embarrassing prom photos of the 13P

If you are not on the 13P email list you should join now because you are missing hard-to-believe stuff like this video.

Report: Government Science Funders Less Chicken Than Government Art Funders

The National Science Foundation has awarded a $700,000 grant to the Civilians, a New York theater company, to finance the production of a show about climate change. (NYTimes, via http://twitter.com/SteveCosson)

I can't act and hate performing, so it should be interesting to see what happens.

Career advice from Young Jean Lee on Adam's blog: Don't fall into the trap of feeling entitled to career success solely on account of your talent. There's a huge market for mediocre art, and the less-talented wipe the floor with the more-talented every day.

The Top Earners in Nonprofit Theater

This chart is being widely linked for good reason. It's worth bearing in mind that some of these names may be the artistic directors who are quoted in Outrageous Fortune (and in articles about the Outrageous Fortune backlash) as saying that American playwrights are a bunch of whiners.

I think Outrageous Fortune is widely misinterpreted. It's not actually a book about plays being messed up by the theatre system. It's a book about money. It's a book about who gets a salary.

By the same token, I've always felt that 13P is a project about money. It's an attempt to show what it looks like when money is used to advance new American plays — by the radical method of actually producing them.

Scientists betting on reality. No, actually betting real money on it.

If I was writing a screenplay for the Sloan Screenplay Competition sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science (which I would be if I was a student in the dramatic writing program, and hoping to win the $20,000 prize which goes to a CMU student each year)... I might well discover a plot in this story from the Economist in which bookies actually make book on scientific discoveries and disasters. Think you know many polar bears will die this year? It's one way to make money from climate change. There's a range of bets on what the Large Hadron Collider will detect. And then there's the story that begins this way:

The story was different, though, for the fifth wager—that gravitational waves would be detected. News that the bookmaker was offering 500/1 against this happening spread rapidly among the small group of physicists and astronomers searching for such waves.

Peter Parnell on writing for TV: "These are not necessarily bad things."

From Adam's always essential blog.

Q:  Besides having plays on and off Broadway and in large regional theaters, you have worked extensively in TV drama. How does one navigate between the two worlds and how do you find time to do both?

A:  When I was starting out as a playwright, there was still a bit of a stigma attached to writing for TV. I didn’t actually work on a TV script until Aaron Sorkin and John Wells invited me to be a part of The West Wing in 1999. By that time, more and more playwrights were becoming involved in both being on staff and in writing pilots. Now, I think we’ve entered a kind of new golden age in writing for TV, and cable shows especially are finding provocative, exciting ways to tell stories. And it’s important for a playwright to learn the techniques of TV writing, if only to make a living while you’re working on your next play. I find the forms quite different, but that may be more because of the kinds of plays I write. Writing for TV is a job, and highly collaborative, and you’re often not the final arbiter of what gets on the screen (including your credit). But, you learn how to work quickly when you need to, and how to solve creative problems quickly, and you can get paid nicely for your time. These are not necessarily bad things.

A Pulitzer juror explains why the choice for drama is often puzzling.

Charles McNulty in the LA Times