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Partnership Fills Growing Demand for Plays for
Young Audiences
Children’s theatre groups in Minneapolis and Seattle
offer licensing rights to dozens of original works or adaptations
Theatrical groups interested in licensing plays for
young audiences that have been successfully produced on another stage have
a new resource, thanks to the combined efforts of The Children’s Theater
Company in Minneapolis and the Seattle Children’s Theater.
The two theatre groups have created Plays for Young Audiences, a nonprofit
partnership that provides a clearinghouse for licensing rights to professional
theatres, amateur theatres and schools for scripts written for young audiences.
In business for just more than a year, it has licensed work to 70 theatres
nationwide.
Because the plays are commissioned and produced originally by The Children’s
Theatre Company or Seattle Children’s Theatre, Michelle Wright, general
manager for Plays for Young Audiences, said they know the plays better than
anyone else. “We have road-tested and produced them,” she said.
“We know them more intimately.”
To make a partnership like this work, the theatre has to be actively commissioning
new work. “It is fairly labor intensive, but you need to have the staff,”
said Teresa Eyring, managing director of The Children’s Theatre Company
and co-executive director of Plays for Young Audiences.
For staffing efficiency, Eyring and Wright teamed up with Kevin Maifeld, managing
director of Seattle Children’s Theatre. Maifeld, like Eyring, acts as
co-executive director of the partnership. They are the only three currently
working on the project.
Work for the project began at the end of 2003 when Eyring and Wright started
working on a business plan for a competition. “It helped us fully develop
what it was going to be,” Eyring said.
Quality Plays in Catalog
Plays for Young Audiences currently has about 60 plays in its catalog, written
by both national and international playwrights such as Kia Corthron, Jeffrey
Hatcher and David Henry Hwang. “We have phenomenal writers,” Eyring
said. “All are established playwrights. We don’t usually commission
playwrights who haven’t been produced before.”
Throughout The Children’s Theatre Company’s long history, it has
been involved in writing new adaptations or creating new work. “Once
the plays are written and produced, there always has been an interest from
theatres around the country [or schools or communities centers] who want to
use the scripts,” Eyring said. “We’ve always been licensing
plays, but it wasn’t a core part of our business.”
Basically, Eyring needed someone to make copies of scripts and do all the
licensing for her theatre. Seattle Children’s Theatre was in the same
situation. Seattle’s theatre had been commissioning plays for many years
as well. In their spare time, staff members would take care of the play licensing.
That’s when Wright stepped into the picture.
“Michelle took an interest in our licensing a couple of years ago,”
Eyring said. “We realized there was more opportunity out there if we
had someone who could actively participate in this. That’s when we started
to get it very organized.”
New Scripts in Development
The Children’s Theatre Company now actively develops new scripts. Wright
said 10 to 15 plays are in development at any given time. Eyring said the
group will eventually look into licensing work that hasn’t been commissioned
by either theatre.
“There are really good writers who have written great plays who might
not have agents or good marketing behind their writing,” Eyring said.
“We would like to give them a chance if we can.” The theatres independently
make decisions about the plays each commissions and develops.
Some restrictions exist once a play is licensed. Wright said playwrights sometimes
want only amateur theatres to produce a play or they want only professional
theatres to license the work. But for the most part, any theatre can license
the work.
Theatres can’t use a copyrighted play without permission. Most authors
own the copyrights to their plays, Eyring said. If the play is in the public
domain, like the works of Shakespeare, theatres do not have to get the rights
for a license.
Once a theatre obtains the rights, it can acquire a license. Small theatres
generally pay a fee per performance or a percentage of the box office sales
to the playwright or whomever is licensing it. “When we license a script,
like an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, for example, we license it on behalf
of the playwright,” Wright said.
Under the license, theatres must report the income made from the play. Then
a small portion of the sales goes to the artist and licensure.
More Partners in the Future?
At this point, only The Children’s Theatre Company and Seattle Children’s
Theatre are involved in the partnership, but Eyring said they are not opposed
to the idea of adding other theatres to the group. “There’s an increasing
interest across the country for programming for young audiences in theatre,”
she said. “We think we can provide a tremendous service by having almost
a one-stop shopping place where you can have access to a real variety of scripts.
We would benefit from bringing in the scripts of other theatres, but we want
to do it in stages.”
For now, the group is figuring out how everything works, and has begun to
revise the business plan to see what the next big steps for the partnership
should be. “We’re trying to get some playwrights represented that
we didn’t commission” Eyring said. “We want to provide a little
more consulting advice to people who don’t know a lot about the process.”
Another step is to have advisors for the group. “We won’t necessarily
have a board,” Eying said. “We may form a separate company, depending
on growth.”
For more information about Plays for Young Audiences, go to www.playsforyoungaudiences.org.
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