Playworks: Inclusive Development of New Plays at the Public University

“Why new plays now?” asks seasoned playwright Steven Dietz in a rhetorical flourish he then answers resoundingly: New works enshrine “the spirit of awe” and provide “potent” new stories that we crave.1 How does that question apply in the university context? Why recognize the emergence of new writers? Relatedly, how does one cultivate these new voices through an inclusive model, especially when working in a large, publicly funded institution?Recognizing that emerging writers are grappling with their own ideas and sharing those in a public forum has been the catalyst for the development of Playworks, a festival of new works that I have helmed for nearly twenty years at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), a campus noted for the diversity of its student population and its large number of first-generation university students.2 The diversity of the campus is one of the motivators for facilitating an inclusive festival of new works by students, many of whom have had very little exposure to theatre, much less, to experimental new work. Though limited in theatrical knowledge, these emerging writers share a powerful desire to assert their own voices while exploring new ideas in community with peers. The richness of ideas and experimentations in writing actuated by our emerging playwrights raises certain challenges. Among these are: How can we develop a sustainable model to produce new work while balancing the needs of a large program at a public university which is prone to ebbs in funding? How do we cultivate inclusivity and playfulness in the process? In the essay that follows, I aim to address these questions by first describing the festival background and logistics. Next, I contextualize Playworks by considering some historical developments in the cultivation of new work. Then, I describe the need to scale up the enterprise especially in the context of the larger institution. Finally, I consider how we have worked to maintain playfulness and an open-ended approach to process in the festival.Playworks is a festival of original, ten-minute plays written by undergraduates in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Digital Production (TFDP) and MFA students in the Writing for the Performing Arts program (which is a shared TFDP and Creative Writing program) at UCR. Initiated in 2007, Playworks has evolved alongside the developing writing track within the major and in connection with the growing MFA program. The exponential expansion of both programs (now at over five hundred majors for TFDP and a twelve-person Writing for the Performing Arts MFA cohort) shaped Playworks into its current format, which is a two-day festival of twenty original, ten-minute plays, presented as concert readings. Of necessity, there are no sound or light cues within each of the ten-minute plays—just lights up and down, and some music leading the audience into the night and out of it. Integrated within our curriculum as its own course, Playworks enrolls seventy to one hundred students each year.As artistic director of Playworks, I work closely with the playwriting professor who teaches a three-quarter writing-course sequence taken by juniors and seniors in the playwriting track of the BA. In that way, the coursework taught in the writing classes supports the festival by dedicating one project (including several subsequent revisions) to the writing and revising of ten-minute plays. The short format evolved over the course of two decades, as more and more students have taken a part in the festival, to allow for more writers and production teams to take part in the learning experience. It is also a format that has a history within the American new play development process, with ten-minute plays featured as categories in the Humana Festival, and in the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival (KCACTF). The flexibility and feasibility of this format is especially appealing to universities, and several programs across the country have included festivals of ten-minute plays in their season, including Cornell University, Iowa State University, Cal State Northridge, University of South Carolina, and Pomona College, among many others.All our work is bolstered by a highly collaborative and helpful staff, including a departmental production manager, as well as a production manager for Playworks. The Playworks production manager (a staff member) oversees a student production team comprised of a stage manager, two assistant stage managers, a house manager, and an usher team. There is a single dramaturg, usually an MFA student, who helps support the festival by providing guidance to specific productions, depending on the needs and interests of the directors and writers. Rehearsals, which always include an initial read-through with the writer present, and one to two follow-up rehearsals, in addition to tech, are scheduled independently by each student director. Casting is managed by a student casting team who review taped auditions submitted online, a recent evolution of the casting process that has streamlined things considerable. Each actor offers their own gender self-identification on an audition sheet, where they can also indicate which gender roles (since actors are cast in more than one role) they are willing to take. Acceptance of play submissions has become more competitive over the years, but we are still able to accept 50 percent of the plays that were submitted.In an article published by The Drama Review (TDR) and surveying thirty years of new play development, Douglas Anderson reflects on the fact that in new play development, despite protestations otherwise, “success has been measured by how far a script travels in the commercial world.”3 Writing at the end of the 1980s, Anderson comments on how that emphasis stunted growth at the regional level and galvanized theatres to rethink how to better serve a plurality of emerging voices across the nation.4 At the time, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was still a viable support for emerging and interdisciplinary work and had directed a considerable amount of funding to “nontraditional artists” developing new work.5 Surveying the first decade of the twenty-first century, Celia Wren’s essay in American Theatre (October 2012) observes a climate of accelerated new play development, in many ways a consequence of Anderson’s call for change, full of new development incubators, including the National New Play Network, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, among other national programs.6 The shape of the theatre world shifted radically in the ensuing decades, following the pandemic; and while a number of cultivators of new works have sprung across the country, federal and centralized support for these efforts has been significantly hampered. This lack of funding and support has trickled down to the support of playwriting programs and opportunities for new, emerging writers. Writing from the context of 2022, Dietz reflects on a very different reality than Anderson and Wren’s. As Dietz puts it: “The hardest conversation I have with avid and gifted MFA playwrights starts when I tell them that there is not a place in the field waiting for them.”7 One incubator of new work that has resisted total elimination has been KCACTF, which has, though diminished, managed to survive (for now) the changing levels of financial support of new work development.Since the start of Playworks, our department has benefited from participation in KCACTF, region 8, and consequently, the festival has provided a good launching pad for student writers, actors, and dramaturgs in our program. While significantly underfunded, and reliant on volunteer faculty labor, KCACTF has nonetheless provided an important outlet for national conversation about new play development, bringing together student writers from across the nation in conversation. Over the years, Playworks has seen more than ten students win the regional and national competition. Most recently, in the 2025 competition, MFA student Melizza Minger had her ten-minute play selected for a staged reading at the regional competition; and in the 2024 competition, undergraduate Aedan Ferrara was a finalist in the regional competition, while MFA student Aaron Higareda (who had gained recognition as the 2022 KCACF National Aspire Leadership Festival representative) was a regional finalist and a national semifinalist, also receiving the inaugural Campana Award honoring scripts that make an authentic, bold statement and demonstrate a clear and promising voice. In the same year, Karly Thomas, also an MFA student, was recognized as a regional finalist for Why Does Bill Clinton?, and in 2023, Karly was the national semifinalist for her Playworks play Oh My God, Did You Lose Weight? Furthermore, MFA student Lily Hart won a dramaturgical award, and was the regional nominee for the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas Fellowship competition that resulted in an all-summer-long fellowship at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut. The organization demonstrates the potential for such national organizations in providing interregional connections, support, and awards for budding playwrights. As a conduit to these national competitions, Playworks has served students well in providing an entry point to many opportunities in their writing and career development. Connecting the university-based festival to other opportunities nationally helps students forge lasting connections with other writers and play developers across the country.While benefitting our more seasoned, graduate writers, Playworks has also served as an entry point for emerging writers eager to have their work produced. And at the same time, it is a culminating activity (scheduled in the spring term) that undergraduate writers see as a celebration of the various tracks within our major (writing, directing, dramaturging, acting, and stage managing). For this reason, one of the challenges of Playworks is addressing the many functions it serves for the program and for the writers, directors, actors, and stage managers. In addition to cultivating new writers for the department, Playworks provides an important capstone project integrating all the students in a single project that highlights students’ voices and talents. As such, the festival is particularly important in the context of a large, public university, maximizing on opportunities to serve a variety of needs.While we align with a playwright-centered focus espoused by Heather Helinsky, the experience of the new play festival has also functioned to benefit the stage management team, the directing students, and the acting students.8 Therefore, for logistical reasons connected to the student stage management team’s ability to call the fast-paced evenings, final scripts are due relatively early, normally by the week before the festival. That means that a theatre festival that would otherwise be fully playwright centered also takes into account the needs of the other departmental constituents involved. Consequently, we do not permit radical changes to the script (such as adding or eliminating a character) after actors are attached to scripts. Another reason that the scripts are “locked” earlier in the process has to do with the fact that Playworks is integrated within the academic curriculum as an official course, and students receive coursework credit for the work in the festival.Working in scale has been a challenge we face. As the department has grown in its number of majors (currently at five hundred), we deliberately made Playworks accessible to many students to allow a large group of students to have the experience of working on original plays. By necessity, that has also delineated the festival as a ten-minute play festival, rather than one of longer-form works. For MFA students, that has been a challenge and resulted in the inauguration of a separate, full-play festival, called the New Works Festival, that follows Playworks and stages three to four full-length play readings. Playworks remains especially accessible to transfer students (those coming in from the community college systems and other campuses, in junior year) and first-year students, making the festival especially inclusive for students wishing and needing to gain production experience. The added benefit of the inclusive nature of Playworks is that it amplifies new work as a focal point for the department. Students gain skills in acting, directing, and stage managing plays that are still in process; they gain useful skills relevant after graduation for finding work outside of the university. Cultivating students’ abilities to work on new plays is an emphasis shared with UCF’s Pegasus PlayLab and other programs featured in this symposium issue.The “play will not be finished in development” is one of the rules that Helinsky proposes. For the participating undergraduates, Playworks is the first time that early writers are introduced to the play development process.9 We encourage the students to take in the audience’s response to their work and their own processing of the experience, aided by their personalized Q and A with an invited outside responder. At the end of each of the fulsome nights of Playworks, the company is invited to a dialogue in which a responder converses with each playwright. Rather than opening up to a full-audience Q and A, the audience is welcomed to stay as silent observers while the responder asks each writer three to four guiding questions about their work, in the spirit of Liz Lerman’s critical response process.10 Student actors benefit from the experience of working on a number of new works within a single festival, and more than half return the following year to perform in more than one Playworks over the course of their studies.Playworks is intentional about generating work that is still emerging and developing, especially since it presents work by first-time writers. For that reason, during the performances, the evening’s company (of twenty to thirty actors) is seated onstage, witnessing the performance. This configuration, of actors and students, in the round, encircling the reading amplifies the “in process” nature of new work that is still emergent. It is also a strategy for insuring smooth exits and entrances for an evening’s worth of new work, in which we stage nine to ten different ten-minute plays in seamless sequence each night. Logistically, the onstage seating also allows for more audiences viewing the readings while controlling the numbers, making it possible for peers to view each other’s work but leave space for family and community members in the audience.The playful and collaborative nature of putting on a project together is a focal point in the process. That is the message we emphasize and anchor in the initial information meeting in which the full company of the festival meets for the first time and is presented with a handout highlighting the cardinal rules and main goals of the festival. First among these goals is to serve the play. Clarity of vocal expression (among the actors) is paramount to ensure the audience can fully hear and understand the text and the writer can listen to what seems to be “landing” for them. Over time, we have found that in the short plays, having actors move around with scripts in hand detracts from the auditory experience, although gestures and intentional moves that highlight and support the meaning are always encouraged. Therefore, we have presented the plays as concert readings, using music stands and chairs. Since actors may be performing in two to three plays in a single night, having scripts in hand, limited changes of the chair configuration, and basic lighting has simplified the transitions from play to play. Over the years, students have developed creative ways (which I enjoy!) of “subverting” these formalities when that serves the play and amplifies the writer’s intentions. For that reason, play readings are often playful with the conventions, incorporating minor “disruptions,” such as integrating strategic movement, minor costumes, props, or changing up the performers’ seating arrangement.“A play is not a flat work of literature, not a description in poetry of another world, but is in itself another world passing before you in time and space.” So writes Elinor Fuchs in “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play.”11 Fuchs encourages us to see and immerse ourselves not only in the language but in the three-dimensional reality of the world before us. Encouraging emerging writers to do this, especially in the ten-minute format, is not an easy task. However, one of the joys of Playworks has been its capacity to reveal the worlds young writers create in response to this ever challenging and exhilarating period of their lives as young adults. The variety of topics reflects a varied student population whose creative responses to their lives are instigated by a diverse set of experiences. In Playworks 2024, Android Abuelita by undergraduate Veronica Fann explored the relationship of a young woman to her grandmother who inhabits an AI-enhanced body. In Why Does Bill Clinton? by MFA students Karly Thomas, twenty-first century students revisit perennial questions of power and male toxicity and calibrate comedy with heart-wrenching anguish in a ten-minute format. The span of themes and styles offers a snapshot of thematic and aesthetic preoccupations of shifting generations of students. Playworks becomes a seismic reflection of the issues that are of greatest relevance to our student populations. As Dietz writes exuberantly of playwrights working on new work, they “render new stories potent and memorable onstage,” and they do so “because the moment we are living has not been written. And it will only ever be witnessed by us.”12