Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED.*

Your new play is going to be so old to you by the time anyone actually produces it that you will experience a soul-kissing-a-grandparent-wince inwardly at any mention of its newtivity. A theater that specializes in new work told me they would be glad to read my new play as soon as they could get to it, four years from now. This fact may account for the frequent complaint by critics (whose work appears the next day) that “X” is “so five years ago.” Raising the question: If a new play remains unproduced does it stay new, and if so, for how long is it new, and how new can it stay?

And by the way, if someone does produce your new play you will hear the words you thought you so cleverly strung together so many times, interpreted in impossibly novel ways, then endlessly picked at and/or shuffled, that you will pray for them to be retired from the English language. No really, burned is more truthful, chopped up and burned. I call this the Baby Ruth effect, because as a child I once repeated the words Baby Ruth printed on the wrapper of a candy bar until the phrase became meaningless and I started to weep and had to be sedated.

The only things you can write and get done right now, next season, are somebody else’s ideas. The Artistic Director has a space waiting for either a musical adaptation of Ronald Firbank’s Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli or a lighthearted look at the Bataan Death March based on interviews with local survivors. Both could be managed without a writer, but what the hey.

This is known as The Platonic Relationship. I trust you know how that works.

If you are the kind of person whose mind requires such exercises in visualization, and as a playwright manque the odds are good you are, imagine the Guthrie Theater is a kiwi fruit in Upstate New York, but blue. The chance of your new play appearing at that kiwi fruit would be represented by nothing at all, really really really far away.

If anyone thought about new work at all, a common misconception might be that a playwright weighs and finds wanting any number of potential projects in search of a “good” idea. Nothing could be further from the truth. When I ask my friends, family, and colleagues about some idea I’ve seized upon, I do not expect them to analyze the potential impact of my brainstorm on the contemporary theatre. I just want to watch them try to be kind.

My secret conviction is that anything that’s “a good idea for a play” has absolutely no chance of ever becoming a play I’d want to watch. If you can tell me briefly about your play, and I can immediately grasp what you are up to and how it can be promoted, then we are probably sharing our recognition of a cliche that you hope to freshen for the market. On the other hand, if the description of a new play begins, “Well, it’s kind of complicated,” I find that promising, especially if I’m talking to the writer, the director, or a cast member two days before opening.

For me, the real test of my own new project is always whether I want to do the work required to turn a given idea into an actual play more than I want to eat kettle chips and watch reruns of Ultimate Cage Fighting. It’s a cruelly high standard, but you can’t write all the time.

I wrote a five act revenge tragi-comedy in verse based on Thomas Pynchon’s description of a fictional performance in his novel The Crying Of Lot 49. When the play was read at the Playwrights’ Center, Lee Blessing said it was the best five act revenge tragi-comedy in verse he’d ever seen there. Such are the rewards of new work.

According to ex-Playwrights’ Center Lab Director John Richardson, the basic human needs are for food, drink, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play. Thus, new work requires DEVELOPMENT. This is a process that falls between writing the play and having the play produced. The existence of the development stage reveals how urgently your new play is not needed. Think if you cooked a nice breakfast for someone, but before a waitress would consent to consider bringing it to the table, a couple of people with degrees from Yale would have to push it around the plate for two weeks, adding and taking away bits of stuff, and admitting to each other over drinks when you’re not around that neither of them really cares for eggs. Yum.

Development also exists as nature’s way of highlighting the lessons we should have learned before now about love and sex. Certain ragged but glamorous individuals will consent to have development with you without really loving you or your work. At first you’ll find this exciting, but it will get old quick. Feel free to extend the details of this metaphor at your leisure; it keeps right on giving.

A past Executive Director of The Playwrights’ Center once took me out for lunch to pass along The Truth About Writing New Plays and this was it: There’s no money in it. For many days after this lunch I stopped whenever I passed a mirror, looked at myself searchingly, and asked myself, as sincerely as I’m capable, “Do I really look that dumb?”

Finally: If not writing new work is an option, STOP THIS MINUTE. A close personal famous playwright friend of mine once told me he was “giving it two years.” If he hadn’t “made it” in that time, he was quitting. As you well know, he “made it,” big, huge, globular, right at the last minute, but he was that close to quitting, and if he had, think of all the work there might have been for the rest of us. I told him, in the instant his lips stopped moving, that I’d never quit no matter what. And I meant it, no matter what. See.