By Erik Kvarnberg
Palm Beach Dramaworks sets eighth new play festival
WEST PALM BEACH — Palm Beach Dramaworks is offering its eighth annual Perlberg Festival of New Plays this month at the company’s Clematis Street home.
From Jan. 9 to 11, playwrights will unite with a number of actors and directors to read through works in progress. Last season’s festival led to two upcoming world premieres at Dramaworks, Steven Dietz’s Vineland Place and Alejandro Rodriguez’s Alba.
The 2026 festival features the following five works:
• The Way North, by Tira Palmquist (3 pm Friday, Jan. 9), directed by Marya Mazor. A lost, pregnant Sudanese refugee is taken in by a former sheriff in rural Minnesota, who soon discovers that the refugee is making a run for the Canadian border.
• Fat Man’s, by Matt Webster (7 pm Friday), directed by J. Barry Lewis. In this play, a minister named Winnie inherits a building inhabited by a tattoo parlor run by Fat Man. They develop a friendship that soon gets tested.
• Provenance, by Jennifer Maisel (3 pm Saturday, Jan. 10), directed by Casey Stangl. This is the story of an unusual German portrait from the early 1900s that is stolen by the Nazis, then travels around the world, losing none of its power to affect people.
• How Should a Conversation Be?, by Malena Pennycook (7 pm Saturday), directed by Lily M. Wolff. Two women meet for coffee and fall in love, but struggle over the years to find the right language for a real connection.
• Bobby Robotowitz and Allison Portchnik, by Matt Schatz (3 pm Sunday, Jan. 11), directed by Liz Fisher. An aspiring novelist and mother enlists the help of a chatbot for writing help and emotional support, with surprising consequences.
There will also be a Playwrights Forum at 1:30 pm Sunday, hosted by Jenny Connell Davis, Dramaworks’s resident playwright and literary manager. Admission is free with the purchase of a ticket to any of the readings.
Each reading is followed by a post-performance discussion. Information about individual plays is available on the Palm Beach Dramaworks website at palmbeachdramaworks.com.
Tickets for the festival are on sale now, and can be purchased on the Palm Beach Dramaworks website or by calling the box office at 561-514-4042. Tickets are $35 per play, or $100 for all five plays.
FAU Theatre Lab moves to new venue
BOCA RATON — Theatre Lab, Florida Atlantic University’s professional theater production company, has gotten a larger pasture to graze in.
With the support from the school’s Department of Theater and Dance and the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, Theatre Lab will be moving its operations to the Marleen Forkas Studio One Theatre on campus. The move will allow the company to retain its focus on new work while being able to treat each show with more detail and support than its old space allowed.
The old space in FAU’s Parliament Hall was once a frozen yogurt shop in a student dorm’s cafeteria area. Hosting a professional theater company from this space was never an easy undertaking, said Matt Stabile, Theatre Lab’s producing artistic director.
“There’s a lot of decisions based on what you are able to do, instead of what you would like to do,” Stabile said. The new space also adds resources such as Broadway-style lighting, projectors, and the space to fit more performers.
This move is still temporary, though. While Stabile and company have been able to put together more than 30 shows and 100-plus developmental readings since 2015, they are still seeking a dedicated space to fully support the FAU Theatre Lab.
Two world premieres are scheduled for the first half of 2026, parts of a planned trilogy: Conversa, by Joanna Castle Miller, a one-woman show about an evangelical Christian who converts back to her ancestral faith of Judaism. Miller will star in the show, which runs from Feb. 7-22.
Miller’s second world premiere, Inferna, a two-hander about a playwright coming to terms with her childhood, is scheduled for April 11-26.
For more information, visit fau.edu/theatrelab.