Experience new play development firsthand with PlayPenn this summer

New play development — the reading and workshopping of new plays in consideration of full production — is something many theater companies participate in and support. Organizations devoted solely to this are rare, but we’ve had one in Philadelphia for 10 years: PlayPenn.

This whimsically named brainchild of actor-director Paul Meshejian started in “a kind of lightning-bolt moment,” the Philly native explains. “I suddenly realized that Philadelphia had become a prolific production community and that we were seeing seasons with three productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the like, and almost no new work was being produced. What’s more, I realized there was no organization committed, in a concerted way, to advancing new voices.”

Enter Meshejian, a People’s Light & Theatre Company resident actor who drew on years of work acting and directing in Minneapolis-St. Paul’s Playwrights Center. “My experience there let me to understand that a community could be known as a place that is a home for playwrights as long as there is support and promotion of playwrights and plays as foundational elements in that community.”

Since the first conference in 2005, PlayPenn has helped to shepherd over 60 plays from infancy to a state closer to production-readiness, and has also grown a thriving education program. Each playwright is provided a director, a dramaturg, actors and designers, and is staged (script in hand, so that the writer can continue to rewrite without requiring actors to memorize the lines), culminating in free public readings.           

This year’s plays are Stephen Belber’s The Dizzy Little Dance of Russell DiFinaldi, Anne Marie Cammarato’s A Scar, Emily Schwend’s Behind the Motel, Jen Silverman’s Wild Blue, Philly resident Davey Stratton White’s Cattle Barn, Hoochie Coo, and Mr. Wheeler’s by Rob Zellers. In addition, PlayPenn sponsors readings by conference interns and a symposium, Ten Years of New Play Development in Philadelphia, moderated by Associate Artist Michele Volansky (July 24, 6 pm).

PlayPenn does not limit itself to Philadelphia writers, though many have participated, including Bruce Graham, Michael Hollinger, Aaron Cromie, Quinn Eli, Katie Gray, Arden Kass, Seth Rozin, Nicholas Wardigo, and James Ijames, whose The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington was produced in June to great acclaim by Philadelphia’s Flashpoint Theatre Company. Locally, PlayPenn-developed plays have been produced by the Arden, Azuka, InterAct, Philadelphia Theatre Company and others. PlayPenn does not produce plays, so these scripts are submitted to producers by the writers or their agents. Many have been produced and published, and some have won awards.

“The principals behind our choices at PlayPenn,” Meshejian explains, “Have to do with a decision we made early on to make an environment that keeps commerce out of the room. We believe that if writers do their work in response to their own impulses, along with the collaborative input of artists they choose to work with, that the outcome will be a play that reflects their intent.”

This means that the playwrights choose their directors, participate in casting actors and schedule rehearsals to allow writers time to reflect and revise. This year, PlayPenn added a second public reading of each play to the process, allowing the writers to hear the script performed with an audience, and then apply lessons learned in another week of rehearsal and revision before the second reading.

Most plays, says Meshejian, “are commissioned or invited to be developed at producing theaters that have a vested interest in a play meeting their particular needs.” This is appropriate, he notes, since theaters must choose plays to produce, but it means that when a theater develops but then chooses not to produce, the play has “a kind of black mark” with other companies  — often after the playwright “has, in good faith, adjusted her storytelling to please her hosts, in the interest of potential production.”

PlayPenn avoids this with what Jacqueline Goldfinger, PlayPenn’s new Director of Education (replacing Sarah Mantell, who departs to join Yale University’s esteemed MFA Playwriting program), and a past participant as both a dramaturg and playwright, calls “a holistic approach to creating new theater.” PlayPenn, she explains, “enables an artistic state of permanent revolution.”

PlayPenn has offered more than 30 classes, focusing on playwriting for writers at all levels, but also classes on acting in and directing new plays. Nationally prominent writers including Paula Vogel, J.T. Rogers, Craig Lucas, Jeffrey Sweet and Sam Hunter have taught classes. This fall, playwrights can learn about writing for television, marketing their plays, reaching their subconscious and working with actors. More online classes will be offered in the future, and their Rent-a-Dramaturg program — in which playwrights work one-on-one with a carefully chosen mentor — will expand.

Classes draw not only local writers, but eager students from New York, Baltimore, DC and other cities, which is proof that PlayPenn is offering something that others don’t.

While playwrights are PlayPenn’s focus, the audience is also very important to Meshejian. Unlike other new play readings, PlayPenn’s are not followed by an audience discussion, but the people who fill nearly every available seat (tickets are free, but reservations are required, and most performances have a waiting list) certainly matter. Meshejian sees PlayPenn helping playgoers “become comfortable with the idea of new plays as experiences that can entertain, excite, and provoke in the best sense,” inspiring them to attend more.

“We want to see more new plays produced in Philadelphia, the region, and the nation,” says Meshejian, “so if we’re successful in growing a population of theatergoers that looks forward to seeing new plays, we believe it will lesson the burden our producing theaters feel when deciding whether or not they can afford to take the chance on producing them.”

Through July 27, Free but reservations required, PlayPenn at The Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-242-2813, playpenn.org.