In addition to the festival, there are readings of very early drafts of plays every Wednesday night in Lab, and though you are not required to go to Lab for the readings, we really encourage you to do so in order to hear how we discuss new plays, participate in those discussions, and meet the playwrights who might not have been selected for Festival through their work. We encourage our playwrights to also work with directors for these readings, and the same rules apply to them as to festival readings.
Every Friday night we have a venue called No Shame Theatre, where short original performance pieces are staged. The rules are simple: 1) pieces have to be short, no more than five minutes; 2) pieces have to be original, with no copyright violations; and 3) you can’t break anything, including the law. Very often these pieces are fresh out of the printer and have neither been rehearsed nor employ a director. We would love it if having access to directors meant that some of those pieces ended up getting a little more polish.
Halfway through the summer session we partner with Mill Mountain Theatre to present our version of the 24 Hour Plays, which we call Overnight Sensations. At 8 pm on a Friday night, six playwrights are randomly paired with six directors. Then those teams are randomly paired with six pre-selected groups groups of six actors. Then a bunch of writing prompts are drawn and the playwrights get rushed off to the library to write a new 10-minute play based on what they got. Directors usually go to No Shame to take their mind off of worrying about the kind of play they will get in the morning. At 8 am, the playwrights meet the directors at the theatre to read the draft and discuss any changes to the text, then the scripts are printed out while we have a production meeting. Actors arrive at 11 am for lunch and rehearsals begin at noon. At 5 pm we do a cue to cue, and at 7 pm the audience starts arriving. At 8 pm the curtain goes up on six freshly baked new 10-minute plays. The directors are selected from among our certificate students as well as our faculty, guest artists, and local directors. Any certificate directors who are not selected to direct in Overnight Sensations are encouraged to participate as performers if they wish. Everyone is required to attend the performance, however.
There are also other opportunities during the summer, as our playwrights are allowed to check out performance spaces in two hour blocks for their own student initiated projects, like private or public readings and they may request a director to work with their script. You might also like to propose a project of your own or even a devised piece with multiple collaborators.