Playwright Residencies

In this installment, David Dudley talks with Goddard’s Elena Georgiou about the benefits of earning an MFA in a low-residency model, and how that can help shape a writer’s voice.

Commons producer Jonathan Norton chats with Anne Bothwell about Stagger Lee: Making a Musical, a digital storytelling project tracking the development of Will Power’s new musical.

Andrew Saito explores what being a resident playwright has afforded his rewriting process as he works on Mount Misery, a world where Donald Rumsfeld and Frederick Douglass coexist.

Deborah Salem Smith, playwright-in-residence at Trinity Repertory Company interviews Curt Columbus, Artistic Director of Trinity Rep.

Aditi Kapil's playwriting residency is helping to formulate Mixed Blood's organizational narrative through social media, press materials, and show imagery.

Commons Producer Laura Brueckner interviews Suzanne Appel, managing director of Cutting Ball Theater, about playwright Andrew Saito’s residency.

Commons Producer Jonathon Norton talks to playwright Will Power, the playwright in residence at Dallas Theater Center, about being on staff at a regional theatre and being a member of a community.

Jeff Augustin talks about the luxury of time, how he gets to learn and grow through his residency, how an artistic home shapes both artist and art, and his desire for an artist exchange with Haiti.

Playwright Heidi Shreck comments on the importance of people who have faith in your work and want to watch your plays evolve, and how wonderful it is to have the resources for those to be possible.

Emily Schwend talks about how her residency can support her art, the strange experience of knowing in what space her play will eventually come to life, and her view on artistic home as an antiquated notion.

A. Zell Williams talks about how a resident playwright and a theater can affect dialogue together, and how the trouble when residencies happen without enough commitment.

Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig answers questions in about her residency at Manhattan Theatre Club through the Tow Foundation. She talks of her artistic home as collaborators, as well as her hopes for the future.

What are two essential elements to creating a transformational experience for an up-and-coming playwright? 1) A full time salary and health insurance. 2) The guarantee of having a work produced by a major off-Broadway non-profit theater.

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

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.

In this installment, Mike Lew discusses the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, the fraught practice of yellow face, and what equity for people of color actually looks like.

All you have to do, for ten days, is look at beauty and create. If you need to talk your ideas through, you have a teacher available, ready to listen and help. If you want to hear your pages read aloud, supportive comrades will oblige, then drink wine with you at night to a chorus of crickets and cicadas, the only loud nightlife around.

The keynote address delivered by Todd London at the Mellon Playwright Residency Convening on September 7, 2014.

Anne Towns shares an overview of the Alliance Theatre Collision Project. 

I wrote this summer, but all channeled through the Lorca lens. Translating when you are sad, I can say, is a very good thing to do. You can experience wild creativity within very safe margins. It’s Lorca’s play. But I get to stand in his skin, and pretend. I get to leave the sad couch of my mind, and go somewhere else. Lorca is my Virgil.