About NewDramatists

HISTORY & MISSION

New Dramatists is dedicated to the playwright, and pursues a singular mission:

To find gifted playwrights and give them the time, space, and tools to develop their craft, so that they may fulfill their potential and make lasting contributions to the theatre.

Regarded as a national leader in playwright support and advocacy, New Dramatists has remained a pioneer in the field of new play development since its inception in 1949. We offer our company of 50 playwrights a home base and self-guided laboratory for seven years, free of charge, in the company of their most gifted peers. Our playwright company is made up of emerging and mid-career writers that collectively embodies an artistic, cultural, ethnic, and geographic diversity rarely found in the American theatre.

The cornerstones of New Dramatists’ dedication to playwrights are:

Sustained Support—a seven-year commitment to the artistry and body of work of each resident playwright;

Peer Community—the challenge and inspiration of a continuous community of playwrights—each with the same seven-year residency—about 50 at a time, more than 600 since our founding;

Creative Authority—each writer leads his or her own years here, selecting what to work on when, choosing collaborators, setting timetables, and designing process.  Work at ND is literally writer-led in order to fully empower them artistically and professionally; and

Artistic Home—a building that includes two theatres, a classroom, a manuscript library of our resident playwright and alumni work, a private writing studio, and residence rooms for out-of-town writers.

A LAB FOR PLAYWRIGHTS

New Dramatists gives writers seven years of laboratory time. Each writer uses it differently, and our job is to create a Lab that is as flexible, inspiring, intensive, welcoming, and supportive as possible, in which the gift of time is matched by the quality of that time. We program over 125 events in the building each season, engaging with 425 collaborating artists and over 4,000 visitors annually.

The Playwrights Lab comprises our writer-driven readings and workshops series—public or private, single-day or multi-week—enabling playwrights to explore or revisit work at any step in its gestation. The Lab offers an array of programs that the playwrights can access freely in order to best suit their needs as artists, including:

Play Readings—our playwrights have unlimited access to program public or private one- to two-day readings with full artistic staff support;

PlayTime—a two-week retreat in New York City for five writers to develop ambitious plays with a shared company of actors, directors, and other artistic collaborators;

Composer-Librettist Studio—a two-week workshop in partnership with Nautilus Musical Theatre, CLS groups five writers with five outside composers and five singers towards developing new songs and enriching the collaborative process;

Working Sessions—Working Sessions provides extended resources to an artistic team, allowing new musicals to evolve during a series of writer-initiated workshops;

Playground—an innovative partnership with Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis, Playground commissions three playwrights every two years to write for family audiences;

The Creativity Fund—a new resource in the Lab added this year, that provides ten to fifteen playwrights per year with the opportunity to program weeklong new play workshops whenever they need the resources; and

Full Stage—a new program added this year that pairs our resident writers with producing organizations nationwide, towards linking new play development and production. Full Stage provides writer-driven support at New Dramatists in collaboration with a partner theatre, and culminates in a full production of each play.

In addition to the resources of the Lab, throughout our writers’ seven year residencies we offer unprecedented Professional Support. This includes personalized dramaturgical and career support from the staff, free script duplication, several grants and awards, and access to retreats and international playwright exchanges. We advocate for our writers by publicizing their activity and maintaining a public manuscript library of their scripts. The artistic staff performs direct outreach to theatrical professionals through monthly bulletins and newsletters, the ScriptShare program, and the Plays and Playwrights Catalogue. The playwrights also have access to our building, which houses all of this laboratory work. They can work in our private writing studio, hold meetings in our classroom or library, stay in our temporary residence rooms, or create new work in our two theatre spaces.

IMPACT ON THE THEATRE

There is a palpable link between the work of New Dramatists and the vitality of the American stage. New Dramatists’ alumni include some of the most revered and influential playwrights of our time:  Robert Anderson, Kia Corthron, Nilo Cruz, Horton Foote, Richard Foreman, Maria Irene Fornes, John Guare, David Lindsay-Abaire, Eduardo Machado, Donald Margulies, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, John Patrick Shanley, Mac Wellman, August Wilson, Doug Wright, and many more. Current residents and alumni have won 16 Pulitzers (including 8 of the last 11), 24 Tonys®, 68 Obies, 17 Drama Desk Awards, 4 MacArthur Fellowships, and 12 Susan Smith Blackburn Awards. New Dramatists itself is the recipient of a 2001 Tony Honor and a 2005 Obie Award.

We also measure our impact in terms of our role as a crucial connection point in the field, and we pride ourselves on serving as a lab for the American and world theatre. This is the impetus behind new programs like Full Stage, but is also work that occurs in many other ways at New Dramatists. David Adjmi underwent an intensive workshop of Stunning here before premiering the play at Lincoln Center. Playwright/director teams, like David Grimm and Peter Dubois or Dael Orlandersmith and Gordon Edelstein, have used the Lab to explore work headed for regional stages. Marcus Gardley and Sarah Ruhl have held extended workshops here in conjunction with theatres that commissioned them (Epic, Yale Rep, Berkeley Rep). Dan LeFranc rewrote sections of Sixty Miles to Silver Lake (Soho Rep, NYC) while staying in our residence rooms, as did Quiara Alegría Hudes on her Tony Award winning musical In the Heights (Broadway).

This page was last updated 08/13/2009