Link: Far From the Spotlight, a Brewing Fight Between Playwrights and Nonprofit Theaters Over Subsidiary Rights - NYTimes.com.
When Mr. Lucas agreed to make the Off Broadway premiere of his play “Prayer for My Enemy” part of the Roundabout Theater Company’s 2008-9 season, he said he didn’t realize that the Roundabout’s standard contract would require him to sign over 40 percent of his subsequent author royalties for the play for 10 years. (In other words, if Mr. Lucas were to collect, say, $50,000 from “Prayer” over the next decade — a respectable sum for a well-received new play — the Roundabout would receive $20,000 of it.)
A veteran playwright, Mr. Lucas (“Prelude to a Kiss”) said he knew that nearly all nonprofit theaters exacted a percentage of an author’s future earnings from a new play — known as subsidiary rights — in return for producing its premiere. What startled him was the 40 percent, standard for commercial productions but a figure he considered “far too high” for a nonprofit. So last March Mr. Lucas took the rare step of moving “Prayer” to Playwrights Horizons (for only 10 percent of its future earnings), where it will open on Dec. 9. In doing so, he rekindled a long-simmering debate in the small, interdependent world of American playwrights and nonprofit theaters: do nonprofits deserve a sizable cut of an author’s future royalties for producing a play?