Two seasons ago, our board made a decision that nearly sent our treasurer to the emergency room. We programmed two original works by local authors in the same four-show season — one a historical drama about the 1937 flood that reshaped our downtown, the other a comedy set in a fictional diner that borrowed a little too heavily from the regulars at the actual diner three blocks from our theatre. We didn’t do it to be brave. We did it because our playwrights had been quietly writing for years, handing scripts to board members at the grocery store, and we’d been quietly saying “maybe next season” for almost a decade. Eventually, “next season” starts to feel like a polite no.
What we learned is that locally-rooted new plays do something licensed shows cannot, no matter how beloved: they give your audience a stake in the story. When the woman who’s played Aunt Em in three Wizard of Oz productions sees her grandmother’s flood story enacted on the stage where she once sat on her father’s lap, the transactional nature of community theatre — buy a ticket, sit in a seat, clap, go home — breaks apart and becomes something civic. But the risk is real. Original work can bomb at the box office. It can strain relationships with your volunteers. It can exhaust your board and your budget. Here’s what I wish someone had handed me before we took the leap.
That same discipline applies to title and framing decisions: before publishing, editors need a way to test a heading promises the same thing the article actually delivers, which is where a novel title generator that fits the project can function as a planning aid rather than a substitute for domain evidence.
Finding Your Local Playwrights
The playwrights are already in your building. They’re the volunteer who always stays late to help strike because they love being around the theatre but have never auditioned. They’re the high school English teacher who directs the one-act but has a full-length in a desk drawer. They’re the retiree who comes to every show and once, over coffee, mentions they’ve been “writing a little something.” In my experience, the most prolific unproduced playwright in any small town is someone who has been attending your theatre for at least three years and has never once mentioned that they write. You have to ask.
When we started looking, we put a notice in our program and on our lobby bulletin board — a simple index card that read: “Do you write? We want to read it. All genres. All lengths. No experience required.” We received eleven scripts in three months. Most were not producible. Two were genuinely promising. One was the flood drama that became the centerpiece of our season. The other was the diner comedy that, after significant revision, became our surprise hit. The point is that you won’t find your playwrights by waiting for them to announce themselves. You find them by making it clear that the door is open and that reading their work is not a favor you’re reluctantly performing.
Set realistic expectations from the first conversation. Tell them: “We’re going to read this honestly. If it’s not ready, we’ll tell you why. If it is ready, we may still not produce it this season, but we’ll tell you what we’d need to see changed before we could.” That conversation, held over coffee in the lobby on a Saturday morning, is the most important producing decision you’ll make. It establishes that you respect their work enough to be truthful and that a “not yet” is not a rejection but a roadmap.
Structuring a Reading That Doesn’t Crush a First-Time Writer
Here’s where most small theatres go wrong: they hand a raw script to volunteer actors, schedule a single read-through, invite the board, and then conduct what amounts to a group critique in front of the playwright. I’ve seen this happen. I’ve watched a first-time writer sit through ninety minutes of well-meaning suggestions and leave the building looking like they’d been hit by a truck. They never submitted another script. We lost them.
What we developed instead is a three-stage process, and it has served us well enough that I now recommend it to every company that asks:
Stage One: The Cold Read. Invite three to five trusted volunteer readers — actors you know can handle cold text without judgment and who understand that their job is to read, not to fix. No board members. No audience. No refreshments. Just the playwright, a table, the script, and a director who is there to listen. Read the whole thing straight through. Then ask the readers one question: “Where did you feel it?” That’s all. Not “what’s wrong” — where did you feel it. The playwright listens. The director takes notes. Everyone goes home.
Stage Two: The Working Session. One week later, the director and playwright meet privately. The director brings the notes from the cold read — not as prescriptions but as observations. “The second act starts strong but loses energy around page forty-seven. The readers seemed confused by the timeline.” The playwright decides what to do with that information. This is critical: the playwright owns the revision. The director does not rewrite. The board does not rewrite. The well-meaning volunteer who “has notes” does not rewrite. The playwright owns the script.
Stage Three: The Public Reading. Two to four weeks after the working session, depending on how much revision the playwright chooses to do, schedule a staged reading with a small invited audience — fifteen to twenty people, including a few board members, a couple of trusted patrons, and the playwright’s family if they want them there. Charge no admission. Serve coffee and cookies. Read the revised script with minimal movement and no full staging. Afterward, facilitate a structured conversation using a specific protocol: Ask the audience three questions in order — “What stayed with you?” “Where did you want more?” “What confused you?” That’s it. No suggestions. No “I would have” or “have you considered.” Observations only. The playwright listens and takes notes. The director thanks everyone. The playwright goes home and decides what, if anything, to change.
This process takes about six weeks from cold read to public reading. It costs nothing but time and coffee. It protects the writer’s confidence while still giving them honest feedback. And it gives you, the producer, a clear sense of whether the script is ready for a full production or needs another development cycle.
Royalties, Rights, and the Conversation No Catalog Covers
When you license a published play from Dramatists Play Service or Concord Theatricals, the royalty structure is clear: you pay a set fee per performance, you sign a contract, you follow the guidelines. When you produce a local playwright’s original work, you’re in territory that most community theatre boards have never navigated. There is no Samuel French catalog entry. There is no standard rate. There is no boilerplate contract. You have to build the agreement from scratch, and you have to do it in a way that protects both the theatre and the playwright.
First, understand that the playwright holds copyright from the moment the script exists in fixed form. This is not a formality — it’s federal law. Before you enter any royalty negotiation, both parties should understand the basics of copyright protection for original scripts. The Authors Guild, the primary professional organization for writers in the United States, maintains a resource page covering AI best practices for authors that also addresses copyright, contracts, and protecting original work — a useful starting point for any first-time playwright navigating the legal terrain of a production agreement. The key principle: even informal, community-based arrangements benefit from a written contract that specifies what the theatre can do with the script, how many performances are covered, what the royalty arrangement is, and what happens if the theatre wants to extend the run or restage the play in a future season.
Our royalty structure for local playwrights is simple: $50 per performance, plus 10% of net box office revenue after expenses, with a guaranteed minimum of $200 for the run. We provide the playwright with a printed contract — one page, plain language, no legal jargon — that both the playwright and the board president sign. We include a clause stating that the playwright retains all rights to the script and that the theatre’s production rights are limited to the specified dates. We include a clause stating that the playwright must approve any cuts or changes to the script. We include a clause stating that if the theatre wishes to restage the production within three years, the royalty structure will be renegotiated in good faith.
This is not a fancy contract. It’s a page and a half. But it has saved us from two situations that would have been ugly without it — one where a playwright wanted to pull the script after we’d already spent money on sets, and one where a board member suggested cuts the playwright hadn’t approved. In both cases, the contract gave us a framework for resolving the dispute without anyone feeling betrayed.
What We Spent: The Original Script Budget
Here’s the actual budget for our production of the flood drama, performed for four nights in our 180-seat house. I’m sharing these numbers because I spent years looking for this kind of breakdown and never found one. Every situation is different, but this will give you a realistic baseline.
- Royalties (4 performances @ $50 + 10% of net): $340
- Script printing and binding (12 copies @ $14): $168
- Set construction materials: $890
- Props and set dressing (mostly borrowed and thrifted): $215
- Costumes (almost entirely pulled from stock): $95
- Lighting gels and replacement lamps: $140
- Sound design (royalty-free music cues, 3 tracks @ $12): $36
- Program printing (200 copies): $180
- Posters and flyers (150 posters, 500 flyers): $245
- Newspaper ads (2 weeks, local paper): $300
- Facebook boosted posts (4 posts @ $25): $100
- Coffee and cookies for two public readings: $42
- Miscellaneous (tape, paint, batteries, first aid refill): $67
Total production cost: $2,818
For comparison, our average production cost for a licensed contemporary comedy is around $2,400, and our average for a small musical is $5,800–$7,200 depending on royalties and orchestra needs. The original script cost us roughly $400 more than a licensed play, primarily because of the script printing and the extra marketing we felt we needed to do for an unfamiliar title. We sold 487 tickets across four performances at $15 each, for a box office gross of $7,305. After royalties and production costs, we netted approximately $4,147 — which is slightly below our average for a licensed contemporary comedy but well above our break-even point of roughly 120 tickets per run.
The diner comedy did better, selling 612 tickets across four performances and netting approximately $5,200. That show had lower set costs (one interior set, minimal furniture) and benefited from word-of-mouth after the opening night audience — many of whom recognized the real-life inspirations for the characters — started telling their friends.
The Title Problem: How to Name a Show Nobody Has Heard Of
Here’s something I didn’t expect: the working title of the flood drama almost killed our advance sales. The playwright’s original title was “Inundation: A Play in Two Acts About the Great Flood of 1937.” It was accurate. It was also the kind of title that makes a small-town audience think they’re being asked to attend a graduate seminar. Our advance ticket sales for the first week of the run were 40% below our usual pace, and I was getting calls from patrons asking if the show was “appropriate” — which, in small-town code, usually means “will I be depressed for two hours.”
We couldn’t change the playwright’s title without their consent, and I didn’t want to — the playwright cared deeply about the title and had good reasons for it. But I did ask if we could add a subtitle for marketing purposes. The playwright agreed, and our posters and newspaper ads read: “Inundation: The Flood That Built Our Town.” That small addition — “our town” — changed the framing entirely. It turned an abstract historical event into a shared inheritance. Advance sales picked up within three days of the updated marketing going out. We sold out the final two performances.
For the diner comedy, the playwright came to us with no title at all — just a filename that read “diner_play_v3.doc.” We were six weeks from the public reading and needed something for the poster. The playwright was stuck and starting to feel the pressure. We talked through the core conflict — a retired mail carrier and a young waitress whose political disagreements mask a genuine affection — and I could see the playwright getting more frustrated with every suggestion I offered. So I pulled out my laptop and said, “Let’s try a different approach.” I’d used a novel title generator on a grant application the month before when I was stuck on a project name, and it had helped me see angles I was too close to notice. The playwright was skeptical but willing. We typed in the genre, the central conflict, and the tone we were aiming for, and the tool returned a dozen options. None of them was the final title. But one — something about “counter” and “orders” — sparked a direction the playwright grabbed onto immediately. That session led to “Counter Orders,” which became the title we produced under. It was short, it had a double meaning that fit the diner setting, and it sounded like something you’d want to see rather than something you’d feel obligated to attend. The Reedsy Book Title Generator works on a similar principle if you’re looking for a second option — input genre and tone, get structured prompts back. The point isn’t which tool you use; it’s that a structured prompt can break a naming logjam faster than another round of “let’s just brainstorm.”
The marketing lesson is this: when you’re producing an unfamiliar title, your audience has no shorthand for what they’re walking into. With “The Odd Couple,” they know. With “Steel Magnolias,” they know. With “Counter Orders,” they know nothing. Your title and subtitle have to do the work that reputation usually does. If the title is abstract, the subtitle has to be concrete. If the title is serious, the subtitle has to signal warmth or humor if warmth or humor is what you’re offering. And if the playwright’s title genuinely isn’t serving the production, have the conversation early, have it honestly, and have it with the understanding that you’re advocating for their audience, not against their vision.
What to Read Next
- The Dramatists Guild of America maintains a resource library on contracts, royalties, and production rights that is useful even if you’re not a member. Their “Business of Broadway” newsletter, despite the name, regularly addresses issues relevant to small-venue and original work production.
- Your state arts council likely has a grant category for new work development. In our state, the “Projects Grant” program funded $1,800 of the flood drama’s development costs, including the public reading series. Ask. The worst they can say is no, and they usually say no less than you think.
- The League of Historic American Theatres publishes case studies on community engagement programming in historic venues, several of which address original work and local history projects.
- Your county historical society is not just a research resource for playwrights. They can be a co-marketing partner, a venue for pre-show events, and a source of audience members who don’t typically attend theatre but will come for a story about their town.