On a sun-kissed summer day at the Connecticut shore, some 200 people huddled in a darkened room. They had come to the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., to hear “Dead Girl Quinceañera,” a new play by Phanésia Pharel. The story of a Miami teenager who goes missing during her own birthday party, the play was performed by four young actresses, their scripts propped atop metal music stands.
When Pharel, a playwright newly sprung from graduate school, arrived at the O’Neill a week before, the play was much shorter. It lacked an ending. But she had since found one. After the reading, she floated back into the afternoon on an artist’s high. “It’s a dream,” she said of her time at the center. “It’s a little bit of a utopia.”
Pharel and three colleagues are the newest members of the National Playwrights Conference, which the O’Neill has hosted annually (barring a brief pandemic hiccup), since 1966. It is perhaps the country’s premiere spot for play development, its alumni functioning as a who’s who of American theater in the last half century.
John Guare was among the first cohort, with “The House of Blue Leaves.” Those who followed him include August Wilson, Wendy Wasserstein, David Henry Hwang, Beth Henley, Samuel D. Hunter, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Dominique Morisseau, Jeremy O. Harris. (Musical theater alumni include Jeanine Tesori, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Robert Lopez.) Celine Song, another alum, sets a scene from her recent film, “The Materialists,” at the center.
But if the influence of the O’Neill is undisputed, its future is far from assured. In recent years, the Lark, the Sundance Theater Lab and the Humana Festival — seemingly indispensable new play incubators — have all shuttered. While the O’Neill has hung on, this summer’s four playwrights represent about half of its typical roster. The center’s operating budget has shrunk by nearly a third. Tiffani Gavin, the center’s executive director since August 2020, described the O’Neill as “stable-ish.”
“I won’t say that we are thriving, I won’t say that aren’t struggling,” she continued. “We are.” Gavin and her team are investigating ways to engage the community, cultivate new donors, create new education programs and extend beyond the summer season to generate more revenue. “This year feels really quiet,” she said.
Recently, I spent two days at the O’Neill, which was founded in 1964 by George C. White, a Yale School of Drama graduate. The campus, grand and shabby, stands on the grounds of an estate formerly owned by a railroad millionaire who often chased a young Eugene O’Neill off his beach. (The nearby Monte Cristo Cottage, O’Neill’s childhood home, is also owned by the center.)
There are four major playing spaces — two outdoor, two indoor — a serviceable cafeteria, a ring of cabins and a small warren of offices and meeting rooms, topped by a sun-warmed library that holds every play the O’Neill has developed. A safe in the company manager’s offices contains Wilson’s hand-annotated scripts. The O’Neill, I was told by several people, has good ghosts.
On the lawn at the back of the Hammond house, I overheard an earnest conversation about Aristotle’s “Poetics,” conducted over mini pizzas. Outside the campus pub, staffers played cards. There was talk of karaoke nights, Frisbee games, morning swims. Theater summer camp for grown-ups? Sure. “This is theater Brigadoon,” Eleanor Burgess, one of the invited playwrights, said.
Over the years, the O’Neill’s offerings have grown to include the National Musical Theater Conference, as well as conferences on puppetry and cabaret, a critics institute and training programs for young artists. Yet its most celebrated program is the National Playwrights Conference. And while its parameters have shifted over the years, the conference’s format remains relatively consistent. Each year, readers peruse more than a thousand blind submissions, finalists are chosen, invitations are extended. In June or July, the playwrights arrive, they read their plays aloud, they consult with an assigned director. Professional actors perform a first staged reading for colleagues and a paying audience, playwrights rewrite, the actors perform a second reading, playwrights rewrite again. Because plays only truly exist in performance, playwrights can learn, quickly and with audience input, what works and what doesn’t.
Hudes, a Pulitzer Prize winner and the book writer of “In the Heights,” counts her weeks at the O’Neill working on her play “The Happiest Song Plays Last” as among the best of her life. “Something special happened in those days,” she wrote in an email. “The process. The togetherness. A sense of using these cultural materials, using our own rich histories in the work. It remains my gold standard for how it can feel, like something bigger than your individual contribution. Like the luckiest job on earth.”
The goal of the conference is not necessarily to move a play closer to production, on or Off Broadway. Hunter (“The Whale,” “A Case for the Existence of God”) came to the O’Neill as a graduate student. His time there transformed his writing process and taught him how to rewrite. The play he came with, “Norman Rockwell Killed My Father” was never subsequently produced. “But my entire relationship to the physical act of writing changed,” he said. “Like now the clay is perpetually wet.”
Readers do not consider commercial potential when evaluating a script and, unlike professional theaters that assist in a play’s development, the O’Neill does not demand any portion of a play’s subsequent earnings. “Its genesis was not wanting to saddle a writer with that kind of obligation right out front,” Gavin said. “It isn’t a commercial endeavor.”
Instead, the conference is meant to help playwrights learn about their plays, about themselves. They can be as wild as they want, as weird as they want, knowing that they’re not trying to impress a potential producer.
“It is truly for the playwright,” said Melia Bensussen, the artistic director of the playwrights conference. “You’re not auditioning. My note is always: Just do whatever the hell you want.”
Burgess, a midcareer playwright, has taken that note. She brought “The Ingénue,” a sprawling seven-actor play, based on a Restoration comedy, and she hasn’t felt tempted to narrow it. “Like, August Wilson probably sat here,” she said. “So for God’s sake, take a risk. Don’t operate from a place of people-pleasing and market-chasing when you’re staying in a cottage named after Wendy Wasserstein. Do something truthful.”
Crucially, playwrights take these risks in community. Playwriting is typically solitary work. “A lot of the hardest moments you handle on your own,” Burgess said. But here playwrights are encouraged to eat together, talk together, share wounds and workarounds. And they can do so in a quiet, bucolic space.
“There’s something about being outside of one’s day-to-day life,” said Emily Morse, the artistic director of New Dramatists, another play development organization, and a frequent O’Neill visitor. “It’s very open and very nurturing and it’s stimulating and it’s beautiful. ”
But that space has lessened. Gavin said that she has had to shrink the operating budget from $5.5 million to $3.75 million, which resulted in cuts to salary, capacity and staff. (There were 30 full-time staffers in 2020. There are now 25, though Gavin hopes to hire a few more. Seasonal staff has also been reduced.)
“We are as lean as we can be, too lean for the amount of programming we are used to producing,” Gavin wrote in an email. A canceled partnership with the Moscow Art Theater ended a revenue source, a National Endowment of the Arts grant was awarded, then canceled, as part of the Trump administration’s recent moves.
Individual and foundation giving has stalled. According to Gavin it has been difficult to attract a new generation of donors, in part because there is an overall decline in private giving to arts and because development — amorphous and difficult to quantify, with few naming rights or other perks — can be perceived as unsexy.
“The measure of success is different for us,” Gavin said.
Gavin hopes never again to have a season as quiet as this, as sparse as this. “This is the smallest season we could have and still consider ourselves delivering what we normally deliver,” she said.
The O’Neill isn’t the only development program remaining. There are about two dozen others, including prominent ones such as PlayPenn and the Ojai Playwrights Conference. But many of its peers are struggling as well. Without them, the world of American theater will become diminished, more homogenous, more dependent on a handful of respected graduate programs. There will be fewer places to fail and then to fail better, fewer places to take a risk.
“There’s a reason so many great plays have come through places like this,” Pharel said. “Because you need a certain level of development and specificity and care.”
Pharel needed it. She found it. “I really did have a magical time here,” she said.
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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