After all, why do playwrights need to do promotion? Our job is simple: We sit in a bay window typing away at an Underwood typewriter. Once we’ve completed a script, we send out copies to various theaters. And then all one needs to do is buy a bottle of champagne to uncork backstage opening night. Then we retire to Sardi’s to read the plaudits in the early edition of the Post.

There are two problems with this scenario. Firstly, it isn’t true. Secondly, even if it were true, it’s boring.

There may have been playwrights that this described, once upon a time, although I suspect they died with the Lunts and are buried somewhere in the vicinity of Cole Porter. Nowadays, we live in a fast-failing world of independent nonprofit theaters, and it hasn't been very good for American playwrights. The rise of the nonprofit created a new professional class of theatermakers, but almost all of them worked in administration. Playwrights were not offered professional positions inside these institutions, and the institutions pursued their own needs, which was to support themselves. We have reached a moment in history where it is increasingly unlikely that a new play will receive a production; even if it beats the odds and finds a stage somewhere, statistically, it is the only time that play will ever be produced.

Theaters don’t think they can find an audience for new plays. They don’t have the budget for failure, and so they program their seasons around what they can be reasonably certain will do well in the box office. Theaters turn to the classics, or they turn to whatever just did well in Manhattan. Perhaps they produce a new play every year as a sort of grudging gesture. But the theaters that are open to new production are flooded with scripts, most terrible, and even if yours is a dazzling work of genius, they may turn it down. The modern theater world is not a meritocracy. Perhaps a friend of the artistic director has written a play, and they get first dibs. Perhaps your script is too similar to something they just did. Perhaps they have a specific theatrical sensibility, and your play just doesn’t fit in.

This makes it very hard for a playwright to develop an audience for his or her writing. Without an audience for a playwright's writing, a theater is going to be shy about producing their play, no matter how excellent. When you offer a play to a theater, if you're another unknown playwright, a producer sees a marquee that reads like this: “The Play with a Generic Title by the Playwright Nobody’s Ever Heard Of.” That’s not going to fill seats, even if your play with a generic title is the best thing since The Play With a Generic Title by the Playwright Everybody Has Heard Of.

There’s an analogy with rock and roll here, and it won’t be the last in this book. Most bands start off playing in bars. Bars are not in the business of giving opportunities to untested talent. They are in the business of selling alcohol. They have live music, because people who come to hear live music are going to buy liquor, mostly awful vodka drinks mixed with Red Bull. And so the bars are most likely to book bands that already have an audience. You want regular, paying gigs in bars? Promote yourself so that every time you play, 40 people show up to see you.

So it is with theater. Ignore the mission statements theaters put out — the only function of these documents is to convince arts organizations to pony up some grant money. Any theater that is sufficiently established, and has sufficient overhead from staff and venue, has only one mission. They’re not out to “foster community,” neither are they there to “challenge and educate.” They’re there to get butts in seats. They’re there to turn audience members into seasonal subscribers. They’re there to turn subscribers into donors. Most theaters exist on the razor’s edge of collapse, especially nowadays. A single production can sink a season if it does badly enough, putting the theater into the red in such a way that it will take months or years of begging donors before they can climb out. If ever.

So if you’re an unknown playwright, it doesn’t matter what script you wrote on your bay window Underwood. However, if you go to a theater with a track record of bringing several hundred audience members with you — well, that makes whatever you have to offer a hell of a lot more appealing.

Doing your own promotional work — promoting yourself as a playwright — can go a long way toward developing that audience.

I argue that you need to do it even if you have a theater that has agreed to produce one of your plays. For one thing, theaters are often surprisingly bad at PR. I generally promote my own plays. Every time I have done this, the audience has been healthy. Every time I haven’t, the audience has been sparse.

Theaters often complain that they can’t promote a new play. It isn’t so much that they can’t, but they don’t know how. And when the play fails as a result of their feeble promotional efforts, the most common response is for them to simply decide that audiences aren’t interested in new plays. As a result, the next time a new play comes across their transom, the theaters are gun shy. Every new play that is promoted poorly and every new play that is produced badly makes American theaters more skittish about new plays. The failure of a new play will always be seen as the fault of the play.

Even if you’re working with a theater that knows how to promote new plays, they’re not in the business of promoting playwrights. They want to promote their theater to an audience. After that, they want to promote their season. After that, they want to promote a specific show. If they have a director who works with them a lot, they might promote the director. They might promote an actor. Getting press for a playwright is at the bottom of the list, if it’s on the list at all. You cannot count on a theater to put you in front of an interviewer. Any attention you get that can help your career will be an afterthought or accidental on the part of the theater. If you don’t do your own promotion, nobody else is going to do it.

There are other reasons to do your own PR. I’ve moved away from writing plays that are intended to be produced in a theater. I write plays that I can self-produce, and are simple enough that anybody with a little bit of ambition and a basement could produce as well. But leaving the theaters behind means leaving their PR machine behind. If you approach theater as I do, you have to find your own audience.

We’re in an interesting time now. Everything seems to be going through epochal transformations just now, in large part thanks to the Internet. The non-profit model of theater seems wobbly, in part because their audience is aging and dying, and in part because they’ve lost much of their funding as a result of this recession. The web is creating new tools for self-promotion while, at the same time, rendering long-established PR techniques dated and unworkable. It is genuinely possible nowadays for one person, working from a home computer, to find an international online audience of thousands, or even millions.

We may be entering a new period of theater, in which attention moves away from institutions to focus on artists. Why were institutions getting all the attention anyway? As a critic, I was never interested in the administrators. I was interested in the artists. But, inevitably, most of the press releases I got, and still get, were from arts organizations announcing a fundraising drive, or telling me that they had hired a new literary manager, or passing along the scintillating news that they now have a local bakery making their concessions for them. This is a bit like the Rolling Stones playing at, say, the Roxy, and the Roxy sending out press releases reminding us that they now offer valet parking.

The trouble is that playwrights forget that they are the Rolling Stones of theater. We have the right to get attention, because we’re the ones who wrote the play. Without that, there would be no theater, for the most part. But somehow we’ve been pushed to the margins, existing just as a name on the playbill cover and a few paragraphs in the bio section. If we’ve been especially lax, an audience member or critic who especially likes our work will try to find out more about us online and find … nothing. We won’t have bothered creating our own web page. We’re nowhere to be found on social media. We’ve never been interviewed. No photos of us are to be found. And that’s wonderful if you’re, say, Howard Hughes and have dedicated your life to living in isolation, wearing tissue boxes as shoes and pooping in antique vases.

But if we’re not demented loners, we’re doing ourselves an injustice. We’ve let ourselves be the ghosts haunting our own plays, our specters only represented by a hundred words in a printed program. Why be phantoms? We can, and should, be superstars.

Before you begin, I should point out that this ebook is not intended as a checklist of instructions for gaining fame as a playwright. It is, instead, a guide to a way of thinking about PR, and my approach is pretty outré — I am a fan of PR stunts, wild misbehavior, and hard partying. You need not share my particular approach to make use of suggestions in this book, and it should be noted that the world of promotion is changing faster than we can chart it. Popular social media today will be obsolete tomorrow, and new mechanisms will develop to aid you in promoting yourself, and your work.

Try them all. Be an early adopter. Be unafraid. And approach it however suits you best. You've got something you want to share, and it's up to you to figure out how best to share it. This ebook offers you a starting place, but where you go from here is up to you.

BE NOTORIOUS

To begin with, let's talk about punk, as it is a subject that will come up repeatedly in this ebook. We'll get to playwrighting in a moment, but we're here to discuss publicity, and punk demonstrated that it's possible to get reams of press without being on a major label or represented by a team of professional PR agents. So there are lessons playwrights can learn from punk.

I know, I know, punk is dead. It’s been dead or dying since the first teenager put a safety pin through his or her ear back in the 1970s. Crass declared it dead all the way back in 1978 on their album The Feeding of the 5,000, and we’re now at a time when a lot of actual punk rockers are dead — Sid Vicious with no small amount of spectacle in 1979, Joey Ramone in 2001, Dee Dee Ramone in 2002, the same year Joe Strummer died of a congenital heart condition. Malcolm McLaren passed away in 2010. And this is a small sampling — a complete list of dead punk rockers would be an ominous undertaking, and a frequently depressing one. Punks tended to die with less style than they lived; I suppose we all do.

But so what if punk is dead? Punk borrowed liberally from garage rock music, which enjoyed a brief explosion in the Sixties and then burned out just as quickly. Punk also borrowed from the Situationists, a small group of artistically inclined radicals and revolutionaries who managed to inspire one great riot in 1968, the May wildcat strikes in Paris. So every movement borrows from the past. We are all, in our way, cannibals.

We playwrights have never really gotten our chance at punk rock. Sure, there have been playwrights who would have made brilliantly decadent rockers — Joe Orton springs to mind at once. And punk has had its influence on theater. But I’m not talking about playwrights who borrow the themes of punk rock, or write plays with punk rockers as characters. I am talking about playwrights stripping theater down to the equivalent of three chords, offering up on-the-cheap-DIY productions in garages and basements, and then misbehaving as entertainingly as possible in public.

It’s not for everybody, of course. Some people want to spend two years writing a play, they want it workshopped for three months, they want that play produced in a reputable theater, they want a name cast, they want a shot at respectability. They’re welcome to it. I wish, instead, to address myself to playwrights who want a chance a disrespectability. It's a straight-shot from being disreputable to being a news story. And here are my suggestions:

First of all, realize that you’re a public figure. The past few decades have seen playwrights sort of hidden away from public view. Sure, sometimes workshops of our plays are open to the public, or theaters will offer talkbacks for audiences when you have written an especially depressing play about some public issue.

Otherwise, we’re treated as sort of reedy creatures who type away in our rooms and think very long and very hard about things, and maybe some playwrights are. But the playwrights I have known, and I include myself among them, have just as frequently tended to be total lunatics. I sometimes wonder if that’s not why we’re hidden away, placed at the theatrical equivalent of that table at weddings where the drunk uncle is put next to the angry cousin who might try to disrupt the best man’s toast.

If you’re that sort of lunatic, take it public. It hasn’t hurt Courtney Love, and it won’t hurt you.

Is that how you’re dressed? We’re not businesspeople, and we’re not blue-collar workers. We are society’s outliers, and one of the few advantages of that is we get to dress however we want. Rock and rollers figured that out a long time ago, and so we barely look twice at the collection of leather, tattoos, teased hair, and bad makeup that your average rock and roller brings into a room.

Well, let’s go one better. If you’re a playwright, there is a good chance you’re some sort of a freak. Highlight that through your clothing choice. Ransack an S&M store and show up at your premiere in a leather facemask. Tear apart clothes from a thrift store and reassemble them using duct tape and a needle threaded with dental floss. Dress in bright red tuxedos, or dress like a space alien. It’s been too long since David Bowie looked like he had just fallen out of a passing space ship, and it’s probably time a playwright tried their hand at it. We’re theatrical people, god damn it; why do we tend to look like slobs? We should be walking billboards for the theater we make. People should look at us and know we bring something outrageous to the table.

Oscar Wilde used to have professional costume designers create his costumes, which were so gaudy by Victorian standards that he was constantly mocked for it. But Wilde wasn’t just a dandy — he knew that a little bit of outrage is great box office. Next time you see a production of "The Importance of Being Earnest," keep in mind that it wasn’t just the dazzling dialogue that made it a sensation — it was Wilde’s cape and soft hats.

You can't dress outrageously and not act outrageously. And my guess is, if you’re like most Americans, your impulse is toward lunacy, and you constantly thwart that. We’re a nation of maniacs masquerading as squares, and we playwrights should not feel bound to participate in those conventions. Joe Orton used to write angry letters to the press about his own plays — now there was a man with a head for self-promotion. We can do as well.

You may be tempted to use drugs. That’s up to you, but keep in mind that drugs can affect your artistic output, so try to be appropriate. If you write about sex, maybe poppers are for you; there is, after all, a reason they have been popular in the gay underworld for decades now. If you write angry plays, maybe Bennies? It worked for The Who, after all. LSD runs the real risk of causing you to write psychedelic theater, which can either be hilarious or terrible, often both. So choose wisely.

I know, I know: I shouldn’t be suggesting people use drugs. So many people are so bloody awful at them, and wind up jumping off roofs or dying miserably of hepatitis. Steer clear of the stuff if it’s not for you. There are all sorts of other ways to make yourself a spectacle.

You can make a big fuss about sex. Sex is free, it’s fun, and we get to do it because we’re adults, but if you publicly stray into more avant garde territory here, tongues will start wagging. Write essays about the most outrageous sexual thing you have ever done for some erotica blog. Get photos taken of yourself line dancing at a lesbian club. Let an especially terrifying Craigslist ad, perhaps involving cock and ball torture, get traced back to you. Release sex tapes of yourself and claim an assistant stole them. But make sure the tapes are hot — god, the last thing we need is more boring amateur porn. Have three-ways with groupies. If we are to be rock and roll stars, it’s going to be expected of us, and groupies work hard for it. They deserve it.

Artistically, it might be time to dive deep into punk's most important legacy: DIY, doing it yourself. You could spend your life sending off scripts to theaters and waiting years and years for them to finally decide to do a production, or you can just mount the play yourself. And the advantage of this is you don’t have to write to anybody’s specifications — just write what you know you can afford to do. Theater can be awesomely inexpensive to produce, especially as there are all sorts of free places to perform in any American city. We don’t need to put our plays on a stage — set a play in an alley and then just go ahead and take over an alley. It will cost nothing, and the bottle gang of alcoholic hobos will appreciate the free entertainment. We’re in a recession now, which means most American cities are cluttered with derelict buildings. These are all potential stages. Sure, there might be some legal issues involved in trespassing, but then, getting arrested for the sake of art is a tried and true way of attracting attention. I’d suggest performing in a park, as they are free and open for the public to use, but you run the real risk of running into a Shakespeare troupe, and that’s never fun.

Hell, this is rock and roll. Rent out a hotel room and trash it — make that your show! Keep in mind, though, that I authored a play called "Fucked Up Rock Stars Trash a Hotel Room," and I may sue you. Do it anyway! There's nothing that generates publicity like a lawsuit. If that's too much for you, just take over a bar and do a show there. Trust me, if you can bring a large enough audience, the bar will underwrite it, just to have people drinking beer. Crash conventions — they’re always looking for entertainment, and if you adapt some slash science fiction stories to the stage, you’ll be in demand at every science-fiction convention in America.

And what of the plays? You’re not going to make much money anyway, so write them fast. Don’t worry about them being perfect. Don’t even worry about them being art. There are plenty of people struggling with just the perfect word and just the perfect scene transition. We’re the punks here. Our goal isn’t to write a perfect play, or even a meaningful one, but a spectacular one. Steal text from the web — there’s a noble tradition of this sort of theft, and it’s called “found text.” Write in a frenzy and glue your text together almost at random. When William Burroughs did it, it was called “cut up.” As long as you can find an existing, and artistically respected, example of your approach, you can be as fast or as wild as you like and call it your aesthetic. This shouldn’t be an excuse to do bad work, by the by. But I stand with Oscar Wilde in that the only sin is to be boring. Don’t shoot to make a masterpiece. Shoot to make something you would want to see. More than that, shoot to make a piece of art you’d be afraid of. Ask anything of your actors, if you want to see it in a play. Ask for nudity. Ask for live sex acts. They can always say no.

And actors? There are a lot of them. Put an ad on Craigslist and they will line up outside your door. But, when possible, I argue that you should flesh your cast out with non-actors. Build your plays out of glorious freaks. This is not polished theater, and its imperfections can be seen as a sign of authenticity, so find the most authentically imperfect people you can. Are they going to be bad at acting? Some will, so write plays in which bad acting is a bonus! A badly performed line of dialogue can be infinitely more entertaining that a well-performed one. We’re not after the exquisite here, we’re after the memorable.

And finally, and most importantly, publicize everything you do. Send out press releases constantly. They’re easy to write, and the American press is just lazy enough to print them exactly as written every so often. But go beyond that — have your own Web pages and Facebook pages and zines and self-published books and whatnot. Put all your plays on your Web page. Put videos of your plays on your Web site. Put videos of your arrests on your Web site. How else is anybody going to know what you’re up to, and they’re going to want to know. You’re a star, aren’t you?

ON FAME

It sometimes seems like everybody in America wants to be famous, and they don’t know why. We’re raised in a world that is supersaturated with fame, and we grow up with a media that is fascinated by fame, and it’s mostly unexamined. It’s why we wind up with a grotesque parade of talentless nobodies on reality television, each certain they deserve their moment in the spotlight. And perhaps they do. Fame isn’t a product of accomplishment. It’s a separate phenomenon, and who am I to say who deserves it or not?

Fame is mostly a byproduct of mass media. At its simplest, fame is the experience of having a lot of people know who you are, and that can happen to anybody who finds themselves broadcast to a large audience. An appearance on television can instantaneously put you in front of millions of eyes. A viral YouTube video can have you seen by an equally large number of people.

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WE CAN BE SUPERSTARS:

PUBLIC RELATIONS AND SELF-PROMOTION FOR THE PLAYWRIGHT

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: WE CAN BE SUPERSTARS

BE NOTORIOUS

ON FAME