| On 29 September 1963, Edward Albee, Richard Barr, and Clinton Wilder established the Playwrights Unit, an off-off Broadway play development workshop, using {dollar}25,000 of Albee's profits from his Broadway hit, {lcub}it Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?/{rcub} Over a period of ten years, the Unit produced the first or early plays of Louis Auchincloss, Mart Crowley, Charles Dizenzo, Gene Feist, Paul Foster, Frank Gagliano, John Guare, A. R. Gurney, LeRoi Jones, Lee Kalcheim, Adrienne Kennedy, Terrence McNally, Leonard Melfi, Howard Moss, James Prideaux, Sam Shepard, Megan Terry, Jean-Claude van Itallie, Lanford Wilson, Doric Wilson, and Paul Zindel.; The Playwrights Unit represented a special paradigm of new play development, since it tested plays by the fire of full production, rather than by the readings, staged readings, and workshop productions of the new play development process as it is practiced the United States in the 1990s. The Unit's process of new play development was based on producer Richard Barr's belief that the play and the playwright are the epicenter of play production--a philosophy to which Barr adhered in his successful productions of Albee's plays. Albee has expressed his dislike of the current model of play development on several occasions, a process which he believes is destructive to new work.; Many of the playwrights produced at the Playwrights Unit went on to receive prestigious awards for playwriting including the Pulitzer prize. Two of the Unit's most important plays, Amiri Baraka's Dutchman (1964), and Mart Crowley's The Boys In the Band (1968), have become seminal works of American theatre. Most of the Unit's plays were later published and produced off and on Broadway in full Equity productions. New York's finest professional directors, actors, and designers worked at the Unit, including directors like Michael Kahn and Joseph Chaikin, as well as actors James Coco, Viveca Lindfors, Frank Langella, and Nancy Marchand. While the production process at the Playwrights Unit reflected both the explosion of new plays and the low off-Broadway production costs of the New York theatre of the 1960s, it resonates as a model for new play development today. |
