NEA New Play Development Program hosted by Arena Stage

New York Times and the Pacific Playwrights Festival

Did you read Charles Isherwood's article on the Pacific Playwrights Festival at South Coast Rep?  (A very well curated, cast, and run festival, by the way-- hats off to everyone involved...)

It's nice that he kvells about Amy Freed's new play, but, people-- that's the NYTimes reviewing the first public reading of a play taking place clear across the continent, and one where there had been real challenges getting the whole cast together to even rehearse it. No matter-- it was a boffo reading, but what is he doing writing about it?

I find it so unnerving I'm not even going to link it. You'll have to look it up for yourself.

Coming Soon To a Mailbox Near You

Hello, new play people--

Just a quick note to update y'all on the progress of things around the New Play Development Program.

First, the guidelines and the application are in the final review phase and rapidly approaching a release date.  They will be available on our website when they are finished.  Once they are posted, we'll update this blog and those of you signed up for e-mail updates will get it immediately. 

There will be an Intent to Apply form to complete by June 20th, with the full applications due on July 31st.  The Intent to Apply is required.  It will help us in two ways: anticipating volume so that we have enough readers and other help lined up for the review process, and narrowing the field of potential panelists.  So, if you don't file the Intent to Apply by midnight, June 20th, you'll be having to sit this round out...

Second, there's good news coming back from the NEA based on a question asked at the Humana Festival presentation at Actors Theatre of Louisville.  Credit Woolly Mammoth Artistic Director Howard Shalwitz with raising the issue of the matching requirement for this program.  As originally structured, the awards would have required a 1-to-1 match as do regular NEA grants.  Howard asked whether that was going to place a burden on smaller companies vying for the Outstanding New American Play selections, where the match would be $90,000-- more than the budget for many small companies around the country.

NEA Theater and Musical Theater Program director Bill O'Brien asked for a review of this requirement, as Arena Stage is already providing a match for the full amount of the NPDP grant just in carrying out the program.  The ruling is that, given the Arena Stage matching commitment, the selected projects would be free from matching requirements altogether.

More shortly...

All The Rage

OK, I promise this pace of posting isn't going to keep up, but there's lots of news this weekend, actually.  Look at the New York Times paying attention to the new play development sector!

I can identify with the frustration Cherry Lane is experiencing as they scramble to keep their program afloat amid what seems like a sudden abundance of resources and interest in effectiveness in this area.  I'm sure The Lark, Playwrights Center, Bay Area Playwrights Foundation, Z Space, New Dramatists, HERE, Foundry, Boston Playwrights, and a bunch of other organizations who have been at it more than a decade are watching the resources sail over their heads and wondering the same things about their own sustainability.

But I also fully celebrate the increasing opportunities and attention for playwrights in these larger settings. And the muscle these institutions can bring to the battle for a stronger environment for new plays and playwrights.  If the net impact of these new programs and resources is to improve the health of the new play sector across the board, won't that be what ultimately matters? 

I wonder if this is an evolutionary process we're seeing?  Are there always plucky pioneers who proof up hardscrabble land that then becomes visible and viable for others, folks with investment resources and the capacity to make a bigger impact with their efforts?

Steinberg Rocks a Playwright's World

Have you seen the news coming out of The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust?  They've just announced two new prizes for American playwrights, with the top prize carrying a cash award of $200,000!  Yowza!!

These are the same folks who put the serious cash behind the awards given out each year at the Humana Festival by the American Theatre Critics Association.  Congratulations, by the way, to this year's winners: Moises Kaufman (33 Variations) and Sarah Ruhl (Dead Man's Cell Phone), both for plays which premiered last season in Washington, DC I might add.

With these awards and other recent arrivals like the Lucille Lortel awards and this new NEA initiative, this has to be some sort of Golden Age for major cash prizes to playwrights, no?  So why does it seem so much like the Dark Ages to the practitioners I speak to in my regular travels in the field?

The link to the press release on the new H&M Steinberg awards is here.

Welcome to the New Play Development Program's Blog

You've found your way to the blog for the NEA's New Play Development Program, a program that aims to support and advance the practice and outcomes of new play development around the country.  Cool!

This isn't meant to be a one-way blog, so I hope that whenever you find yourself interested enough to come here you also leave behind your own stories, reactions, and questions about what's happening in the NPDP program or in the world of new plays in general.  We'll try to keep this a commercial-free zone, and will control for comments that are purely promotional in nature.  But news of opportunities, stories of best practice, profiles in courage, concerns about the field-- share them here and keep the conversation rolling.

I'm David Dower, Producing Artistic Associate at Arena Stage, and I'll be the project director for the NPDP.  Vijay Mathew is our project coordinator and will be standing by to answer questions about the process or about this blog throughout.  All of us here at Arena, and the staff of the National Endowment for the Arts, look forward to a lively forum on new play development throughout the initiative.

The NEA New Play Development Program

by David Dower

Did you catch the announcement of Arena's selection to host the National Endowment for the Arts new Leadership Initiative for New Play Development? Pretty great news.

The goal of the NPDP, as we're going to be calling it here for a while, was stated by the NEA in these terms at the outset:

“To advance the American nonprofit theater’s ability to provide meaningful support for new work. This project will provide support to theater institutions for the development of new plays of substantial merit. …This initiative will also identify, organize, and disseminate widely in the theater field information on effective collaborative models for the sustained development of outstanding new American plays.”

Stay tuned here for details of the program as well as announcements about the project deadlines and guidelines.  You can also find more information on our website here.