Deadline: November 1, 2024
Special Interests: Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania
Website: http://www.premierestagesatkean.com/play-festival
Description:
Premiere Stages is committed to supporting emerging and regional playwrights by developing and producing new plays. Through our Play Festival script competition, Premiere Stages offers developmental opportunities to four playwrights. We provide playwrights with an encouraging and focused environment in which they can develop their work through discussions, rehearsals, sit-down readings, staged readings, and full Equity productions. Beginning October 1, 2016 through January 1, 2017, Premiere Stages will accept submissions of unproduced new plays from playwrights affiliated with the greater metropolitan area (New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania). There is no fee to enter. All plays submitted to the festival are evaluated by a professional panel of theatre producers, dramaturgs, playwrights, scholars and publishers. Four of the submitted plays will be selected for staged readings with Equity casts in March 2017 and awarded cash prizes. Following the March readings, the winner of Play Festival is selected for a full production during Premiere Stages’ 2017 mainstage season and awarded $2000; a second play will be selected for a 29-hour Staged Reading and be awarded $750, and the two other finalist writers will be awarded $500. At Premiere Stages, we pride ourselves on a uniquely accelerated process in which plays we find particularly promising are developed and fully produced within a year of submission. In many professional theatres the time span between meeting a writer, staging a reading and producing the play can be years. At Premiere Stages, immediately following the Spring Readings, two plays enter an intensive development phase. Playwrights work with a director, dramaturg, and design team to develop the play for a staged workshop or full production only a few months later. When we find a writer we believe in, our Play Festival process allows Premiere Stages to fully commit the time, talent, and resources necessary to share their work with a broad regional audience. Premiere Stages’ productions offer playwrights the chance to see their work fully realized on stage. We hope, however, that the plays developed at Premiere will go on to subsequent productions throughout the country. Because of this, playwrights whose scripts we produce retain the coveted “World Premiere” brand on their plays. Premiere Stages also strives to facilitate relationships between playwrights and other theatre professionals who we think will respond to their work. Plays are consistently reviewed by the New York Times and scouted by major publishing houses. Multiple Festival plays have been honored by the American Theatre Critics Association.
Comments from NMI Staff:
Premiere Stages Play Festival
SUBMISSIONS ARE OPEN FROM SEPT 1-NOV 14, 2022!
Submissions are closed for 2023. I decided to use past information to get the deadline for 2024.
As of November 2023, no update on 2025.
CONTACT NAME: Clare Drobot
CONTACT EMAIL: premiere@kean.edu
CONTACT PHONE: 908.737.4092
CONTACT ADDRESS:
Premiere Stages Play Festival
Clare Drobot
Hutchinson Hall, 1000 Morris Ave.
Union, NJ 07083
BACK TO LISTINGS