The way to a theater’s heart…

…is through its script library (or its annual fund, perhaps, but as a voracious reader with a small bank account, I’ll take the former route).

This afternoon I began the project of organizing the Long Wharf’s script library–a sizeable project, given the forty one years’-worth of American plays that have passed through here. Since I’m new to the Long Wharf, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the theater’s production history. A year-by-year list of productions has been sitting on my desk for two days, but the information had remained just that–a memorized list. But today, as I alphabetized the production scripts, I felt as if I began actually getting to know the theater’s history: not just what plays have been produced here, but who wrote them, when they were written, how many drafts they went through before production, and what the literary agents scribbled on the inside cover when they sent the plays to the artistic director. My favorite part was definitely reading the notes. I felt as if some of them should be museum pieces–typewriter-typed on delicate vellum, signed with nicknames (”Pete” instead of A.R. Gurney). I even happed upon the stage manager’s book of sign-in sheets and rehearsal reports from the 1980 National Tour of “The Lion In Winter”! We decided to keep only the final drafts of each play and get rid of unrevised versions. I felt a little sacreligious throwing them away, but I felt better when I saw the room it made on the shelves–all the more space to fill with scripts from seasons to come.