censorship, author's rights, directors

On Sep 28, 2006, M C wrote:
An actress friend of mine.. told me that her boyfriend gave a play to someone to do. "And they destroyed it." Has anyone sat while their play was being destroyed?
I replied:
Mess up the production, yes? But spoil the play? The author can yank the rights if what is on stage is "wrong". Friends of mine have done this. I turned down a production of my "most important" play because the company had no black actors and weren't willing to reach out to any.
Several friends have arrived at opening to discover that the director has re-written or re-arranged the script without permission. At that point they usually pray it won't be reviewed and will disappear without comment. I've shown up to discover my German-American Protestant senior citizen characters being played as 1st generation Irish Catholics, but it didn't bother me much. The play has been done before and after that, and no one else has ever decided to play them with that accent.
Playwrights can sue-- some do. Unauthrized changes happens all the time, to one degree or another. The cult of the director causes one set of problems, the cuts of genteel censors are something else.

Plagiarism, plays about current events

There's plenty of precedent for the use of newspaper material-- especially when one reporter's version has been taken up by the wire services and is rewritten/re-reported by other papers. Dos Passos "USA" and depression-era Living Newspaper shows incorporate just such material. But like all litigated matters, it depends on whether an entity with lawyers wants to make a particular artist's life hell.

I've both performed in and written plays that used "public record" material. All were and are defensible as "fair use" of material from multiple sources, but would not be defended in court simply because no writer or producer could afford to pay a lawyer to defend them. Fortunately, this usually becomes an issue only when a play is high
profile and there is actually money being made: and since almost no plays or playwrights in fact make real money, the temptation to sue is not very strong. Disney does it to intimidate. The psychologist whose work Bryony Lavory based "Frozen" on was very upset to be so portrayed. At the end of the long New Yorker article about it, Lavery's play continues unmolested.