MeyerBros

the SSDC and the DGA are entangled in an all out (sometimes legal) battle over copyright issues. everyone, surprisingly, wants to be paid for the work that they do.

i’ve been reading the latest issue of The Dramatist, a magazine that i recieve as a member of the DGA. i love this magazine as much as i hate it. every issue is thrilling, inspiring, angering, pathetic, self-centered, energizing, smug and insulur. what more could you ask for in a publication. i am reminded with every issue that New York is the only important place in the world (with the occasional minor exception of Chicago), playwrights are the only important people in the theatre, and nearly everyone is out to get me. i can also read back-to-back articles by Marsha Norman and Richard Nelson, the former listing her simplistic rules of playwrighting (which she teaches at Juilliard) and the latter arguing that such rules are the bane of playwrighting (which he teaches at Yale). neither one, you will notice, is too far from the center of the universe, which is Broadway. and neither one dares question the centrality of playwriting in that universe. this is, after all, “The Journal of The Dramatists Guid of America, Inc.” the issue concludes with a playwright’s legal battle against a former director in copyright issues. i disagree with both sides of that one article. that’s a lot to disagree with, but as a young anabaptist radical i consider myself up for that sort of third-way challenge.
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