Playwriting Friends — I have a recommendation to pass along. Jacqueline Goldfinger recently started a service for playwrights called Business of Playwriting Consultations. In case you don’t have time to read this blog entry, I’ll cut to the chase — if you’re a playwright who is struggling to navigate the theatre landscape in this moment and want fresh eyes on your plans for a specific play and other business advice, you need to apply for this opportunity immediately. Trust me on this one.
The process:
Submit a play on her website: https://www.jacquelinegoldfinger.com
https://www.jacquelinegoldfinger.com/consultationConduct a 30-minute phone conversation about your goals for the play
Receive a detailed plan of places to submit tailored to your work (places you haven’t already applied), as well as people to contact, classes to take, links to form emails and resources. In all, after I pasted the information from the links into a document, it was 25 pages of resources!!
Follow up on the phone for an hour consultation with Jackie going over the plan and answering questions along the way.
Jackie’s business advice comes from her decades of navigating the theatre world as a playwright, producer, and educator. The opportunity to have a conversation with someone so accomplished was worth the price of admission (twice the fee would still be a bargain).
Entering into this service, I hoped for some thoughts about where to submit that were specific to my play, some frank advice about my career and what to focus on to reach my goals. I got all of that plus a mind-blowing amount more.
Jackie researched the theatres in my city (one of which I didn’t know existed), who to contact, how to approach them, ideas for how to get involved locally, specific areas in my website to fix, thoughts about my artist’s statement, etc.
A few words to describe Jackie: generous, frank, insightful, compassionate. Jackie gets it and doesn’t sugar-coat the difficulties. But I left feeling like I had a realistic and strategic plan about where to spend my energy to get my play out in the world.
This opportunity is a no-brainer. It will be the best money you spend on your playwriting career in terms of what you get for what you pay. I will definitely do this again for my next play. To find out more about Jackie, check out her bio: https://www.jacquelinegoldfinger.com/about