Theater and Licensing

I did this interview awhile ago, but then the world went crazy and I tabled it so I could have more pressing conversations, but I don't want to wait too long to post it, so here it is.

THEM is a former employee of a company that publishes plays and licenses the rights to productions. I won't say which of the companies it is, but there aren't that many, so I'm sure you can narrow it down.

Here's the interview:

ME:  Can I just tell you that when you contacted me I actually screamed?

THEM:  You screamed?

ME:  I...screamed.

THEM:  Why did you scream?

ME:  Because this is, like, the lid I've been wanting to blow off.  Just the--

THEM:  (Laughs.)  Because the place is such a mystery.

ME:  All of these--we're mainly going to talk about licensing.

THEM:  I thought so, yeah.

ME:  And licensing is just so secretive.  How people get the rights to what they get the rights to--

THEM:  That's on purpose.

ME:  Oh, I'm sure it is.

THEM:  Yeah.

ME:  When did you start working at [Name of Company].

THEM:  I'm nervous to give you exact information--

ME:  I'm sorry.

THEM:  It's all right, but let's say--Hm.  Let's say I was there for longer than a few years.

ME:  Okay, very mysterious.

THEM:  You were just complaining about transparency.  I'm sorry.

ME:  No, that's okay, I really don't need to know how long you were there.  It's not relevant.

THEM:  You're trying to set the, uh--

ME:  Like just ease into the story.

THEM:  Right.

ME:  So maybe we just dive in?

THEM:  We can, yeah.

ME:  You were able to see, up close and personal, the process for giving theaters the rights to do certain shows or denying them?

THEM:  Yes.

ME:  What was that process like?

THEM:  That's a big question.

ME:  Sorry.  I'm so excited my non-existent journalism skills have gone right out the window.  Is the process like what these companies say or is it totally different?

THEM:  I wouldn't say it's totally different, but as you said, it's already very, uh, everything's in the dark, yeah?  There's not a lot of transparency, and that's so they can make decisions without having to make those decisions public.

ME:  What kind of decisions?

THEM:  It comes down to who gets accepted or denied rights.

ME:  Mainly denials.

THEM:  Mainly denials,  yes.

ME:  Normally when you get denied, these companies say that either you can't do the show because another theater in your area wants to or it's because they reached out to the playwright's agents, and those agents said 'No.'

THEM:  Yes.

ME:  Are those the only reasons you'd be denied the rights to a title?

THEM:  Starting from your first--What they tell you, uh--That's usually true more than the agents saying 'No,' because a lot of times, we never hear back from the agents, and if we do, it's a 'Yes.'  We didn't make it a point to go to the agents too often, because oftentimes, when you go to an agent, you're going to wait forever to get a response, but if you also don't want the answer to be 'Yes,' you don't want to go to the agents.

ME:  Why would you not want the answer to be 'Yes.'

THEM:  Because you might assume--You might feel that you need to restrict a title for a little bit longer.

ME:  Why would you want to restrict a title if--

THEM:  If there's no interest from a bigger theater on a title in an area, but you think that will be eventually unless that title gets done in the meantime by another theater, then you might want to protect that title, so to speak, and keep it unavailable for longer.

ME:  How long?

THEM:  It's different for different titles.  I remember there was a theater in--Will you edit some of these details out?

ME:  Sure.

THEM:  There was a theater in [City] that really wanted to do [Title of Play] and was in contact with us a lot about it, and we kept saying 'No,' because this was a big play that we didn't license to smaller groups anywhere else in the country, but, uh, for whatever reason, it wasn't--We weren't getting any interest from any of the theaters in [City], but the decision was made to keep the title restricted, because we felt that once a smaller theater did it, we would never be able to get a larger theater to do it in that area.

ME:  And--I know the answer to this, but--Why would that be an issue for [Name of Company]?

THEM:  So how it works is, uh--I don't know how much detail I can go into, but, uh, you already know the kind of company I worked for, and all these companies are the same in that they take a percentage of the rights that a theater pays to do a show.  A professional company--

ME:  An equity company.

THEM:  Yes.  An equity company is going to pay more for rights, and that means everybody--including the playwright and the playwright's agents--are going to make more money if a bigger theater does the show than a smaller one.  You want to give yourself every chance to have a bigger--an equity theater--do a play or a musical before you pass it down to smaller theaters.

ME:  How do you decide what stuff you should send down right away, because I've gotten the rights to things immediately that were brand new and other things I've waited on forever?

THEM:  Okay, so, this is one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you, because I wasn't really interested in just being a whistle-blower or anything like that, but something always bothered me when I was working at [Name of Company] when it came to licensing.

ME:  What was that?

THEM:  We would--and I'm just talking about this one company, but I'm sure it happened at all of them--We would restrict shows, uh--more often we would restrict shows by white playwrights and shows that would, uh--shows that didn't require a lot of diversity in casting.

ME:  Even if those shows were well-received in their original productions?

THEM:  Yes.  There was a show that opened in New York, got a--got great reviews, very popular--came to us that year, and it was never restricted.  I remember talking with somebody when the first request came in, and it was from a smaller theater, and they were surprised--my friend who worked there with me--was surprised that we let this theater do the show, because it was new and it was really--we thought there'd be a lot of interest in it.

ME:  But that's just anecdotal.  You're saying you saw this happen a lot?

THEM:  I saw it happen a lot and I heard conversations about why it was happening.

ME:  But they wouldn't bring up race would they?

THEM:  No, there's always coded language.  They would say that we were restricting a title because it showed 'mainstream appeal.'  It was going to be 'appealing' to larger theaters.  If something wasn't 'appealing' to larger theaters, you would look, and most of the time, there would be casting requirements that involved people of color or a point of view in the script that was decidedly not, uh--That was not going to speak to the perceived audience--the audience these places--these bigger places were perceived to have.

ME:  Which is making assumptions all around.

THEM:  And we couldn't test that out, yeah?  Because by putting these titles out there unrestricted right off the bat, we might have been making them unattractive to bigger theaters.

ME:  But I want to talk about that idea too--That you were holding onto the rights for things until bigger theaters wanted to do them.

THEM:  If they ever did.

ME:  What's the longest you kept a play restricted?

THEM:  I know of one that was restricted for four years.

ME:  With no interest from bigger theaters?

THEM:  Yes.

ME:  And by then, it might not even be appealing to the smaller theaters, because it's not new anymore, and then the playwright hasn't gotten anything.

THEM:  Nobody has.

ME:  But the agents represent other playwrights and you all have other plays you can--

THEM:  I'm agreeing with you, yeah, you're right.  In that case, the playwright is missing out.

ME:  I once went right to the playwright to get the rights to something, and the company I was dealing with was not happy about it.

THEM:  Yeah, they would hate that.

ME:  Because playwrights are going to say 'Yes' most of the time?

THEM:  Yes.  Playwrights want their work done.  That's why we try not to involve them in the process.

ME:  I was told I was 'bothering' the playwright.

THEM:  You probably weren't.  You were getting the rights to something that they wanted to shop to bigger theaters.

ME:  Can I tell you my two biggest gripes about all this?

THEM:  Go ahead.  I can't do anything about them, but--

ME:  (Laughs.)  I know, but I'd love your take on it.  The first is that I live in Rhode Island, and I feel like at one point, we had our own market, and now I think we're lumped in with the Boston area, so now we get denied rights to something, not because someone else in Rhode Island wants to do it, but because Boston wants to do it, even though anyone who knows Rhode Island knows that people here rarely travel up to Boston to see a play.

THEM:  Here's what I think the story is behind that.  Certain areas like touting that they have 'the premiere,' yeah?  It used to be you had the state premiere.  The Michigan premiere.  But--I believe you about Rhode Islanders traveling, but that's not the case everywhere, yeah?  Some people are fine with traveling to see something they want to see.  Then it became about getting the 'regional' premiere, which is different than the state premiere.  Boston was a place where I think that became important.  That they get the New England premiere, and that would shut out Rhode Island and other places too.

ME:  It seems like some of those theaters don't have mission statements other than to present six New England premieres and call it a day.

THEM:  You're right.  That's right.

ME:  But that's not your fault.  I'm sorry.

THEM:  But you are right.  And the theater with the money throws the most weight.  A Boston theater that's of a--of a certain size is probably a lot bigger than the biggest theater you have in Rhode Island and that means they can throw their weight around and get their way.

ME:  My second gripe is--I'm cool with saying 'We're restricting certain titles to equity houses,' but is that really what's going on or--

THEM:  Right, we talked about that in the email you sent me.

ME:  Yes, sorry.

THEM:  There was a shift--not while I was working there, but right before, I think--when professional went from 'Equity' to 'You can afford to pay ten grand to do a play.'  I think the reasoning before was that only an equity house could afford that much to do a play.  Then you started to see people--theater people--who were so crazy to do a show that they would pay that much to do a one-off production of it so they could play the lead role in this brand new play and they didn't care if they lost their life savings doing it.

ME:  And [Name of Company] saw this happening and didn't say, 'Well we just need to change the language so that it's restricted to only equity companies?'

THEM:  There was talk of doing that at first, because some guy in [Name of State] bought the rights--the professional rights--to do a production of [Title of Play] so he could play the lead, and we allowed it, and we caught hell from an equity theater in the area, and yeah, they're kind of our biggest customers, and there was a discussion about not letting that happen again, and it doesn't happen very often, but I think we'll always come down on the side of the money.

ME:  So if you can pay it, they'll let you do it, and they'll deal with getting yelled at.

THEM:  Yes, because what is that theater going to do other than be mad?  If we have a play they want, they have to go through us.  We might offer them a discount on the rights to some other show, and can, uh, appease them most of the time.

ME:  All of this feels very classist.  Like, you're preventing smaller theaters from doing work that they might excel at just because they're smaller with less money and less--

THEM:  Part of that is the way of the world, yeah?  Part of it is, uh, you really don't want it being open season every time a new play comes out where you have twelve or twenty different productions of it.

ME:  But that happens anyway, it just happens with older plays.

THEM:  Them being older helps kind of cut down--you know what I'm saying?

ME:  I got it.  I understand.

THEM:  Where I think it's wrong is--Yes, it is classism, I think you're right about that, and I also think we're making calls about which stories and plays are valued and which aren't.

ME:  You're saying you create more value for a show by restricting it?

THEM:  Yes, and, uh, I'm not sure we should be the ones doing that anyway.  I think the playwrights and the agents should be the ones saying 'I don't care if my play gets done thirty times in the same city' or 'I don't want this play to ever get done unless it's done by an equity house.'  I don't think--We might have been the best people to make that decision at one time, but I don't think we're the right people to be doing that anymore.

ME:  I'm asking this question for a friend who I know reads these--when you see theaters breaking rules about advertising and stuff like that, the fine print stuff--

THEM:  Yes.

ME:  Do you avoid going after theaters that might be paying you more money if they slip up and do the wrong thing?

THEM:  I wouldn't say we even go after the small theaters that slip up.

ME:  I've heard of places going after smaller theaters.

THEM:  We might rattle the cage a little and scare them, but we're never going to take you to court unless you straight up do not have the rights to a show and you're performing it, or you changed the play or the musical in some way.  Anything else, we might wrap your knuckles, yeah?  But we're not going to make a federal case out of that.  We don't have the manpower to go around suing people because they forgot to put the name of the company on the poster.

ME:  So just disregard getting an email about that stuff?

THEM:  Just hit delete.  Nobody's coming after you.  Everybody violates the fine print, because nobody reads it.  I'm not sure I ever read it and I helped with one of the revisions to it.

ME:  I feel like people might have questions for you that I'm not thinking of now.  Would you be comfortable talking with me again when I get some of those questions?

THEM:  Yeah.  I would do that.

ME:  Great.  Let's talk again soon.

Them is now working as an educator full-time.