(This is part three of a four part series.)
The Third Lesson on Producing: Finding a Producer
The first blog post in this series showed how to make your show more producible.
The second was how to to get your play produced (by networking, submissions and research).
Now let’s talk about how you actually can approach a producer and get him or her invested emotionally enough to do all the hard work and long hours to actually produce your play.
What is the producer thinking as he listens to your pitch?
A Producer is Interested in Profit
You must realize by now that the entire idea behind theater, both commercial and not for profit, is to sell enough tickets to make enough money to be able to do the next show.
A producer’s astute judgement of the possibility of selling tickets for any particular show heavily influences their decision to produce it.
When I’m thinking of producing a play that will be very expensive to produce because it has too many actors, I have two options:
- The first is to not do the show.
- The second is to talk to the playwright about rewrites to include a smaller cast.
To Produce or Not To Produce?
You need to think of a scale.
One side is to produce, the other is not to produce.
The bad things are those that make a play more difficult or costly to produce. Very few things have enough weight, are SO bad, that no amount of good things will move the scale. However, a LOT of bad things can all add up to make the play not one that I’d produce. Some of them are things that playwrights don’t even think about.
The first is about your characters and the actors who portray them.
You may think that because you only have three actors in your play it’s good. But maybe not. Say the play has a father, a mother, and a child. That’s three salaries. And because each character is so different, you also have three separate understudies. That’s six salaries.
Because one of the actors is a child you also need a tutor and a wrangler. Eight salaries.
A play with six characters, with the same age, race and gender is cheaper to produce. Producers think about things like this. So should playwrights who want to get produced.
The other thing a playwright needs to think about is the pool of candidates capable of embodying their characters. On the youngest end, the pool is small. It swells in between the ages of 20s to 40s, and then as actors get older (and perhaps more discouraged and leave the industry) the pool again shrinks.
Therefore, a play with all its characters in their 20s to 40s is easier to produce, because the producer has more available options in the area of casting.
What Else Does a Producer Think About?
Over the next few weeks I’ll talk about some of the other issues that go into a producer’s decision to choose to do a show.
Next week is the physical setting of the play.
Are you writing a hip hop show? Let me know.