New Works Development and Student Learning Outcomes

Donald Gillian-Daniel et al., in “Inclusion in the Classroom,” open their article by posing a series of questions: “What if there were a way for faculty to teach more equitably and inclusively, advise minoritized students more effectively, and mentor all students in research settings without the need to learn separate skills for each role? What if, at the same time, faculty could become better colleagues and more effective leaders?”1 To imagine the possibility of mechanisms for cultural transformation is the first step toward creating institutional structures to support faculty and staff labor to transform our daily activities.Our approach to faculty creative research and student opportunity is to prepare students for the professional theatre by working alongside faculty to create new works within the university setting. Michigan State University is dedicated to advancing new play development as a core component of our student-learning outcomes and faculty research. Echoing calls in American Theatre making cases for supporting new plays, we engage in a variety of play development processes that reflect different styles of theatre and performance, aligned with our pedagogical goals.2 From our Young Playwright’s Festival, which engages Michigan high school students, to our diverse play commissions, we strive to be a dynamic center for theatrical innovation, fostering bold ideas and nurturing the next generation of creative leaders. Through personalized mentorship, we support students’ creative interests and abilities across a wide range of professional roles, such as designers, dramaturgs, stage managers, intimacy directors, and directors. Additionally, our strong partnerships with performance organizations provide students with real-world experience and industry connections. Our commitment to new works and inclusive theatrical practices is reflected in initiatives such as our New Musical Theatre Laboratory, visiting artist programs, and cross-campus collaborations, all of which contribute to shaping the future of theatre.The New Musical Laboratory (NML), formally known as ĭmáGen, is a collaboration between Wharton Center Institute for Arts & Creativity and the Department of Theatre at Michigan State University. The Institute for Arts and Creativity is the arts and education wing of the Wharton Center. It seeks to connect communities to the renowned artists that come as performers and connect them as teaching artists in classrooms. Our partnership is rooted in the cocreation of new work. NML brings a new musical and its creative team to MSU for workshopping, rehearsal and performance. At its core, NML is a symbiotic relationship between Broadway theatre artists, Wharton Center, and the Department of Theatre students. Launched in 2015, NML has hosted a three-week workshop residency on one new musical each season. Each year, the chosen project selects a creative team according to the needs of the musical and may include AEA actors, a director, and others. Student actors drawn from our musical theatre minor work alongside professional actors and a creative team made up of professionals and theatre department faculty. Our focus is to educate our students while developing new relationships with industry professionals. The visiting artists teach masterclasses during the day and workshop musical in the evening. The team can add new pages, songs, extract scenes—whatever they wish to accomplish in the workshop experience.New musicals take several years to develop, with many recent shows on Broadway taking six-to-eight years. Writers begin with an idea, concept, or adaptation and outline a potential story, typically write three-to-five songs to pitch to determine if the idea has legs. Once the show has an initial vetting, the writers draft the first twenty to thirty pages of a script and more songs to send to workshop programs to secure developmental funding. Shows go through several of these workshops prior to securing a potential producer to help bring the project to fruition, and MSU serves as a cost-effective opportunity to develop material (one of a handful of university housed MT residencies). Each year, over one hundred submissions are received for the NML through a national open-call process.3 Musicals are in various stages of development at the time of submission. The projects submitted range from those in early development, where the goal was to develop songs and improve the book, to those with a fully completed book and score, where the goal was to work through the challenges in staging and pacing. The selection committee—made up of institute staff, musical theatre faculty, and students—selects a musical that aligns with the goals of the casting age-appropriate work reflecting the concern of contemporary students and a creative team who is rooted in being in an educational environment.Recent projects include In Pieces (2024) and Rocky Mountain High (2023). In Pieces, with book, lyrics, and music by Joey Contreras, was produced with guest collaborators Andrew Patino (producer), Emily Maltby (director), Jennifer Lowe (stage manager), Samuel Yates (dramaturg), Dave Wendelberger (musical director), and equity actors Julian Diaz-Granados and Stephanie Torns. The production focused on developing a compelling narrative structure to complement Contreras’s music. Already a global hit, In Pieces sought to evolve from a concept album into a fully realized musical. The workshop emphasized character development, narrative cohesion, and the alignment song with the emotional arcs of the characters, with the involvement of a musical theatre dramaturg proving crucial. Across projects like In Pieces and also In Emily’s Words (2022) and We Foxes (2017), our students have had the most impact when the “writing team” is comprised of a single person for the book, music, and lyrics. Wendelberger explains, “These solo writers seem to benefit from hearing their work performed by our students, who bring their words and songs to life with a full emotional journey. Otherwise, we often see how their writing exists, mostly in their head or in the theoretical, and not as much in the practical before our workshop.”4 As Helinsky et al. state, “Sometimes the playwright needs to see it not work [to] realize why it is not working. (Sometimes the rest of us need to see it not work to truly understand what the playwright is trying to do.)”5 Here, students learn by watching how writers rewrite and make choices to craft meaning, disrupting their assumptions that plays have fixed meanings.In contrast, Rocky Mountain High (2023)—with book and lyrics by Kia and Cooper Kofron, music by Mark Hollman and Drew Gasparini, and direction by Marc Acito—focused on weaving together multiple plotlines while exploring how young-adult voices navigate storytelling through music. Music direction was led by Wendelberger, with guest actor Simon Pearl. This workshop prioritized setting transitions to clarify the narrative, with daily score adjustments facilitated by assistants. The involvement of MFA designers in imagining set and audio design opened new possibilities for plot development through design experimentation, highlighting the collaborative power of visual and auditory storytelling. In all these workshops, student actors, assistant directors, assistants to the writers, and composers had a chance to collaborate with the writers and often made choices that led to discoveries for the artistic team. For example, a student made a recommendation to the creative team for their character to become a dancing marijuana leaf for the “dream ballet” section. This was not initially imagined but resulted in a significant contribution to the storytelling of that scene. Adam Yankowi, NML faculty, describes, “You can see the way having our students in the room, making real-time choices, pushes the work forward. There’s something about hearing the piece spoken and sung out loud, on stage, that helps these writers fine-tune their material. The workshop process allows them to step back, see what’s working, and make changes.”6 Not surprisingly, others on the team like the director, dramaturg, and other creatives also contribute to this, but the student actors are equally valuable.A challenge with these projects has been setting budget limits and determining the production elements for workshops. At its inception teams were restricted to music stands and house lights. However, as projects are at various stages of development needs are variable. Our aim is to provide a process-oriented space where the team is not distracted from the detailed developmental work during the intensive writing and composition sessions. This means standing firm and denying last minute additions meant for audience consumption. We have limited production elements to props and environmental cues essential to the storytelling. Prioritizing process over product benefits students and the artistic team, preparing them for premieres. We also invite artists to share career advice, helping students connect classroom work to professional opportunities.We are redesigning the program for greater impact, shifting from a one-visit, three-week model to a two-year investment. This approach allows faculty to engage in high-impact creative research and gives students the opportunity to witness and contribute to the creative process at various stages. It broadens students’ networks and enhances faculty collaboration within the national theatre market. The enhanced program model is a three-phase initiative:Past participants agree that a subsequent developmental production would allow the project to identify potential challenges and thoroughly address them through a full production. Using the lessons of each iteration we balance hiring guest professionals with the need to create a professional venue for the artists to collaborate. We discuss how many professionals to bring in residence and how many student actors, stage managers, and assistants are optimal for each project. While we have tried using an advance stage management student as the stage manager, we found that given the compressed process a union stage manager working with student assistants offered more opportunities for the students to acquire skills.In 2020 MSU Theatre actively responded to the challenges raised by We See You, White American Theater and student activism, aiming to diversify our mainstage productions and classroom curriculum to better reflect the values and experiences of our students.7 Our efforts go beyond simply adjusting season selection; true change requires attracting a more diverse range of identities within our casting pools to ensure equitable representation. Our goal was to create a range of practices that invite broader student participation on their own terms and offer personalized opportunities, allowing students to explore and develop their talents. Two initiatives epitomize our efforts.The first, Transforming MSU is a partnership between the Transforming Theatre Ensemble, Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, and Theatre. In 2020 we invited students from across the university to help transform our departmental culture. We established a playwriting fellowship where eight graduate and undergraduates drawn from across the university were chosen by portfolio review to be trained over the course of a year in applied theatre and playwriting. This program gives students from a diversity of disciplines an opportunity to engage their creativity and share thought-provoking experiences around justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion issues. Working as a cohort, students conceive of and develop theatrical sketches that identify biased behaviors, attitudes, and communication within the university community. By engaging with these techniques, students reflect and analyze problematic attitudes and behaviors and help chart a pathway toward cultural transformation. Not only does performance of their writing elevate their work, but most importantly, their voices are given a platform used in institutional training to share with those in the position make structural changes.The plays are presented to focus groups through table readings of works in progress, designed to encourage cross-campus input and invite diverse voices and perspectives. The artistic director leads facilitation workshops to aid playwright revision processes. Feedback is gathered from two key groups: students from various backgrounds and employees with expertise in transformational change. The workshops use Liz Lerman’s critical response process, allowing audiences to engage in postperformance discussions led by a facilitator to reflect on and analyze the play’s dynamics.8 The process culminated in public performances in a festival format.The second example highlights the development of a work for our mainstage season. In 2022, we commissioned a play to reflect the diverse identities within our MFA acting cohort. The commission specifically sought voices from the global majority community to create a play tailored to the ensemble. It was developed over two years, culminating in its premiere as a capstone performance in 2024. With faculty guidance, the cohort selected Iraisa Ann Reilly, who worked in residence with the students over several months, developing a first draft for a workshop reading. Over the following year, Reilly continued collaborating via Zoom before returning in residence for the premiere of Stevie and the Real World. Throughout this process, we encountered challenges related to commissioning a work for a student ensemble, needing to temper student expectations of their control over their characters and allow the playwright the space to allow the structure and the content of the play to develop organically. Here faculty intervention worked to protect the playwright’s creative freedom while simultaneously protecting learning outcomes.Our experience has led to changes in planning our next commission, prioritizing playwright preferences for workshop schedules. Reilly found it helpful to rehearse every other day to allow time for rewrites. A Zoom reading and discussion after submitting the final version would have clarified changes and ensured alignment on design elements. Also, we are considering whether the capstone director should be a tenured faculty member to handle challenges, and whether an external dramaturg specializing in new work development is necessary. While student outcomes are key, supporting the playwright’s success is also important. By engaging our students in a process with a fluid script we challenge preprofessional students to apply the skills introduced through canonical productions and in classroom settings. We hope that our students will carry these flexible skills into the profession more readily. For our 2026–27 season, we have partnered with the Department of Theatre at the University of Iowa by commissioning one of their students to work alongside our students to create a new work for the stage.Taking up Steve Dietz’s call, “We must commit to the long-term support of an entire generation of playwrights. Playwrights from all ethnicities and identities, all religions and cultures.”9 Universities offer playwrights a space to take creative risks and develop their next play, while engaging students in a journey of discovery. It is a symbiotic relationship where artists can develop, and students can learn by doing. We’re working to integrate new play development into coursework, where classes can workshop elements for guest artists or support full premieres after multiyear development. Our students and faculty work alongside professional theatre makers, creating new networks, seeding future projects, and honing existing work for the stage. Relationships have developed organically and resulted in grant applications, professional collaborations, and new plays and musicals. Our faculty are driven by a mission to revise older musical theatre repertoire for a more inclusive LGBTQ+ audience, created new roles for the global majority, and put into practice intimacy and violence practices within our rehearsal spaces, modeling working practices that support the changes occurring across the industry. These initiatives foster new work and provide faculty opportunities to support playwrights crafting pieces suited for university-age casting. Our low-pressure environment, compared to commercial theatre, allows students to experience how plays evolve, face challenges, and adapt. This prepares them for professional theatre, helping them develop their voices and perspectives to speak authentically to their generation.