PlayPenn’s 2009 Conference marked the 5th year that PlayPenn has offered resources to American playwrights in the interest of helping them to bring their work closer to production readiness. Since our inception in 2005 when we invited four playwrights to the conference – Sheila Callaghan, Jordan Harrison, J.T. Rogers, and Lydia Stryk – to this year when we were able to invite six playwrights and give rehearsed readings to two others, PlayPenn has evolved into a development conference ever-sensitive to the needs of the playwright. We are proud of and grateful to over 80 artists who joined us this year and over one thousand members of the Philadelphia community and the national professional theatre community who came out to appreciate the results of the work that was accomplished during the two-and-a-half weeks of the conference. Finally, without a committed community of supporters, both individual and institutional, there would be no PlayPenn and the theatre community - locally, regionally and nationally - would be all the poorer.
WHAT IS PLAYPENN?
PlayPenn is an artist-driven organization dedicated to improving the way in which new plays are developed. Employing an ever-evolving process, PlayPenn creates a relaxed tension within which playwrights can engage in risk-taking, boundary-pushing work free from the pressures of commercial consideration.
PlayPenn gives time and attention to playwrights from around the nation whose work is poised for a developmental workshop environment. Each summer PlayPenn hosts a two-week conference, inviting playwrights to develop new plays in a collaborative workshop environment. In order to encourage active revision and rewriting during the period of the conference, PlayPenn provides professional actors, directors, designers and dramaturgs with space, technical and administrative resources and ample time to use them. The process culminates in a series of staged readings to be presented to members of the local, regional and national professional theatre communities and to the community at large.
PlayPenn is a new play development conference. The goal of the conference is the development of plays, through a process of collaboration, experimentation, rehearsal and rewriting rather than fully realized productions of finished works. We like to think of what we do as “development heaven”. By focusing on playwrights’ needs, PlayPenn makes the fundamental work of the theatre possible without the constraints and pressures of production, promotion and commercial concerns.
