The International Reach of National New Play Network’s Rolling World Premiere Model

Jennifer Barclay, playwright and co-founding creative director of the 2024-2025 Not Beckett International Rolling World Premiere Festival, sat down with Nan Barnett, executive director of National New Play Network (NNPN). They discussed the inception and current iteration of NNPN’s Rolling World Premiere program and the inspiration Barclay took as she created her own international iteration of the model.

Jennifer Barclay: What was the initial impulse for creating the National New Play Network’s Rolling World Premiere (RWP) program? My understanding is that it’s about uplifting your mission of extending the life of new plays beyond their premiere and creating more opportunities for theatres, playwrights, their plays, and interconnection. But I’m curious what precipitated it and how the idea evolved?

Nan Barnett: National New Play Network was founded in 1998. At the time, if a new play didn't have a New York Times review, it was very hard to get it out into the rest of the country. David Goldman, the founder of NNPN gathered some folks from small and mid-sized new works focused companies from across the country to talk to each other, and that group evolved into NNPN. By 2005, we were starting to try to figure out how we could work together in a way that was both innovative and productive. And one of the things we identified as an issue was the “one and done syndrome,” where a play would get a world premiere and never be seen again.

Jennifer: “Premiere-itus.”

Nan: Yes. So, two problems: no pipeline to move new plays across the country unless they were published or had a New York production, and playwrights were getting only one production. With only one production, you can’t really finish the play.

Jennifer: There are all these discoveries that you can only make once you have collaborators and an audience.

Nan: About five years after the beginning of NNPN, Goldman did it again. There was a conversation with a few NNPN-ers: dramaturgs Liz Engelman and Morgan Jenness, one of the founding artistic directors, Seth Rozin of Philly’s InterAct, and a few others. I was there as the administrative leader of Florida Stage, by then a Member Theater. We decided if we could get three producers to commit to full productions before a new play started rehearsals, NNPN would supply some funds to help mitigate the costs of doing an unknown play and support the playwright’s participation in each production. That morphed into the Continued Life of New Plays program, thankfully renamed NNPN’s Rolling World Premieres. Philadelphia-based Thomas Gibbons’Bee-Luther-Hatchee was the pilot, and his follow-up, Permanent Collection, was the first official Roll. The next year it was one of America’s ten most produced plays. 

Your play, Ripe Frenzy, had a Roll in 2018. You were number seventy-seven.

Jen: Lucky sevens.

We want the playwright to understand how it feels in the hands of different directors, how it looks on the bodies of different actors, how it lands in communities that are culturally very different.

Nan:  We have just completed the initial paperwork for numbers 124 and 125 and already have at least three lined up for the 2025-2026 season. The program is still evolving, but the concept hasn’t changed: it has to include three separate and distinct productions— it's not a tour, not a transfer. You have different teams working on it in different cities. We want the playwright to understand how it feels in the hands of different directors, how it looks on the bodies of different actors, how it lands in communities that are culturally very different. Did you experience that with Ripe Frenzy?

Jennifer: Absolutely. It’s a play that’s partly about gun violence, so it was a hot lens through which to view different cities across the country. Because I was there in person, I had the chance to listen and learn and connect with some pretty radically varied communities.

Nan: The RWP gives us all a greater understanding of what’s happening in a play. Things that work in one city with one set of collaborators don’t work in the other, and with a third you start to understand why.

Jennifer: In the first production of Ripe Frenzy in Boston, during previews, I realized there was a key building block of plot that was missing. So I added it and thought, great, I’ve solved it. But then, because I got to be there for the second production in Atlanta, I discovered something else that was unclear and was able to make another tweak.

Nan: Yes, and you wouldn’t have known that without multiple productions, different collaborators, and getting to be there in the room. 

The other part of our mission is to “collaborate in innovative ways to develop, produce, and extend the life of new plays.” NNPN theatres want to have the writer in their space as a part of the process. Some of the RWP playwrights have built really deep relationships with cities, patrons, and other artists in the community. 

We also now have a whole process of putting together a collaborative agreement. So, the writer and all three theatres come together and work on a document that says what the plans are, what they think will and won’t change, what the approach will be, and the amount of time the writer’s going to be with the production.

Jennifer: I think you’re really exceptional at finding opportunities for that interconnection. You incentivize it, and you and the member theatres also make these values so clear in your missions. It comes from a very authentic place.

I think that you and NNPN are really great at not just sticking to arbitrary rules because they worked in the past but really being flexible and listening to the evolving creative needs of the specific playwrights and theatres you’re working with.

Nan: We like to say, “Here’s the outline, now fill it in so that it works for you.” Our programs have a framework, but we also want to leave plenty of room for learning and collaboration. We pay the writer to report back along the way. The theatres report back too, and we look for trends to discuss. NNPN has never trademarked or registered the term Rolling World Premiere because we want people to be able to take the model and iterate on it in their own way. We ask that they hold true to our guiding principles (separate and distinct full productions, playwright participation, continued work on the script, active collaboration between the partnering theatres), but besides that, we believe the more the merrier.

Tell me what things you took from the RWP program when you founded the Not Beckett International Festival. And what did you change?

Jennifer Barclay: I co-founded the Not Beckett International Festival with London-based Irish Palestinian playwright Hannah Khalil and London-based creative producer Alison Holder. It was important to us to hold true to the three RWP guiding principles: the festival is not a tour (we’re collaborating with different producers, designers, directors, and actors in each city so that we can learn more about the plays), it will take place over the course of eighteen months with joint publicity and reporting back, and the playwrights are included in every production so that they can work on the plays throughout. Two key differences are: we have five playwrights (including Hannah and myself) who have written five plays to be performed together as a unit, and instead of rolling across the country it’s rolling across the globe—with productions in France, England, Scotland, Ireland, and the United States. All of the plays are written by femme-identifying and nonbinary playwrights of Irish descent, and all of the plays are inspired by Samuel Beckett’s plays and biography. The plays aren’t adaptations—instead our goal is to use Beckett’s theatrical inventiveness as a springboard to create a new canon which interrogates what Irishness looks and sounds like today. Another core value which is unique to this iteration of the RWP is that all five plays have to be produced as a unit by every producing partner, with no play receiving priority in any way.

The interconnectivity of the RWP is one of the things that excited me the most, and we’ve prioritized that in our process and structure. For our first production in London at Jermyn Street Theatre in October 2024, producers from our upcoming productions in Dublin and Reading (United Kingdom) joined us to see firsthand what worked. For our next one at Irish Repertory Theatre in New York in February, collaborating producers are coming in from Dublin and Philadelphia. Everyone is able to cross-pollinate and learn from each other.

Nan: Yes, that’s the same reason why it’s so important for us to bring our NNPN Member Theaters together every year for the National Showcase of New Plays. We believe it’s essential for people to come together, learn about the visions and missions of each other’s theatres, and understand each other’s values and aesthetics. They find new collaborators, and the more relationships within NNPN, the more relationships we can build with writers and the more plays we can get spun out across the country.

What if we teamed up not only as playwrights, but also as producers?

Jennifer: Absolutely. And with Not Beckett, not only do our collaborating theatres interconnect internationally, but so do our five playwrights, who come from England, Scotland, France, Belgium, and the United States. That’s very important to us.

Hannah and I were first connected through a co-writing commission based on our Irish heritage from Fishamble New Play Company (Dublin), Mosaic Theater Company (Washington, DC) and Solas Nua (Washington, DC). We adored working together and found that we were simpatico artists, and it was such an unusual pleasure to collaborate with another playwright—we were both so used to working alone in our silos. As soon as we’d finished our co-writing, we started dreaming up our next collaboration. We asked, what if we teamed up not only as playwrights, but also as producers? What if we expanded our reach to include more playwrights? We both have been greatly influenced by Irish expat Beckett, and Hannah was the creative fellow at the Samuel Beckett Research Centre in the United Kingdom, so we landed upon our overlapping common ground for the playwrights (femme-identifying and nonbinary of Irish descent) and the plays (inspired by Beckett). We found the other three playwrights through our global network of Irish theatre artists. Folks would say, “Oh, you need to read this person’s work,” and it's been this sort of glorious domino effect. As we’ve traveled with our plays, we’ve been able to build our own global network.

The RWP model is so well-known in the States, but it was a brand-new concept for our European collaborators. It’s been a wonderful learning curve as we figured out how to communicate clearly who is responsible for what. Producers had to be ready to take the reins and run with it. There were challenges, including a producing partner who was so used to the financial and logistical structure of touring productions that they couldn’t shift gears and had to withdraw. But most of our collaborating partners have found it to be a really exciting model and have stepped up to the challenge. Also, because we’re producing this Roll outside of NNPN, we had to create our own structure for funding the commissions and playwright travel. Fortunately, our brilliant producer Alison helped spread the word about our mission and unique structure, and was able to find us funding from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and Culture Ireland, which bolstered our funds from the Samuel Beckett Research Centre.

Also inspired by NNPN’s RWP, we encouraged the theatres to connect with their own communities—that was key to our vision. We want them to hire the directors, actors, and designers who they’re most excited to work with. They can connect with their audiences in a way that feels right to them. They can produce it on the scale and timeline that works best for them. And we’re able to make discoveries as we travel to each of the cities. Our cohort of five playwrights stay up to date on each other’s rehearsals, read each other’s drafts, and when we were gathered together for the launch in London, we sat together and cheered each other on. We got to understand on a deeper, experiential level how our work was not only in dialogue with Beckett, but also in dialogue with each other in ways that weren't even intentional. It was thrilling. And to me, that’s also the spirit of NNPN and the Rolling World Premiere program—that we push back against a competitive scarcity mentality and instead celebrate and uplift the work together.

Nan: Are all five plays being directed by one director or are there five directors?

Jennifer: That’s a choice we’re leaving up to our producing partners as well. And the casting structure is flexible too—the plays have been written so that they could potentially be performed by a company of three actors, but it could also be a larger ensemble. 

Nan: That’s the kind of thing that you can play with over the different productions and see how it works or doesn’t work. And what about the order of the plays?

Jennifer: That’s also up to the producers. We have an anthology that's being published by Methuen in the United Kingdom coming out in the spring, and we chose to publish it in the order in which it was first produced in London. But we also specified that producers are welcome to change the order. So that’s also something else we’ll play with and learn from.

Nan: Isn’t that great? I love the things that you learn. Are you making script changes along the way, too?

Jennifer: Yes, we’ve been making tweaks as we go. And we’re playing with international linguistics and how we’re contextualizing it alongside Beckett’s work. In Bordeaux, there’s a group of graduate students who are translating our plays into French—which of course feels very apt for plays inspired by Beckett. While we were in the middle of the London production, we were fielding some really exciting translation questions. The French production will probably be bilingual. One of our playwrights, Olwen Fouéré, is bilingual in French and English, and so she's writing two versions of her play. Irish Rep in New York is producing our festival alongside their productions of three of Beckett’s short plays. Some of the theatres are considering playing a Beckett radio play between our plays. We encourage this experimentation, and we’ll keep learning even more from the different contexts.

You’ve mentioned that the NNPN has interest in expanding its internationality. Can you tell me more about that?

Nan: I think our international work will primarily come from New Play Exchange (NPX). We already have theatre artists from more than sixty countries and territories on NPX, and we just brought our first Chinese schools onto the higher education subscription roster.

Jennifer: NPX allows everyone to find the work that they’re excited about without some filtered, unifying arbiter dictating taste. It allows for more variety, more avenues. Our festival grew out of a similar desire to change the system of how plays were selected and produced.

Nan: I also love the idea of being able to share the frameworks for our different programs internationally. For example, NNPN’s Producer in Residence program has proven so unbelievably beneficial for our theatres, for rising new works leaders, and for the field. I'd love to see the outside outline of that program replicated in other countries as well.

Jennifer: It feels like international collaborations are getting easier—a silver lining of the early pandemic years, when we developed stronger video technology and a comfort for using it. We’ve expanded our idea of how live theatre could be produced, and that it could include a livestream. I’m excited to see how these technologies—and our creative use of them—can keep opening up more international collaborations.

I think you and the NNPN are exceptionally generous about sharing your frameworks and models with others. You hold true to your values and mission, but you’re not proprietary.

We’re not out there telling you how to do it, but instead: “Here’s how we did it. Here’s what we learned. And here’s what we want to do next.”

Nan: I like the idea that the way we work together can be seen as a path forward for others. That’s been really important to NNPN. We’re not out there telling you how to do it, but instead: “Here’s how we did it. Here’s what we learned. And here’s what we want to do next.”