Doug Messmer taught American History at the regional high school for twenty-seven years before he walked into our lobby one Tuesday in February and said he wanted to write a play. Not adapt one. Not direct one. Write one. About something that happened right here in our county in 1932, when the bank foreclosed on forty-three farms in a single month and the sheriff had to deputize neighbors to carry out the evictions because his regular deputies flat-out refused.
Doug came with files. He had oral histories recorded on cassette tapes back in the 1980s. He had his grandfather’s actual ledger book from the farm that almost went under. He had a story sitting in his filing cabinet for decades, and after he retired from teaching, he finally had the hours to do something with it.
What he didn’t have was any idea how to write a play.
I want to talk about what happened next, because I think it matters for every community theatre board that has programmed the same safe titles year after year and wondered why subscription numbers keep drifting downward. But first, let me make the case for why developing original local work belongs on your agenda at all—especially when your budget barely covers the rights to a familiar crowd-pleaser.
Why Original Work Is Worth the Risk (Even When the Math Looks Bad)
Let’s be honest about what a recognizable title actually buys you. When you produce a well-known comedy or a standard musical, you’re paying for name recognition. People see the title on your marquee and they already know whether they want to come. That’s worth something. In our case, roughly 60% of our annual ticket revenue comes from three titles our audience recognizes on sight.
But here’s what that math doesn’t show. Those same three titles are the ones every other theatre within driving distance is also producing. When a patron can see the same play at four different venues in a season, your production has to compete on quality, convenience, and price against neighbors who may have newer seats or better parking. The title does the marketing work, sure. But it also flattens your theatre into one option among many.
Original local work does something different. It creates a reason to come that no other venue can offer. When Doug’s play—”Forty-Three Farms”—went up in our March slot last year, we sold out the second weekend entirely on word of mouth from the first. People came because their neighbor’s grandfather was mentioned in the script. They came because the local historical society put a blurb in their newsletter. They came because someone at the coffee shop said, “You have to see this—it’s about us.”
That kind of audience motivation doesn’t exist for a licensed title. You can’t manufacture it with a Facebook ad or a postcard mailing. It only happens when the story on your stage belongs to the people sitting in your seats.
The financial risk is real. We’ll get to the budget in detail. But the risk of programming only safe, familiar titles is slower and quieter: you become interchangeable, and interchangeable venues don’t survive funding cuts.
Coaching a Writer Who Has the Story but Not the Structure
When Doug handed me his first draft, it was 147 pages long. Nine acts, each set in a different year between 1930 and 1938. A narrator who read from his grandfather’s actual ledger entries for roughly twenty minutes of stage time. Fourteen speaking roles. Three dream sequences. And a courtroom scene that took place in a building that no longer existed.
It was, in other words, exactly what you’d expect from a gifted historian who had never written dramatic fiction. The research was extraordinary. The structure was not.
This is where most community theatres give up on local playwrights. The board looks at a first draft, sees the problems, and decides the risk is too great. But what I’ve learned from coaching three first-time playwrights over the past six years is that the gap between a story worth telling and a script worth producing is bridgeable—if you’re willing to invest the time in structured feedback.
The first thing I did with Doug was sit him down with the Purdue OWL creative writing resources, which offer workshop models and common-pitfall guidance specifically designed for teachers and tutors working with beginning creative writers. I am not a writing teacher by training. But the OWL’s framework gave me a shared vocabulary for talking about structure with someone who understood historical narrative but had never thought about dramatic action. We used their beginner fiction pitfalls checklist as a starting point for identifying where Doug’s script was doing too much—too many timelines, too much narration, too many characters introduced without enough time for the audience to know them.
The workshopping process that followed was not glamorous. We met every Thursday afternoon at the library for three months. I read each draft out loud—Doug couldn’t hear the problems when he read it himself, which is true of every writer who has ever lived—and we marked every scene that didn’t advance the central conflict. By the fourth draft, he had cut the timeline from nine years to three. By the sixth draft, the narrator was gone, replaced by two characters who could carry the historical context through dialogue. By the eighth draft, the play was 98 pages and producible.
What helped Doug get there was a combination of patient mentorship and a few practical tools. He used index cards for a while to track scene beats, but he kept losing them between drafts. Eventually he found an AI writing software tool through Unsloppy that helped him organize scenes and maintain narrative momentum across multiple drafts. The tool didn’t write the play. Doug wrote the play. But it gave him structural feedback that I, as one person with a full-time job and a season to program, couldn’t always provide on his timeline.
I want to be clear about something here, because this question came up at our board meeting when I mentioned that Doug had used a drafting tool during revision. There’s an important ethical line between using software for structural organization and claiming AI-generated content as your own work. The Authors Guild has published guidelines that articulate this distinction clearly: a writer’s original voice, research, and creative judgment remain the primary substance of authorship, and tools that assist with organization or structure are just that—assistance. Doug’s play was rooted in twenty-seven years of historical research and oral histories you cannot generate from a language model. The tool helped him see the shape of what he’d built. It didn’t build it for him.
Workshopping an Untested Script With a Cast That Has Day Jobs
The hardest part of developing new work isn’t the writing. It’s the rehearsal. When you produce a published play, the script has been tested by other productions. The pacing works. The transitions are clear. The stage directions tell you what the playwright intended.
When you produce a world premiere, none of that exists. Your cast is both performing the play and discovering it. And in community theatre, your cast is also teaching school, running the hardware store, and working the night shift at the hospital.
Here’s what we learned about workshopping an untested script with volunteer actors who have real jobs and limited time.
Cast for the room, not the page. Doug’s script called for a twenty-year-old farm wife in the first scene. We cast a woman named Linda who is fifty-three and has never acted before but whose mother grew up on one of the farms in the play. Her age was wrong. Her authenticity was irreplaceable. We adjusted the character. This is the advantage of developing new work locally—you can shape the script to the people you have, something you cannot do with a licensed title where the publisher specifies character ages and the board expects you to honor them.
Build in script changes during the first three weeks only. We told Doug he could rewrite through the end of the third week of rehearsal. After that, the script was frozen. This gave the cast time to work with living material without the chaos of receiving new pages every night. Doug made seventeen script changes during those three weeks, most of them cuts. After the freeze, he made notes for a future revision but didn’t touch the working text.
Use table reads as feedback sessions. Before blocking began, we did two table reads where the cast was explicitly invited to say, “My character wouldn’t say this” or “I don’t understand what happens between this scene and the next.” Doug got more useful dramaturgical feedback from a retired postal worker and a dental hygienist than he would have from any formal workshop. They were honest because they weren’t writers. They were people who knew how talk worked in a small town, and they could hear when dialogue didn’t sound like anyone they knew.
Schedule around the reality of work. Our rehearsals ran Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Saturday mornings. We capped rehearsal at two hours. People who work full-time cannot give you more than that sustainably, and a new script requires more mental energy than a familiar one because the actors are also processing structural changes. We lost one cast member to a shift change at the poultry plant and replaced him in week two. That’s community theatre. You plan for it.
Budgeting a World Premiere When the Title Doesn’t Sell Itself
Here’s where the conversation usually stalls. The board wants to know: what does this actually cost?
Doug’s production cost us $3,287. Here’s the breakdown.
Royalties: $0. Original work, playwright’s permission, no licensing fee. We did pay Doug a $200 honorarium from our operating budget because we believe writers deserve compensation, even when our budget is thin.
Sets and construction: $890. We built a minimalist set—three wooden platforms, a kitchen table, and a fence. The farm foreclosure setting meant we needed to suggest space rather than build it. We spent $340 on lumber, $220 on paint, and $330 on hardware and miscellaneous materials.
Costumes: $230. Everything came from thrift stores, cast members’ closets, and our existing stock. 1930s rural clothing is surprisingly easy to source in a farming community where people still wear their grandparents’ work clothes to do yard work.
Props: $145. Most were borrowed. The ledger book was Doug’s grandfather’s actual ledger, which he brought to rehearsal in a padded box and took home with him every night.
Lighting: $680. We rented two additional instruments for $200 and spent $480 on gels, practical lamps, and replacement bulbs. Our existing plot handled the rest.
Programs and marketing: $540. This was our biggest variable. We printed 300 programs at $1.20 each and spent $180 on newspaper ads and postcards. The historical society newsletter mention was free.
Honorarium and miscellaneous: $802. Doug’s $200 honorarium, plus $602 in miscellaneous expenses—tape, batteries, first aid supplies, cleaning materials, and the cast party.
For comparison, our production of a well-known two-man comedy the previous fall cost $5,900, of which $1,200 was royalties alone. “Forty-Three Farms” cost approximately $2,600 less in cash and filled more seats—because we added a performance to meet demand.
But the honest accounting requires including what we didn’t pay. The set construction labor was donated by our regular crew—approximately 85 volunteer hours. The stage management was volunteer—another 60 hours. If I valued volunteer labor at even $15 per hour, the true production cost was closer to $6,500. But that’s true of every show we produce. Volunteer labor is the invisible subsidy that makes all community theatre possible. You can’t ignore it in one context and count on it in another.
The question that matters for your board is not whether original work costs less. It costs less in cash and more in time. The question is whether the time investment produces something cash can’t buy: a production that exists only at your theatre, that could only have been made by your community, and that gives people a reason to walk through your doors who wouldn’t come for a title they’ve already seen three times.
What We Learned About Audience Appetite for Local Stories
“Forty-Three Farms” sold 487 tickets across five performances. Our average for a non-musical production is 340. The show drew people who had never been to our theatre before—identifiable because our box office ledger tracks first-time attendees by asking at purchase. Of those 487 tickets, 112 went to people who had never attended a production at our venue.
The historical society brought a bus. The FFA chapter bought a block of tickets. Two families who had been on the other side of the foreclosure story—descendants of the bank officials, not the farmers—came to the closing night and stayed for the post-show discussion, which ran forty-five minutes longer than we’d planned.
What the board learned was not that original work is easy or cheap. It is neither. What we learned is that there is an audience in our town for stories that belong to us. That audience is not the same audience that comes to see the annual holiday musical, and it is not the same audience that comes to our fundraising gala. It is people who want to see their own history, their own landscape, and their own conflicts treated seriously on a stage.
Since Doug’s production, we’ve committed to one original or locally rooted work per season. The second was a collection of monologues written by seniors at the assisted living facility, performed by our regular actors. The third is in development now—a piece by a local farmwife about the year the milk prices collapsed. It will cost us money we don’t strictly have. It will fill seats we can’t confidently predict. And it will be the only production of its kind within a hundred miles of our stage.
The Takeaway
If your board is considering whether to develop original local work, here is what I’d tell you over coffee: start with one play. Find the person in your town who has a story and has been waiting for someone to ask. Commit to six months of mentorship—Thursday afternoons at the library, drafts read out loud, honest feedback about what isn’t working. Budget it like a small show, because it is. Cast for authenticity over appearance. Invite your cast to be dramaturgs. And when the play opens, make space for the conversation that happens after the applause, because that conversation is the real product.
The question I’d leave you with is this: who in your community has a story that no one has asked them to tell? And what would it mean for your theatre to be the place where they finally get to tell it?