Collaborative Process

I'm sorry, but your script is not a sacred document. If it cannot be cut, trimmed or edited for purposes of fitting a director's vision, the theatre company's mission, or the limitations of the production itself, you have no business contributing your work to the creative collaboration to begin with. If the playwright's vision is the be all and end all of the theatrical work, the playwright should find the funding and produce and direct the piece themselves. It's a collaboration. A melting pot. Even one contributes. Which means every one must be willing to bend a little. And in the end...its the person with the money and the person who is pushing the production through to the end that has ultimate artistic control.

Besides, our theatrical landscape would be fairly boring indeed if every production of Romeo and Juliet or The Glass Menagerie altered not from its tried and true course. Each new vision presents the story from a slightly different light...which what makes the arts so rich to begin with. Each production finds a different angle...a different driving theme, a different point to highlight and those variations sing praises to the complexity of the playwright's characters and plot. Theatre would choke on its own pretension if we relied on only one person's vision to voice the tale.