Supporting a Culture of New Work Development: Opportunities and Challenges at Texas Tech University

The Texas Tech University (TTU) School of Theatre & Dance (SoTD) uses the umbrella of “new work” to include original scripted plays and musicals, devised performance, and choreography as important outcomes of creative research and learning. Our dance program embeds new choreography within its pedagogy and practice and robustly engages in extracurricular and community-centered projects. Within the theatre program, a culture that supports new theatre offers multiple access points for student involvement. While critical for the longevity and relevance of the performing arts, cultivating an environment conducive to new work comes with significant challenges within the academy. Our experience highlights the demands on resources, pedagogy, and praxis of producing new plays. Reconciling the disparate needs of students in academic theatre (e.g., liberal arts education; research and scholarship; artistic training; personal enrichment; and acquisition of general skills) with the value of academic exposure to new play development is essential to sustaining this culture into the future.The SoTD supports several new theatre initiatives. During the academic year, the largest of these has been the Frontier Festival (Frontier Fest), which in 2021 expanded the former Raider Red’s One-Act Play Spectacular (RROAPS) and Raider Red’s Awesome Dance Spectacular (RRADS) to include full-length plays by graduate students. Our former head of playwriting Rebecca Gilman and our former dramaturgy professor Sarah Johnson drew from their experiences with the University of Iowa’s Iowa New Play Festival to reimagine RROAPS and RRADS as a showcase for student work within a minimally produced, sustainable frame. To produce the volume of new work for each festival (around ten to twelve pieces of different lengths and formats), individual plays may have directorial, dramaturgical, and acting support, but minimal design (i.e., shared unit set, repertory light plot, no-costume build, no-complex sound cuing, minimal technical rehearsal time). Despite exploring multiple production models, sustainability remains elusive. Frontier Fest was on hiatus for the 2024–25 school year, as the SoTD considered how best to administer the festival in the future. Nevertheless, both Frontier Fest and its predecessors were valuable laboratories for students to take risks and explore new work processes and pedagogies, such as script management, prompt-based playwriting, and working with living playwrights.Other opportunities exist. The SoTD partners with TTU’s Center for Students in Addiction Recovery (CSAR) to produce Plays on Tap, an annual festival of new ten-minute plays exploring topics of recovery and addiction. Established by retired playwriting Chair Dr. Norman Bert and CSAR Associate Director Dr. George Comiskey, Plays on Tap represents an important intersection of applied theatre, community engagement, and new play work. CSAR students and leaders provide prompts to the student playwrights and then respond to the original plays during a talkback after the public performance. By centering the experiences of students in recovery, the talkback disrupts traditional discussion of theatrical craft in favor of the impact of the art on a community deeply connected to its concerns. The annual TTU Arts and Humanities Graduate Research Conference holds a short-play competition that highlights our graduate students’ new works. Also, the SoTD has produced workshops of new material that have facilitated student exposure to professional artists and new work processes. Student-led groups, such as Script Raiders or the Red Theatre Company, have contributed by facilitating time-limited theatre-making events, readings, writing groups, and workshops of new plays by TTU students.In the summer, new theatre work takes a more central and curricular role in student experiences, anchored by TTU’s signature WildWind Performance Lab.1 Founded in 2013 by school Director Mark Charney, WildWind leaders curate a holistic, weeks-long summer course that combines workshops led by professional artists with opportunities to participate in new play development for professional playwrights of varying career levels. Works that have received development time at WildWind have gone on to regional (Mara Nelson Greenberg’s Do You Feel Anger?), international (Yilong Liu’s The Book of Mountains and Seas), and Broadway productions (Selina Fillinger’s POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive). A unique aspect of the WildWind process is the inclusion of “abstractors,” nonperformance students who create responses to the play in development that have varied from visual art to immersive experiences to new music composition.Students may also participate in the Marfa Intensive, a two-week immersion into devised theatre technique in the small, arts-focused town of Marfa in southwest Texas, using art and the environment to inspire new collectively generated work. In summer 2024, the leaders of the Intensive began The Ghost Project, the first project from Marfa that continued development to a full production in the 2024–25 season.Despite this extensive portfolio, Texas Tech does not offer a formal course of study in new play development, outside of its credit-bearing summer experiences. In the past, the SoTD experimented with one-hour courses aligned with RROAPS with mixed results. Nevertheless, new work creation is so common to the interests of students and faculty that most students receive some sort of exposure during their time.In recent years at Texas Tech, I tried to teach that new play collaboration serves the needs of the work before the egocentric vision of the individual artist. That is, students might ask, “What does the play want?” before “What do I want?” Richard Nelson’s 2007 critique of Western new play development practices is foundational when broaching this ethos to students. In this speech, Nelson challenges the assumption that the new play begins as flawed and that the playwright needs “help” (i.e., the prescriptive guidance of well-meaning others) to “fix” their play.2 To Nelson, the new play exists as a work not to be “fixed” but to be solved. Those in new play-rehearsal rooms should respect the autonomy and knowledge of playwrights as the primary experts about their own work. Other playwrights have voiced similar arguments over the years, and other theatre professionals, dramaturgs especially, have expanded these ideas through greater advocacy for artist-centered modes of giving feedback (e.g., Lerman’s critical response).3 Helinsky et al.’s rules of engagement is another process-focused framework that positions the new play team as “midwives” for the playwright, among other advice.4 The abstraction process used in our WildWind program is another method to bypass prescriptive responses to new plays in favor of generative processes that seek to point at richer dramaturgical connections and conversations between the new play and other discourses.At TTU—as at many other institutions, one suspects—students are likely to encounter the late Elinor Fuchs’s essay “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet” in multiple classes; design, directing, script analysis, dramaturgy, and new play development are only a few of the contexts where its relevance shines.5 Fuchs argues that readers may consider the play too narrowly by rushing to normative psychologies when first encountering a text. Rather, she invites readers to describe the unique world of the play itself first, based on close reading and questioning whether it must resemble our own, before making conclusions about dramatic action and meaning. Her simple guidance unites the disparate tasks of fact gathering, objective and subjective analyses, and world building to elucidate the rules of the play world itself. The influence of her ideas here can be seen in that most of our students, across disciplines, in both classes and production, are able to have conversations about the “rules of the world” as part of the process of making choices about the story, characters, and design.These approaches resist value judgments of the play’s “merit” or rewriting the play to suit personal preferences in favor of discovering what the piece is trying to accomplish—on its own simplest terms. In my directing classes and new play work, I emphasize this simplicity by inviting all to think more naively about the work. That is, before leaping to literary, conceptual, or evaluative analyses, student directors should try to describe what the play is and what is happening, no matter how obvious one assumes that might be, or how unfamiliar it may be on the page.In addition to simplicity, student artists benefit from cultivating other specific aptitudes through course or production experiences that augment this new play culture, such as soft skills of active listening and care. Gifted new play director Ken Rus Schmoll once said, “There is never a single way to direct a play, but with new plays there is the first way, which carries a big responsibility.”6 This advice recognizes the vulnerability of a living playwright within a new play process. A scarcity mindset may hinder the team that fears getting it “wrong” or playwrights who fear this will be their only chance to experience their text in production. New play directors, designers, and dramaturgs must hold their nerve as they synthesize what multiple constituents tell them. A new play actor must exhibit fidelity to the playwright’s written word and resilience when things change. A new play producer must negotiate a piece’s continued evolution with the pressure to lock the play to achieve production goals. Artists who prefer fixed modes of working, who habitually paraphrase, or who prioritize their own authorship above the specific demands of a text may struggle to serve a living playwright.Years of producing new work have highlighted how resource and labor-intensive new work development may be. Like many other university programs, the SoTD felt the impact of the pandemic sharply. Depressed enrollments have reduced the number of students available to work on productions. Increased costs have made productions more expensive. Combined with the pressures of classes, other productions, and external commitments (like the spring conference season), giving new play development its fair attention adds another burden to an overtaxed production environment.Managing student expectations is another challenge. Frontier Fest and its predecessor intentionally ask students to center acting and directing and to think creatively with limited resources, echoing new play incubators such as the O’Neill’s National Playwrights Conference. Every year, “production creep” has been an issue as students try to maximize what they can achieve. Students unfamiliar with this kind of process may perceive the minimal production support as an equity issue, as they compare our new play development with other season productions that receive the full complement of design and technology.In recent years, more troubling has been an emerging skepticism about new plays themselves. Some students have questioned the value of working on plays that seem “unfinished.” This perspective evinces their creative ambition and desire to take their work seriously but runs counter to our vision of a risk-friendly, low-stakes space where student playwrights may develop voice, technique, and experience without anxieties that may accompany full production. The roots of this ambivalence are worth future exploration: For example, have TTU’s current lack of a head of playwriting and the hiatus of the playwriting concentration in its master of fine arts program reduced overall student buy-in for new plays? Is there a resurgence of preference for more “tried-and-true” fare among students concerned about what experiences shape their education, or are students just more discerning about activities to which they are willing to commit time?Despite these concerns, several students remain attracted to having a new play festival, but its scope and sustainability will be key factors to defining its future. In response to Frontier Fest’s hiatus, Red Theatre Company and Script Raiders inaugurated the First Light Festival in spring 2025, a new work festival entirely curated and produced by students. Learning from Frontier Fest, those student artistic directors reduced the number of produced scripts to four ten-minute plays, with minimal production, and a staged reading of a one act, and found it still to be a hefty undertaking. That said, the audience response was keen, and the festival offers hope for a revitalized enthusiasm for new play work, driven by student initiative than faculty fiat. Should First Light continue, student leaders must develop succession plans that provide continuity and clear leadership as they graduate.Given the landscape of competing interests, making the case for new play work remains a valuable project of the academy. Director Liz Diamond once observed that the greatest compliment one can give a new play director is that she has “given the playwright, the play.”7 By this, she meant the collaboration had manifested successfully the intentions or potential of the playwright’s vision. At Texas Tech, we consider that the ideal and most satisfying outcome of our new play efforts, through which we hope to impart the preparation and ethics for our theatre students to participate professionally in the future of new plays.