Back in 1997, back in the days when some people still communicated with each other by fax, Liz Jones sent a message to her would-be collaborator, Asher Richelli, about the theatre company they were planning to create. Contemplating the mountain of tasks ahead of them – structure, finances, leadership and, of course, what to produce – she worried that it could all go wrong. “The thing that worries me is that we’re doing this half-assed, and if this fails we will have exhausted all our resources on a half-assed attempt,” she wrote. “This could come back to get us and literally prevent us from ever starting again in this city!”

         More than two decades later, Liz and Asher are two of the three co-founders of the now well-established theatre company Page 73 Productions. Liz discovered the long-ago fax one day recently while cleaning out her office. “It was very 22-years-old thing,” she says. “You know, ‘We have to get this right or we’ll never work in this town again!’ But it captured the urgency of what we all were feeling at the time.” Since then, the company, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2018, has helped launch the careers of more than a hundred playwrights, many of whom have garnered top-shelf awards, and it produces or co-produces two world or New York premieres every year. “We were crazy enough to think we just might be able to do something that was important and very much needed,” says Asher. “But you know what's really crazy? We did.” 

At the beginning, though, the three co-founders of what would be eventually be known as Page 73 – Liz, Asher, and Daniel Shiffman – didn’t exactly have a road map. Liz, newly graduated from Yale University, started working as a production assistant at Manhattan Theatre Club, first as an intern and then joining the staff under Lynne Meadow, the artistic director, where part of her responsibility was reading plays by new playwrights. “Doing that gave me more confidence that I had some ability to discern what was a good play.” But Liz, who remembers feeling like a small cog in a big machine, had begun toying with the idea of starting her own company. “And I remember Lynne saying to me, ‘Why don’t you start a theatre company?’”         

At the time, Liz recalls, it seemed like everyone in New York City with a little theatre know-how was starting a theatre company, though few got any traction. In the mid- to late-1990s, before real estate prices exploded and when many neighborhoods, including those in Lower Manhattan, hadn’t yet felt the full force of gentrification, it wasn’t impossible to find a room or a rundown studio for nothing, or next to nothing. “There was just a ton of space, these little storefront theatres downtown and lots of random people running them,” says Liz. “And it seemed like they all were putting on theatre festivals, showcases, workshops.”

         The first thing Liz realized was: “I would need a partner.”

         “Liz and I worked together producing shows in college. We also worked with our friend Dan Shiffman,” remembers Asher. “Dan was the oldest, and then Liz, and then me. And when we graduated we each went to work for a theatre or arts organization.” Asher started out working for Ben Mordecai, who had produced the original production of Angels in America and who was August Wilson’s producer, and he later spent a couple of years at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center. But immediately after college, all three – Liz, Asher, and Dan – were thinking along parallel lines: how could they take producing into their own hands and support writers who needed help getting started? 

“One of my buddies who’d graduated from Yale wanted to produce an acting showcase for himself, and reached out to me and asked if I’d produce a small production of Fortinbras, which is a Lee Blessing play.  I think that, out of frustration and because I wanted to continue producing, I agreed to help out my friend,” remembers Asher. “But I quickly realized that, with a day job and all, I couldn’t do it by myself, so I reached out to Liz and to Dan and they both agreed to help me. And from that production we realized that we really liked working together, and that this was fun. After Fortinbras, we thought: let’s try to figure out our next project.”

The whole thing was a gleeful experiment, but the trio decided to give it a try. “We had really had no idea what we were doing!” laughs Liz. “We had produced plays in college, but we had never dealt with paying actors or press or marketing, or anything you have to do in the professional world.” Initially – literally initially – the trio called themselves RJS Productions. “It was a name that we made up from the first initials of our last names,” Liz says. They didn’t have a mission, not quite, not yet. But they had an inkling. “We were already in the world of new writers trying to get their work produced, and we thought, ‘That’s what we should do,’” she says.

A friend of theirs, Karen Hartman, who knew Asher, Liz, and Dan from Yale, had written a provocative new play entitled Gum, which was being workshopped in downtown Manhattan. “Karen said, ‘I have this space, but I don’t know how to produce my own play,’” says Liz. Adds Asher, “The play was really special. It’s a story about female genital mutilation, set in a fictional Middle Eastern kingdom, and the writing was extremely lyrical.” What would become the first production of RJS Productions – soon to be renamed Page 73 Productions – began to take shape in a little space called The House of Candles. “The space itself was decrepit, like, no heat, piles of wood in the corner, it literally got condemned by the Fire Department,” recalls Liz. “It had been a store called House of Candles, one of those mystical stores, defunct, and someone took it over and kept calling it House of Candles. It was a room. They had some lights.”

Hartman, now a prolific, award-winning playwright with a long list of produced and published plays to her name, recalls the premiere production of Gum, directed by Jean Randich, as a launching pad for her career. “Most artists have no producing chops whatsoever, and things just die on the vine,” she says. “Gum was a kind of off-night, late Monday night thing, at the House of Candles, this little theatre on the Lower East Side, and they just took this off-night thing and ran it longer,” says Hartman. “They made it possible for this beautiful little raw production to be seen.” Adds Hartman, “I think they did the whole thing for $500.” 

Liz says it was probably closer to $300. “But people came to see it! Agents came to see it.” Says Asher, “Out of that production, Karen got a number of opportunities, she got an agent, and productions of that play at Center Stage in Baltimore and at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco followed.” 

Hartman agrees. “That production made a tremendous difference for me – a morale difference, difference in terms of exposure, and the play was picked up,” she says. And despite its tiny budget and creaky space, it had dramatic impact. “There was a power to that production that, to be honest, wasn’t always there in subsequent productions, but I’ve always felt that I could come back to that production in my head. There was a force and a purity there.”

That was 1998. “And even though our project was really tiny, it had this outsize impact on her as a writer, and that was a light bulb moment for us, like, ‘Oh! We really do have something to contribute,’” says Liz.

As the RJS Productions trio began looking around for what to do next, Asher, Dan and Liz also still had to figure out a better name for the company. “We were thinking about a bunch of other names,” recalls Asher. “At one point we were thinking about calling ourselves Tastes Like Chicken Productions.” At the time, they were exploring the idea of producing a play called The Urn by Peter Ackerman, and it would be Ackerman who hit on the idea that would give RJS its new moniker. When the folks at RJS got Ackerman’s script, for a kind of mystery play whose big reveal came in the final scene, the would-be producers kind of looked at each other and said, “This doesn’t make sense.” Says Asher, “You get through the whole play and you don’t get what happens. And then we realized we were missing the second-to-last page.”

You see where this is going. The missing page was, naturally, page 73.

“We were laughing about the missing page, and Peter immediately said: ‘That should be the name of your theatre company!’ And it really resonated for us.” Why? “We’re trying to be the missing piece, for writers trying to complete their project,” says Asher. Exactly, says Liz. “We were there to help the playwright get to page 73.” Over the next several years, Page 73 produced a series of brand new works, including Ackerman’s The Urn, another work by Hartman called Girl Under Grain, and, among other presentations and readings, a new play festival featuring half a dozen plays and a workshop of a musical written by Michael Friedman and directed by Trip Cullman. All this while working, going to school, and being involved in other projects. Dan, who remained on Page 73’s board, branched into a new area of interest, the intersection of the arts, technology, and telecommunications. Asher, besides working at Lincoln Center and in the arts generally, earned a law degree at NYU’s School of Law. And Liz, who held down a series of jobs in the arts and the theatre world, got an advanced degree in writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

         But Page 73 Productions was gradually building momentum. It was in these early years that Page 73 not only found its footing but began to home in on what would become its mission, namely, to discover, foster, and produce early-career playwrights, give them the support and connections they’d need, and help them to become noticed, known, and recognized. And it worked. “All of the writers that we produced during that period have gone on to have professional, full-time careers in playwriting, which is very tough, or writing for television, film,” says Asher, with some satisfaction.

         “In 1998, when we started the company there were very few opportunities for emerging playwrights,” he says. There were a handful of others who had fellowship programs or sponsored writers, but Page 73’s determination to work with young playwrights seeking to kickstart their careers or have a New York premiere of a new play made them stand out. “The field may have changed since 1998 and 2005, and there are more opportunities for playwrights now, but back then it was different, and we thought, ‘Let’s fill that gap.’” As they got the hang of it, and as word of mouth brought aspiring playwrights to their figurative doorstep – there was no office, not yet – they began to develop a reputation as a go-to place for writers who had something to say. And Page 73 assembled the teams for each one: directors, stage crews, publicity. “We were like a SWAT team,” jokes Liz.

         By the mid-2000s, Liz and Asher realized that they were at a turning point. As successful as they’d been, they both began to understand that it was time for Page 73 to transform itself into a going concern, that it would need some structure, better financing, a board of directors – and that they’d both have to make it their priority, give up their day jobs, and become a real living and breathing theatre company. “It was a psychological shift as much as anything, from like, ‘We’re people who have jobs, and this is our hobby,’ to, ‘Our focus is doing the theatre company, and work is a way to pay our bills,’” says Liz. Luckily – or, perhaps, it wasn’t luck at all – this realization coincided with a major breakthrough, a production of Quiara Alegría Hudes’ play, Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, in 2006. 

         They’d already created a new program: besides producing plays, Page 73 started something else that it’s become famous for, the annual Page 73 Playwriting Fellowship, which launched in 2004 with its inaugural recipient, Kirsten Greenidge, who’s now published more than a dozen plays and who serves as an assistant professor of theatre at Boston University’s Center for Fine Art. The idea behind the fellowship program was to seek applications from playwrights who, if selected, would receive an unrestricted grant, which over time would rise to $10,000, in addition to a development budget up to another $10,000. 

         Until then, according to Liz and Asher, the plays that Page 73 put on happened on a kind of ad hoc basis: friends, or friends of friends, or writers who happened to hear about Page 73, would ask for help. But all along the company was fine-tuning its approach, and in 2003 they decided to formalize things. “The idea was, we wanted to provide a home for these playwrights who were just starting out, and to allow them to work on whatever project they wanted to work on, in a safe environment.” From the very start, it was highly competitive, and the company got more than a hundred applications in 2004, its first year.

         Among the first crop of applicants was Quiara Hudes, who submitted the first ten pages of what eventually would become Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue. Hudes became Page 73’s second playwriting fellow in 2005, and in January 2006 the play had its world premiere. “We produced the premiere in the basement of what was The Culture Project on Bleecker Street,” at 45 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, in a space called 45 Below, recalled Asher. “It was an amazing production, and it was a watershed moment for us.” Elliot earned a rave review in The New York Times, which said that Hudes had a “confident and arresting voice” and that the play “succeeds on every level, while creating something new.”

         Hudes was an astonishing new talent, and Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue went on to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama the following year. Elliot was the first part of what would be a trilogy. In 2012, the sequel and second part of the trilogy, Water by the Spoonful, did indeed win the Pulitzer Prize. Along the way, Hudes collaborated with Lin Manuel Miranda on the mega-hit, In the Heights, also a Pulitzer finalist, in 2009. And she’s had a string of successes since then. The stunning success of Elliot in 2006, in a small, Off-Broadway basement space, got things rolling for both Hudes and for Page 73. “It was just thrilling,” says Asher, “I mean, crazy, insane!”

         Looking back on it years later, Hudes notes that her play had been rejected by pretty much all of the big New York theatres. “Perhaps they were nervous to commit resources to a first-time playwright,” she says. “But Page 73 took the leap of faith [on] an experimental play about Puerto Ricans in Philly. A first-time writer.”

         Nearly a decade after they’d put on Gum for a few hundred dollars, the budget for Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue was about $25,000, a sign of how far, and how fast, Page 73 had moved forward. Even so, that was a small sum in the theatre world. As a showcase production, and under the rules of Actors Equity, the actors, the director and the designer were paid only a small sum, and the company raised money from family and friends. “At the time, we were throwing dance parties to raise money,” says Asher. But the success of Elliot helped put Page 73 on the map. In fact, the production caught the attention of heavyweight New York non-profit leader Reynold Levy, who became a fan of the company and helped facilitate a second production of the play the following fall at El Museo del Barrio in upper Manhattan, a move that garnered attention and support that helped to quickly catapult the company’s profile and budget size.

         By then, Page 73 had two signature programs up and running: the annual playwriting fellowship and the production of a play each year by an emerging new artist. Over the next five years, fellowship recipients included Eliza Clark, Heidi Schreck, Krista Knight, and Jason Grote. And the company produced one successful premiere after another, including Grote’s 1001, Dan LeFranc’s Sixty Miles to Silver Lake, Schreck’s Creature, Samuel D. Hunter’s Jack’s Precious Moment, Clark’s Edgewise, and Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s Lidless. The company was earning its reputation as a font of challenging new works by unknown or less well known writers, each one of whom might have struggled mightily to get a piece staged in New York, have it seen by theatre insiders, perhaps garner a review or a mention in the New York Times or The New Yorker.

“As a writer who was not produced in New York, when you hear that there’s a theatre company that’s specifically devoted to producing unproduced writers, I mean, that’s a pretty exciting idea,” says OBIE winner and MacArthur “Genius” Award recipient Samuel D. Hunter, whose play, Jack’s Precious Moment, directed by Kip Fagan, had a nearly month-long run at 59E59 Theaters in 2010. “It was just so hard to get your foot in the door with that initial production, and it kind of feels like you burst through this barrier when you have your first proper Off Broadway production in New York. It just makes everyone feel like it’s okay to do your stuff. It’s a validation.” A couple of years earlier, Hunter – now a widely produced writer with a lengthy list of plays to his name – had joined a writers’ summer retreat program at Yale that was sponsored by Page 73. Out of that and the 59E59 production, he developed a number of close friends and collaborators, including Davis McCallum, who has gone on to direct eight or nine of his later plays. “It’s one thing to do a reading for your family and friends, and it’s another thing to do it when people you don’t know are actually buying tickets! It’s much different,” says Hunter, thinking back on Jack’s Precious Moment. “And there’s no way I would have been able to write A Bright New Boise or The Whale if I hadn’t had that experience with Page 73.”

         In the late 2000s Page 73 launched its third signature program, this one designed to support a wider range of playwrights than the fellowship program alone could accomplish. Over time, the number of applicants who sought the P73 Playwriting Fellowship had quadrupled to more than four hundred individuals each year, out of which only one was chosen. To expand its ability to support writers, Page 73 began two parallel programs: first, its summer residency in New Haven – the one attended by Hunter in 2008 and held on the campus of Yale University, which allows up to four playwrights to spend a creative, writing and brainstorming week in pursuit of developing a play they’ve been thinking about or working on.

And, second, in response to a suggestion from one of the playwrights in Page 73’s orbit, the company created Interstate 73, a year-long program for six to eight playwrights who meet every two weeks to share and discuss works-in-progress. Since 2007/2008, Interstate 73 has supported more than eighty playwrights. Each participant is guaranteed a reading of their work, including a professional director and set of actors, before a New York audience.

In 2011, Michael Walkup, who studied dramaturgy at Yale School of Drama, became the first full-time staff member at Page 73 who wasn’t one of the founders. Originally brought on as a volunteer, just two days a month, Walkup took on the task of running the Interstate 73 writers group. “The very first thing I did for Page 73 was, I attended a writers group and the very next week we produced a reading of Hand to God.” The writer, Robert Askins, was an Interstate 73 member, and Walkup helped to produce a one-day reading of an early draft of the play before its Off-Broadway run at Ensemble Studio Theatre in 2011. After its successful run at EST, Hand to God had a second incarnation at the Lucille Lortel Theatre before finding its way to Broadway in 2015, where it was nominated for five Tony Awards, including Best Play.

         In 2011, after taking up as Page 73’s Associate Director – he’s now the company’s Artistic Director – Walkup plunged into the process of reading hundreds of play submissions, working with new playwrights in the various Page 73 programs, organizing workshops, readings, the writers group, and two yearly full-stage productions. What he loves most about the job, he says, is working directly and personally with young and mid-career playwrights. “I build extremely personal, one-on-one relationships with about a dozen playwrights every year, at the start of their careers.” Walkup brings an extensive background from Yale School of Drama, where he delved into how plays have been analyzed and structured from Aristotle through Brecht and beyond.

         “Being able to discern for each play what its best structure would be, whether it wants to deliver an emotional impact, whether it wants to be thought-provoking, whether it wants to drive you to political action in the streets, or make you laugh, or whatever!” he says. “I get pleasure from talking to a playwright, being able to help them hone that, and saying to them from the outside, ‘This is where I see the play succeeding.’” As an example he cites Page 73’s much-lauded production of George Brant’s Grounded, which contains a powerful dramatic reveal in the final two minutes of the play – and Walkup was careful to make sure that nothing in the staging of the play got in the way of what, for many in the audience, was a surprise ending.

         Grounded, which ran for three weeks in early 2014 at Walkerspace, is perhaps an indelible example of how Page 73 accomplishes so much. The play, a dramatic story of a female U.S. Air Force combat pilot who, upon becoming pregnant, is “grounded,” piloting lethal drones over the skies of Afghanistan instead of flying a jet herself. Brant’s play had had a few productions outside New York, but the New York premiere catapulted it to international renown. Directed by Ken Rus Schmoll and starring Hannah Cabell, the one-woman show garnered laudatory reviews in the New York Times and other publications. Since its New York premiere, Brant notes, Grounded “has subsequently received over 125 productions in 18 different countries and has been translated into 12 languages.”

“It’s been done everywhere!” says Hannah Cabell. “You don’t often get to do a play that’s relevant, that feels like a protest play, but a very well-written piece of art protest play, not a preaching piece. A nice thing is that I got nominated for the Drama Desk, which was my first big award nomination.” Cabell, who calls Page 73 “an incredibly well-respected and exciting theatre company,” adds, “It’s been wonderful to watch them since Grounded. It’s been really exciting to watch their growth and their progress and how established a company they are now. People want to be a part of it.” 

Playwrights, especially, want to be part of it. Not only those who win Page 73’s coveted annual playwriting fellowships benefit, but so do many of the scores of writers who’ve taken part over the years in the Interstate 73 program or Page 73’s summer residency. And even being a semi-finalist in the yearly competition for the fellowship gets one noticed. Take, for one example, the story of Leah Nanako Winkler.

“I had been applying to their program for five or six years, and the most coveted program they have is the Page 73 Fellowship, that comes with ten grand and development. Every young playwright wants it, and like every year it’s ‘who’s gonna get it?’ I never really got very far with it! But some years I would be a semi-finalist,” says Winkler. “They’re really supportive, and they’d make a big announcement of that, and it’s such a respected organization that you do get a spike in interest in your work when [the semi-finalists are] announced. And that was the very first thing that I had ever gotten institutionally. And in 2011, when I was a semi-finalist, all of a sudden I started getting emails from producers and directors who wanted to read my work.”

Winkler, who spent several years writing plays and even producing plays with her own, mostly self-financed theatre company, credits Page 73 with finally getting her picked up on the New York theatre community’s radar. “All of a sudden I had interest from people outside my circle, legitimate theatre people, who were asking for my script! Producers, agents, some directors.” One of those directors was Kip Fagan, the director who’d worked with Page 73 before, including directing Hunter’s Jack’s Precious Moment. “So, we had a coffee, and that was the very first coffee I ever had with a professional director, and he ended up really advocating for my work,” says Winkler. 

Soon afterwards, she got into EST’s Youngblood program, and she was a semi-finalist with Page 73 twice after that. In 2015, with the support of both Page 73’s Michael Walkup and EST’s Billy Carden, the artistic director – who had just come off a highly successful co-production of Cori Thomas’s When January Feels Like Summer in 2014 – Winkler’s play Kentucky ended up with a month-long run at EST as a co-production between EST and Page 73. “That was the very first production that I had that I did not produce myself, which was so, so exciting,” Winkler says.

The phenomenal success of Kentucky, which earned rave reviews, allowed Winkler to quit her day job and to start writing plays full-time, she says, and one success followed another after that. “They just really completely changed my life. I had been working as a personal assistant for seven years, before I started rehearsals for Kentucky, and I made the choice to quit that so I could give it my all. I haven’t had to have a day job since then. Getting produced by them led to an L.A. production, and that led to getting published, and that led to college productions, and writing Kentucky led me to write God Said This, and that led me to winning the Yale Prize. And having Page 73 on my resume is really great. It’s really amazing what they do, and it’s amazing how they make you feel supported. When Kentucky was over, I felt like, ‘Now what am I going to do?’ And Liz Jones was like, ‘This is just the beginning for you!’ And that was totally true.”

That’s the same sentiment expressed by Karen Hartman, who marvels at Page 73’s uncanny ability to find promising but unproduced playwrights year after year, provide them with support and encouragement, and, most of all, to help realize their art onstage. “They’re such a bright spot in the story of the American theatre!” she exclaims. “Because Page 73 has this commitment to being first-time producers of writers who have not had New York exposure, it’s like they’re doing this impossible thing, and then they’re doing it again and again and again.”

Hartman, whose experience with Page 73 dates back a decade and a half earlier than Winkler’s, points to Quiara Hudes as just one example of how Page 73 works. “They read Quiara’s play before anybody, when she was just right out of college. They had the foresight to pick somebody – and I don't know how many applications they get now, but it must be many hundreds – and somehow they pluck out people who have no track record, they believe in these people, and then they turn around the next year and find new people. Whereas the normal thing might be, let’s try to do all of Quiara’s plays, let’s stick with Quiara. So they’re always doing it the first time.”

“I guess what’s most satisfying is that over the past twenty years, even as we’ve grown and expanded our work, we’ve stayed faithful to our original mission,” says Jones. 

“We often talk about the impact of what we do on our writers, on their careers,” adds Walkup. “And looking ahead, we realize that with more support we can have an even bigger impact, and reach a broader audience, by producing plays that have longer runs, in larger venues. But even as our productions have taken more and more resources, what hasn’t changed is that the mission that we set for ourselves years ago is constantly renewing itself.”