When Development Becomes Production
The Pipeline in Motion
I’m writing this from Philadelphia, where I’ll be in rehearsal for a few days with LITTLE THINGS at the Philadelphia Theatre Company.
And looking at the week ahead, I realized that this may be one of the clearest examples I’ve had of what I mean when I talk about a development pipeline.
Because this week, CreateTheater has work happening at nearly every point along it.
On Monday night, we’ll hold another Monday Night Developmental Reading—this time Act One of a new musical by ETC member Jarlath Jacobs, currently living in Italy. The working title is JACQUES & JILL, a reworking of her musical FIRE ISLAND, which had a showcase production at Theatre Row as part of the CreateTheater New Works Festival in 2022.
That project has already been produced once.
And now it is back in development.
Because development is not a straight line, and production is not always the end of the process.
Production Is Not the End of Development
There is a tendency to imagine a theater project moving along a neat, linear path:
Write the show → develop the show → produce the show → done.
But that is almost never how new theater actually works.
A reading reveals one thing.
A workshop reveals another.
A showcase reveals something else entirely.
Sometimes a production tells a writer that the piece is finished.
Sometimes it tells them exactly where the next version needs to begin.
That is what development is for.
Our Monday Night Developmental Readings have been running all summer, and we are now booked every Monday through December with readings of new plays and musicals. Some are early drafts. Others have already had significant development or production experience.
The point isn’t that every reading immediately leads to a production.
The point is that the work keeps moving.
Tuesday: Back in the Development Room
On Tuesday, after a day in rehearsal in Philadelphia, I’ll run two ETC writing groups which meet over Zoom to continue developing new plays and musicals.
This is quieter work.
There are no costumes. No lighting cues. No ticket buyers.
It can be easy to look at this stage and think that the “real” theater hasn’t begun yet.
But this is where much of the real theater work gets done.
Characters are clarified. Structures are challenged. Songs are moved. Scenes disappear. Endings change. Writers hear pages aloud and discover that something they thought was perfectly clear on the page isn’t clear at all when actors speak it.
Those decisions may eventually determine whether a producer can see a viable production in the work.
Which brings us to Wednesday.
Wednesday: Development Becomes Production
On Wednesday, we will officially announce THE BLUE VIOLINIST OVER WEST END AVENUE Off-Broadway.
Tickets will go on sale.
Previews begin October 27.
That is the moment outsiders can see.
The announcement.
The theater.
The dates.
The tickets.
It looks like production has begun.
But from where I’m sitting, production began a year earlier.
It began in the conversations with playwright Debbie Goodstein about what the play wanted to become.
It continued through readings, rewrites, artistic conversations, assembling a producing team, hiring (and firing) collaborators and making the hundreds of decisions required before anyone ever walks into a rehearsal room.
And, importantly, the development still isn’t over.
On Thursday afternoon, Debbie, director Jonathon Silverstein, and I will spend several hours together hearing the newest draft of the play—just the three of us. On Zoom, because it’s summer and we’re not all in Manhattan.
No audience.
No presentation.
No attempt to make it look finished. But the work continues.
We are still listening.
Still asking questions.
Still making sure the script we take into rehearsal at the end off September is the strongest version of the play we know how to make right now.
That is what I think writers sometimes misunderstand about the moment when development turns into production:
You don’t stop developing because you have a production.
The questions simply change.
The Questions Change
During early development, we might ask:
Is the story clear?
What does this character want?
Is this scene earning its place?
Where does Act One actually end?
Once production approaches, those questions begin intersecting with others:
How will this world physically exist onstage?
What kind of actor does this role require?
What does the audience need to understand visually?
What can we afford?
What must we protect artistically?
What has to be decided now?
By Friday, we’ll be in another production meeting for The Blue Violinist, approving final designs for the set, lights and costumes. We’re hoping to have casting complete by the beginning of the following week.
Those are unmistakably production decisions.
Yet they are still serving exactly the same thing we were serving in the development room: the story.
And Meanwhile, More Work Is Moving Forward
Thursday evening, we’ll shift gears again and continue to plan the three CreateTheater Showcases we’re producing in 2027.
Friday evening, we’ll turn toward the November New Works Cabaret Festival.
And here in Philadelphia, LITTLE THINGS is entering a different stage of the same journey.
The show has already gone through development with CreateTheater, including a cabaret presentation last year. Now the writers have the opportunity to put more of it on its feet and discover what happens when actors, staging, choreography, music and an audience become part of the equation.
That workshop will give us information we could never find sitting around a table.
And whatever we learn will feed the next stage.
So When Does Development Become Production?
I’m not sure there is one clean line.
I think there is a period when the center of gravity shifts.
At first, the primary question is:
What is this show?
Eventually, the question becomes:
How are we going to make this show happen?
And somewhere in between, the producer begins committing resources, collaborators, space, money, time and reputation to the answer.
That is when development starts becoming production.
But development itself never completely disappears.
At least, I don’t think it should.
A healthy new-work pipeline isn’t a conveyor belt that moves a script from one box to the next.
It is a continuing artistic process in which each new stage gives us more information.
Reading → workshop → showcase → production → perhaps development again.
The goal is not simply to “get the show produced.”
The goal is to make the strongest show we can—and to understand what the work needs next.
Looking at the week ahead—readings, writing groups, rehearsal, an Off-Broadway announcement, a script session, design approvals, showcase planning and a cabaret festival—it feels less like a collection of separate activities and more like one continuous act of making new theater.
And that is exactly what I had always hoped CreateTheater would be.
A place where new work keeps moving toward the stage.
