THEATER IS HARD

WHERE IT CAME FROM

I started Theater Is Hard as a weekly Substack in February, 2025. 

Originally, I was just trying to be honest about real life in the theater in the 21st century. I wrote funny, harrowing, moving and personal narratives or I invented imagined dialogues with historical theater artists like Strindberg, Artaud, Chekhov, Grotowski, Oscar Wilde and more. Sometimes I’d even argue with objects and concepts, like an application or Capitalist Rot.

I hustled this book you are reading now to many theater publishers. Responses ranged from “but how many followers do you have?” to “you’re not famous enough” to “no” to the standard industry ghosting.

Always no. Always, we, the industry, know better than you, the artist. Always, we don’t trust you, kid.

Cliched as it sounds, the theater I trained in and fell in love with was always rooted in “Yes, and” not “No, because.”

What would American theater look like without so much “No, because?” 

What if gatekeepers, personal taste, curation and capitalism were done away with in the theater entirely? What if inclusion wasn’t just cat-nip for non-profit mission statements, but truly executed?

What if the default setting for contemporary American theater was “yes?” 

No, I thought. Because we can’t possibly say yes toevery play for production. Nobody has the means for that. 

But… for publication?

No, I thought. Because if you publishedeveryone’s play, shit would get crazy. I’d see a lot of brilliant plays, sure, but I’d also be fending off lunatics, misogynists, racists, entitled know-it-alls, Neil LaButes, David Mamets and god knows who else. 

There has to besome metric for a “yes,” some standard of excellence. Otherwise it’s bedlam.

I rolled this question over in my head for a long time. 

The answer soon came:Performance.

DEFINITION OF PERFORMANCE
A "performance" is a reading, workshop or full production, in front of an audience. It doesn’t have to have been fancy, it just has to have been.

CRITERIA FOR ACCEPTANCE
If your play has been performed in front of an audience, publication is an immediate “yes.” 

I will not read, judge, curate, or edit your play. Who am I to do that? I only like what I like, and that's a narrowminded way to make an ecosystem. But if you, the playwright, took the essential step of organizing and presenting a show, well, you made a play happen in America, so you deserve a “yes.”

CRITERIA FOR REJECTION
If your play has not had a performance in front of an audience, it’s an immediate “no.” 

But, unlike nearly every artistic institution in America, there’s no mystery about how you can turn that “no” into a “yes.” You simply put on a performance, resubmit, and it’s a “yes.”

PHILOSOPHY BEHIND THEATER IS HARD PROJECT
My philosophy here is multi-faceted. 

1) It incentivizes activating a performance, scrappy or fancy, not waiting for one to be activated, which is a form of gatekeeping and industry control.

2) It eliminates the tyranny of taste, intellect, personal grievances, class, and bias– both conscious and unconscious and level of education. This model dictates the ecosystem of American theater based solely on the ones whodid something, not the ones who know someone. 

3) Although my Theater Is Hard brand is attached to every publication, I personally serve only as a point person and conduit, not as an arbiter of taste.

PROFIT MODEL

Any profit made from this project goes directly to the artist and/or into the business model that supports the publicity and book production of the artists’ works. These terms are laid out in detail in the contract each artist receives upon their “yes.”

Because I am an playwright myself, I know how it is. I have no interest in profiting on this. I have no interest in fucking you over. So all published scripts will come attached with a standard contract, with nothing hidden and nothing sneaky. You can read it here.

Because this is your publication imprint, I will also make all income and expenses public.

PRINT-ON-DEMAND MODEL
All publications from Theater Is Hard are printed on demand by Lightning Source, a business unit of Ingram. Both as physical copies and e-books will be made available for purchase. With print-on-demand, there is no inventory filling a warehouse somewhere, and so no minimum playwrights are pressured to buy or sell. 

NOW, I KNOW WHAT YOU'RE THINKING
What if Neil LaBute presents a public reading of his new play,I Hate Women and requests publication from Theater Is Hard’s press imprint project? What if David Mamet submits his new one, Trump Is Great?

Well, ifI Hate Women or Trump Is Great meets the Theater Is Hard sole criteria of public performance, Neil and Dave can assume they will both receive an immediate “yes” on publication. Them's the rules.

However:  the texts of both scripts need to pass through the Theater Is Hard tech stack.

The tech stack is a gauntlet of automation that scans the your script for hate speech and harmful content. If any play is dinged, it will be removed from Theater Is Hard.

NOW, I KNOW WHAT YOU'RE THINKING AGAIN
How will AI detect satire and context?

I myself have written plays that technically contain “hate speech,” but in context, the average human audience member understands what I am doing.

Also, what if the hate speech is embedded in the text without using a single word of hate speech? I know that Oleanna is a misogynist piece of shite writing, but no where does Mamet say "Gee, I hate women." So would it my tech stack ding it? 

Answer: I don’t know yet.

But I am working with the right people and systems to bring me to a place of knowing. Also, using a print-on-demind service offers a safety net that inventory, distribution and bookstores do not. If a hateful play gets through my tech stack and is somehow published, but then later comes to my attention, that play is removed from the catalog. So even if you own a copy of a toxic play that made it through, it ends there.

As with any art project, there are unknowns. Right now you are thinking of that thing that could go horribly wrong that I didn’t consider. (What if someone plagiarizes? What if someone uses unlicensed song lyrics? What if something is libelous?)

Don’t worry. 

I’m beta testing all of this and, with time, will generate a workflow.

THE RISK

I’m willing to take this risk because we need to work together to fix the broken, elitist system of contemporary American theater, a system rooted in exclusion, not inclusion, safety, not imagination, celebrity, not discovery. All these awful things leads to fewer live shows, and fewer variation in what does get produced.

My motivation here isn’t to “fuck the man,” but rather to activate more live shows.

If the man gets fucked while we do it, so be it.

Please browse around our (your) website and submit your proof of performance and play.

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