New Play Development

The Artistic and Education Director of Steppenwolf for Young Adults  explores the  choice to program This  Is Modern Art  and the ensuing public and critical debate in  Chicago. 

All the Lights On is a history of the Twin Cities’ theatre company Ten Thousand Things. Published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press in association with HowlRound.

Dreams on the open sea are part of a larger narrative as Natasha Lee Martin, an actress, director, and teacher, performs in Confessions of a Synesthetic Sailor at TheaterLab in New York City.

Martha Steketee explores the development and evolution of I'm Gonna Pray for You So Hard with playwright Halley Feiffer. The play spans five years and two opening nights, features substance abuse, plenty of familial debate, and one attempt at reconciliation.

Scena Theatre is small but ambitious, and in spite of its relatively low profile, it has thrived in Washington for twenty-seven years.  Founding artistic director Robert McNamara is tenaciously committed to bringing new work from around the world to D.C. audiences.

Enrique's Journey, directed and adapted by Anthony J. Garcia, is based on Pulitzer Prize-winning  book of the same name by Sonia Nazario. The third production of Enrique’s Journey took place at the LATC's Encuentro 2014, performed by Su Teatro.

Seth Rozin says let large theatres do what they do best—be large—and encourage playwrights to cultivate relationships with mid-size and small theatres.

National New Play Network launches the New Play Exchange, a crowd-sourced, open-access database of plays, playwrights, and producers. Nan Barnett shares what she hopes it can achieve.

Some could argue that a play like Burq Off is not the right place to begin to understand the world of the Muslim Diaspora in Europe... But Manzoor herself provides some of that context, throwing statistics into her monologues almost as if her drama were a form of journalism.

Michael “Quess?” Moore explores why he wound up in residence in New Orleans at the DISTILLERY, and what he’s continuing to learn and experience.

The Dreary Coast is a site-specific immersive work that took place in Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, and used elements of Greek and Roman mythology, Dante’s Inferno, black metal music, and the canal’s actual history to journey its audience through one of the most polluted waterways in the United States.

3Christs is an adaptation of a study about therapeutic experiments with three men who believed they were Jesus Christ at Ypsilanti State Hospital in the 1960s. Performed in Judson Memorial Church, 3Christs exemplifies the essence of Peculiar Works Project.

Vickie Vértiz writes about Teatro Luna's production of Your Problem with Men

This long standing collaboration can be felt through and through the ensemble work on display. Premeditation is tantalizing with promise—a talented cast and inventive staging in a noir 1940’s-esque comedy about marriage, infidelity, and murder.

Steve Lyons offers insight on the necessity and development of the American Association of Community Theatre NewPlayFest.

Most productions are not developmental for the script and that usually means the text being used is effectively final. As is often the case, the playwright is usually not in the room, and so they have no say in the changes being made to their script. As a supporter of playwrights’ rights, I often feel that I must become the de facto voice of the writer, to protect the integrity of their text.

Richard Washer is a Washington fixture, having worked in the Washington, D.C. area for more than thirty years as a playwright, director, dramaturg, and educator. He is humble, unassuming, and quietly essential to many in the DC area who are developing new plays.

Emily Morse and Srila Nayak share insight on Full Stage USA's dedication to exploring new models of play creation and production. 

Yet after reading about staged readings and their role in play development, I hit a roadblock. I couldn’t come up with a definition that addressed every possible scenario. More vexingly, I couldn’t figure out how to negotiate concrete meanings for words like “minimal” and “basic” that are often used when discussing staged reading elements. Despite the many points of agreement found when looking at various discussions, there are too many differences in definition to develop a clear picture of what exactly a staged reading is or how it should look.

Bertie Ferdman interviews Anne Hamburger about Basetrack Live, a multimedia theatre production inspired by Basetrack: One-Eight, a web project created in 2010 by photojournalists embedded with US Marines fighting in southern Afghanistan.

Chris Garza covers the Mu Performing Arts production Eric Sharp’s play, Middle Brother which tells the story of an adoptee searching for his roots in Korea.

Martha Steketee writes about the logistics and process of the OOB Festival, including quotes from an interview with the team behind it.

Commons Producer Ronee Penoi interviews Robert O’Hara, Playwright-in-Residence at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington, DC.

It was clear from the first gathering on September 30, 2013 that this was not going to be your typical playwriting class. It was not about process, but ontology. It was specifically designed to demystify the writing process by encouraging everyone’s personal creativity.