” he said, “is that there’s this fake vanity sometimes on the part of the writers who still labor under this old idea that the writers are Artists with a capital A, and the producers and studio executives are businessmen who just want to make a buck.”

The dozen or so playwrights that I talked to with TV experience generally shared this skepticism about a rigid distinction between art and commerce. They were more likely to talk about the creation of a play as a slow evolution rather than as a flash of inspiration. Mr. Wright worked on “Mistakes Were Made” for more than five years, shelving an early version that he said began “very much like a 1920s Expressionist play.” After returning to it three years ago in a workshop for Hartford Stage, he cut down the stylistic excesses and focused on the central character, Felix, and his relationship with the writer he wants to produce.

Shorthand is essential in television, and Mr. Wright displays a facility for pithy description in person and on the page. He says television made him better at communicating information to an audience quickly, pointing to a speech in “Mistakes” in which he signals that Felix lost a daughter through the way Felix describes the plot of a play — an indirect and rather elegant solution.

Theresa Rebeck, whose dramas include “The Understudy” and “The Scene,” said she picked up similar skills working on “NYPD Blue.” “I learned that even when people were just walking down a hall, the scene had to have something interesting,” she said. She added that David Milch, a creator of that show, was “the only person to ever teach me about writing.” She added, “He was ruthless about detail and language.”

But size matters too. Since TV dramas weave multiple narratives through an entire season, a refined sense of structure is as necessary as economy. Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who wrote for “Big Love,” said that handling so many story lines was invaluable in building the revised book to the 1966 musical “It’s a Bird{hellip}It’s a Plane{hellip}It’s Superman,” which had a run this summer at the Dallas Theater Center.

“A musical is more epic than a play,” he said. “So working in TV, where you have a large canvas, helps.” Writing about the patriarch of a polygamist Mormon family, he added, was an unlikely help in figuring out Superman.

“Anyone can make the villains in ‘Superman’ interesting,” he said. “But how do you make the hero compelling? You have a similar challenge with Bill Paxton on ‘Big Love.’ Because of my experience in TV I better knew how to make Superman have drive and passion,”

Television arguably has more in common with theater than movies. “Television is about scenes between people talking,” said Eric Overmyer, who wrote the acclaimed drama “On the Verge” before focusing on high-end television series like “The Wire” and “Treme.” “It might erupt in a gunfight, but it’s still carried along by dialogue.”

For writers the primary difference may be the process. With network executives and large staffs of producers and writers, television has far more cooks in the kitchen than does theater. That can water down a script and lead to decisions based more on business than on artistic concerns. But dismissing TV as art by committee is an oversimplification.

For the rest of the article: NY Times</span>

Playwrights leaving theater for TV? That's preposterous. Show me a (former) playwright who has quit writing for the stage altogether in order to write exclusively for television and/or movies. Even writers such as John Logan and Aaron Sorkin who have made bundles of money working in other arenas return to the stage eventually. That's b/c, most writers enjoy working in more than one medium; and theatre remains the only one where it all comes down to what's on the page and who puts it there. No script, no show.

Besides, Marsha Norman forgot about Edward Albee. ;-)

Love Theresa Rebeck's quote at the end of the article, though: “Going to TV doesn’t ruin your writing,” she said. “You know what ruins your writing? Not writing." True that, girl.

Edited November 25, 201015 yr by Khan

What I find interesting-depressing is that never before were there so many superqualified (r perhaps it's just that it seems they are on the surface.) writers in the business, yet so much awful television around. It should have had an opposite effect, but I guess it ended up being classified under one of Andre Keen's paradoxes.