What Matters

Madison New Works Lab (MNWL) began in 2017 and is the new work development program for plays and musicals housed in the School of Theatre and Dance at James Madison University. I am a playwright, a playwriting professor, and the director of MNWL. I know firsthand the vulnerability of applying for new play development programs like ours.Many middle-class playwrights write their plays and musicals for free without promise of production, much less commission. Although there are a lot of pathways for new work development, creatives often enter these programs to find development frameworks already in place. If your play is selected, you’ve beat the odds (at MNWL, for example, we select two plays out of two hundred) and in the months that follow, a team of strangers examine, poke, and prod it. Although they are enthusiastic, they are still new to you and your play or musical. Playwriting, even in the best of times, can be a lonely business.At MNWL, we are trying to put our playwrights in the center. Rather than thinking we know best, we are trying to curate an experience driven by what the playwright wants and the development process they request. Granted, this kind of agency requires more scaffolding, more conversation, and more work on the part of programs like ours, but hopefully in some of the stories that follow, you will see the fruits of this effort and find new ways of thinking about the development of new plays or musicals.In a very real way, this story begins with COVID. We had three seasons under our belt, but rather than continue in an online format, we took two years off. During this time, we assessed the program and brainstormed opportunities for its development through a three-day think tank. During this time, we not only clarified our commitment to agency for our creatives but also identified the intersection of the academic community and a vision for the future. Our initiative, facilitated by Anne Harbison, an organizational consultant, and attended by faculty across the School of Theatre and Dance, set out to strengthen relationships with writers, maximize educational opportunities for students, and identify the unique qualities that define our new work development program. The pause, though forced upon us, allowed us to interrogate our intentions for the creatives coming through our process and the benefits for the academic community.From those sessions we sharpened our strategy, changed the number and rotation of our plays and musicals, created a for-credit experience for participating students, and moved the entire program from the dog days (and empty theatres) of June into the semester’s first week as a start-of-the-year kickoff event. We challenged ourselves to consider the needs of playwrights and their plays. Through this process, we discovered what matters.Whether you travel down I-81 from Washington DC’s Dulles Airport or wind through Shenandoah National Park on Route 33 from the Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport in Virginia, there is a moment when you find yourself in the valley, surrounded by the Blue Ridge, Allegheny, and Massanutten Mountain ranges. Welcome to Harrisonburg.Our location and the intersection of nature and creativity has a special impact. We may spend hours in a rehearsal studio, but there is always time to visit a local vineyard and talk about how to change the ending for a musical or writing a new scene. Or maybe we just talk about the weather or how to make the perfect negroni.The prestigious Eugene O’Neill Playwriting Festival sits on the ocean in Waterford, Connecticut. In August Wilson: A Life by Patti Hartigan, the location was described as “magical. . . . On the second night of the performance [Fences] at the O’Neill, the fog from the Atlantic Ocean rolled in at the end of the play. This was a common occurrence.”1 The quality of a place is part of the creative process.We provide space in the schedule for writers to investigate their work outside of the rehearsal room. We encourage creators to take the morning off, a day off, if need be, to write new pages, think about a moment, change the opening and come back and hear their work again. And they do. Book writer Maddie Kovach wrote new scenes while composer Alica Daine Benning wrote new songs for their musical Grief Tour during MNWL 2024. Brandy Carie added new pages and an entirely new order for her play How to Live Forever.MNWL defines itself as an incubator for the development of new plays within the School of Theatre and Dance at James Madison University in the Shenandoah Valley. Dean Rubén Graciani coined that phrase when we sat around a table identifying objectives for our new work development program. What does it mean to be an incubator? In the egg world, an incubator is a controlled environment where eggs are hatched. In the business world, an incubator is a place that supports new ventures. From eggs to business, an incubator is a protected space for something very, very new to grow. Like a new play or musical.How do we make the incubator work? Well, first and foremost, we put the creators in the center, metaphorically, not physically, of course. They know their work best and are the experts in the room. They define the structure for the development process. Each process is tailored to meet their needs. What do they want to explore in the limited time and space we have? They are guests in our space but hosts of the new work party.And for this party, we bring along radical creative empathy. For Amanda Andrei’s play Black Sky, set in the woods, we hiked up to the fireman’s lookout before our first reading to imbue the rehearsal room with the sensory experience of the play’s environment. When we workshopped the new musical Divided (MNWL 2017) composed by Kristen Rosenfeld with book and lyrics by Luanne Rosenfeld, we brought in a seasoned musical theatre director, James Cooney. In Alan Stewart’s Of a Feather, we collaborated with JMU adjunct dance faculty Julia Vessey to enhance the actor’s portrayal of a bird, so Alan could understand his own vision for the bird character. For Brandy Carie’s play, we invited musician Trent Wagler to create the musical gestures that underscored key moments in the action of her play.In A Director Prepares, Anne Bogart states, “Imagine planning a surprise birthday party for a friend. You are structuring a journey for another person. This kind of impulse also determines how we compose a song, develop a story, design a house and, ideally, how we rehearse a play.”2 Development is a raw creative process where the new work is finding its way and not always sure where it is going. We aim to create an artist-friendly environment to honor how each creative party is different. We take hosting seriously. Once creatives arrive at JMU, we provide an intensive process with seven-hour rehearsal days, but when we leave the space, we provide dinners, a potluck with the MNWL company, directions to the best coffee shops, and even visits to Monticello; anything necessary to make them feel at home. Brandy N. Carie, a playwright in residence from 2023, noted, “It is rare to find a development opportunity so thoughtfully calibrated to support writers both creatively and on a more personal level.”3Originally, MNWL had its development process in June when students and faculty are out of town (at summer jobs or internships or traveling through Italy). Some community members and theatre subscribers attended the June reading, but we wanted our department to be in the audience. We not only moved the time to the first weekend of the semester, but we also offered students the opportunity to take a one-credit new work development course. This shift addressed questions of financial sustainability and also created a connection to the curriculum. Students and faculty involved in the process return a week before the first day of the semester and continue the process during the first week of class, culminating in a weekend of readings. The first year of this change, we had audiences at 50 percent capacity, the second year, 75 percent, and in our third and most-recent season, the readings were sold out. We added a “Meet the Team” preshow event for audiences to engage with the writers and learn about their process. Without a doubt, the process serves the creatives, but it has also impacted our students’ relationship to new work and offered new opportunities for curricular restructuring. For instance, we have added a new work concentration to our curriculum with the vision of providing involvement in MNWL as a requirement for students in this concentration.MNWL has afforded the opportunity for JMU faculty and students to work closely with playwrights and creative teams. Sometimes we work with seasoned playwrights like Brandy Carie (MNWL 2023), recently selected as one of the Playwrights Center core writers for 2024–27. Sometimes we work with early career-writing teams like Maddie Kovach and Alica Daine Benning on their first musical, Grief Tour. In 2024, Anya Martin’s play, The Presidents Pants (MNWL 2023) was a semifinalist for the Eugene O’Neill Playwriting Festival, one of the most prestigious festivals in the country. Rita Anderson’s play, Lightning Girl!, workshopped at MNWL 2022, has received multiple productions across the country. Playwright Alan Stewart was accepted into the National Fellows Class of 2024–25 for Dramatists Guild.In 2022, American Theatre published playwright Steven Deitz’s speech which addressed the risks of producing new works within professional theatre seasons.How are we creating a pathway for production at JMU or elsewhere for the musicals and plays that come through our program? As faculty at a university with access to new works through MNWL, production is our final frontier. We have the space, the budget, the audience, and the artists of the future in our programs. Identifying new work for eventual production in our season is one of the goals of MNWL and informs the selection process when deciding on the final plays and musicals. Since our inception in 2017, we have not produced a MNWL play or musical. However, the current season planning committee has identified an original work as a possibility for the upcoming year, which will provide an opportunity for students to collaborate with a playwright in residence. Furthermore, we are exploring a partnership with Producing Artistic Director Nathaniel Shaw and Firehouse Theatre in Richmond, Virginia, whereby they would consider MNWL works for future development and production.MNWL has the confidence to envision the future, thanks to the generosity of a donation for the support of artistic entrepreneurship. There is nothing more entrepreneurial than creating something from scratch—like a play, or a musical. From the start, our dean (and former school director) Rubén Graciani has seen the potential of MNWL as a national destination for the development of new plays and musicals. “I hope it continues to grow in reputation and opportunity for our guests, faculty, and students. I also believe it has the potential to become a model for holistically and empathically supporting the risk-taking necessary to engage with new ideas, demonstrate intersectional and collaborative thinking, and translate some of our initial projects into further development opportunities.”5 These important stakeholders are invested in the future of MNWL, providing financial security and vision for the future.Providing a development process uniquely designed to serve the needs of the creatives and their plays and musicals that come through our process is foundational to our program. But that care is not only for those selected but for all creatives who have submitted their work. When the call goes out for the upcoming MNWL, it is first sent to the playwrights who submitted the year before. And when the finalists and semifinalists are selected, that announcement is emailed to everyone who submitted their work. And every year, thank-you emails come back after the announcement is emailed, most recently from a playwright, “Although I am disheartened at the news, thank you for letting me know. As you’re aware, we playwrights often exist alone in a vacuum.”As we look forward, we know, what matters most is what we offer our guest artists who move through our development process and what they say after they drive out of our valley.Yes, playwrights and composers get a structured and rigorous development process, but what makes us special is that MNWL (thanks in no small part to the beauty of the Shenandoah Valley and an itinerary of social activities) is as much a writer’s retreat as a development process. Our 2022 playwright in residence, Rita Anderson, wrote: “I have had artistic residencies and development opportunities at many theatres and foundations, and I found the experience at Madison new works lab to be the BEST of these, hands down. I simply had an incredible time from start to finish. I have told everyone who will listen how wonderful MNWL was, and how grateful I am to have participated.”6