The audience is an integral part of the new play development process, as two area stage companies — Palm Beach Dramaworks and Florida Atlantic University Theatre Lab — can attest. Both have festivals of new work that consist of readings and talkbacks of evolving scripts, some of which will graduate to be fully produced in subsequent seasons.
Coming up soon is Dramaworks’ Perlberg Festival of New Plays, set for January 17-19 and named for executive producers Diane and Mark Perlberg, longtime supporters of the West Palm Beach troupe, both financially and dramaturgically.
This year’s festival — as in the past — will feature five new plays read by veteran actors, followed by Q & A sessions with the audience. Heading the staff support is literary manager and resident playwright Jenny Connell Davis, whose drama The Messenger was part of the 2022 festival and then the 2023 mainstage season.
She and former festival director Bruce Linser read the more than 200 scripts that PBD gathered from its sources, narrowing them down to the most promising 15. They, in turn, were read by a committee of knowledgeable volunteers who made recommendations to producing artistic director William Hayes, responsible for the final decisions.
“We don’t do an open submission process where anybody can apply,” Davis notes. “Ours is more solicited. We’re going out to specific playwrights whose work we love, to directors whose taste we really trust.” The exception is Florida playwrights who are invited to submit scripts, “because we want to support local writers where we can.”
And Davis prowls other festivals around the country looking for plays that were deemed worthy but did not make their final cuts. “So we find scripts lots of different ways,” she says.
She is looking to showcase a specific type of Dramaworks play, “theater to think about,” as the company’s mission statement puts it. “Palm Beach Dramaworks really does so beautifully with character and relationship-driven classics,” explains Davis. “And we’re looking for the classics of tomorrow.”
Leading off this year’s Perlberg Festival (Friday, Jan. 17, 3 p.m.) is Vineland Place, by Steven Dietz, one of the most produced playwrights in the country. It is a two-character play which Davis describes as “sort of a twisty mystery… a great showcase for two really strong dramatic actors. It’s less political than stuff we’ve done, but I think we have other things in this festival that are definitely political.”
At 7:30 p.m. that same day, the festival presents a reading of Class C by Chaz T. Martin, who is the literary manager of Philadelphia’s Interact Theatre Company, a writer whom Davis calls “a real up-and-comer.” Set in a dystropian near-future, she considers Class C “our biggest capital P political play of the festival. It is dramatic and tense and there is violence. It is probably going to be one of our most divisive plays.”
Next up, on Saturday, Jan. 18, at 3 p.m., is The Mallard, by Vincent Delaney. Uncharacteristically for a company with “drama” in its name, this one is a comedy, set at a yard sale, a situation to which much of the audience should be able to relate. “You don’t think of us for comedies, but underneath the comedy it is about real things, and there’s a lot of character work in it.” The bottom line, says Davis, is “We thought it was funny.”
The 7:30 p.m. Saturday night reading is In Two, by Chelsea Marcantel, which takes place in the world of vaudeville magic and focuses on the classic illusion of cutting a woman in half. In addition, the play itself is cut in two, set initially in the 1920s and then in contemporary times. “She’s interested in looking at these sort of niche communities and then digging in and getting under the surface with them,” Davis says of Marcantel.
The fifth reading, Sunday, Jan. 19, at 3 p.m. is Alba, by Miami-based Alejandro Rodriguez, an adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s classic tale of mourning and repression, The House of Bernarda Alba. While the female-centric script has been developed and read at various theaters around the country, “Alejandro is thrilled to be, essentially, bringing this play home, a chance to really put it in front of the South Florida audience that was in his heart as he was writing it,” Davis notes.
“The goal this year is a little bit more to put in terrific plays that we feel like we might produce, and we’re hoping that a couple of productions for the next couple of seasons come out of this. We’ll see. You never know for sure, but that is more explicitly the goal this year than in past years.”
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After 10 years of new play readings in a conventional festival format, Florida Atlantic University’s Theatre Lab is ready to expand its offerings with full productions of new, but largely untested scripts. “This year we are moving to the sort of destination event model,” says producing artistic director Matt Stabile, patterned on the very successful but now defunct Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Ky., and the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, W.Va. To avoid conflict with Dramaworks’ festival and competition for actors, FAU has moved its festival to a three-week period in the spring, from April 5 through 20.
The FAU festival — dubbed the Owl New Play Festival — kicks off with a fully staged world premiere of Jeff Bower’s The Impossible Task of Today, a play about gun violence, mental health and the dangers of social media that was read and acclaimed in the 2022 new play festival. The second weekend of the festival will see the addition of a fully realized workshop production of The Frankenstein Project, by E.M. Lewis, known to Theatre Lab audiences from Dorothy’s Dictionary. Her new play juxtaposes Mary Shelley’s creation of her masterwork with a contemporary high schooler writing a paper on Shelley.
“And we’ll be collaborating on a third non-traditional theater event called ‘The Happiness Gym,’” says Stabile, “which leads participants through scientifically proven exercises to boost their happiness and well-being. All three events kind of talk to each other and communicate with each other. So that’s basically a festival focusing on human connection and how we can use science and technology to our advantage. Sounds like a festival we could really use now.”
The main events will be presented concurrently each weekend “and then we will sprinkle in some additional readings of new plays over the course of the final two weekends,” explains Stabile. “So the idea is that people can come to town for one or two days and see two full productions and, the third, a non-traditional event, and catch a reading or two while they’re here.”
If all goes well in this test-the-waters year, FAU hopes to expand further in future seasons. “Next year we are already planning to have three full productions running and my goal is that within five years, we can get that up to five, potentially six (productions), the way CATF does.
“The other big change to our festival, is that we’re moving to a model where the readings are free events,” says Stabile. “We’ll encourage donations, but there won’t be a ticket charge for those. By removing a ticket price, you can lower what audience expectations are and take the pressure off the artists involved. And so that’s kind of like the model we’re moving toward. But, but again, because we’re offering the full production, it’s sort of like that’s our showcase area, and our reading area is more about the development of the pieces.”
Already chosen for a free public reading this year is a new musical called Donner: An American Tragedy, about the fatal trek of pioneers through California’s Donner Pass in 1846, and a selection from Theatre Lab’s LabRATS program, where high school seniors are mentored to write their own short plays. By the second weekend, Stabile hopes to host the first public reading of a new Fair Play Initiative commission piece, a program geared to developing work by LGBTQ+ playwrights, made possible through the Our Fund Foundation. Details are hazy, however, because that script is still being written.
Regardless of the format changes to FAU’s new play festival, the purpose remains the same. “Our history is, I think it’s something like 70% of the plays that we’ve done full productions of have come out of either our new play festival or our playwrights’ forum readings,” says Stabile. “So we’re very intentional about programming the work that we read. And with these changes, that would still be the case.”
PERLBERG FESTIVAL OF NEW PLAYS. Palm Beach Dramaworks. 201 Clematis St., West Palm Beach. January 17-19. $30, or $100 for all five readings. 561-514-4042 or visit palmbeachdramaworks.org.
FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY OWL NEW PLAY FESTIVAL, FAU campus, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton. April 5-20. $35-$45. Readings free of charge, with donations requested. Call 561-297-4784 or visit www.fau.edu/artsandletters/theatrelab/.