“Our request to the theatrical community is to stop scapegoating the dramatists at this unprecedented time,” the guild said in a statement Wednesday, “and our advice to dramatists confronted by these demands is to just say no, with the full knowledge that it was unfair for you to be put in this position in the first place.”

An advance is an amount of money paid by a theater to a writer for the right to produce a play. According to Ralph Sevush, the guild’s general counsel, advance payments generally range from $500 to $10,000, and are usually contractually guaranteed to a writer, even if the production never happens. “Every contract I’ve seen says options and advances are nonrefundable,” he said.

Writers, who are among the few theater industry workers who are not unionized, also then earn some money from a royalty — perhaps a percentage of the box office — when their show is produced by a nonprofit, and then sometimes earn money from licensing fees for future productions.

“Since writers aren’t unionized, they don’t have collectively bargained compensation, they don’t get health insurance, and they don’t get unemployment,” Sevush said. “A few thousand dollars to a theater is really paper clip money, whereas for a writer it’s grocery money, it’s rent money — it allows them to keep working.”

Sevush said he would not name the theaters seeking their money back because “we prefer them to accept our advice and not alienate them to the point where we have to expose them to public ridicule.”