The Playgoer: National New Play Network

Custom Search

Thursday, May 01, 2008

National New Play Network

I didn't know about this program before:

The National New Play Network is a means to facilitate communication between theatres that are the “new play hubs” in their region, spread across America. These are generally larger theatres, with budgets between $500,000–$4 million a year, according to General Manager David Golston’s estimates.

It works like this: The literary departments of the member theatres read scripts that are submitted to them. If they like a script, they “pitch” it at one of the monthly online meetings, or at the face-to-face meetings that happen twice a year. If other theatres are interested in the play, they pass the script between them and start a conversation between themselves as to whether or not they’d like to produce the script. If three or more artistic directors find a play worthy to produce, NNPN invests in that particular play. This investment comes in the form of a $5,000 donation to each of the theatres producing the play.

“That money can go to pretty much anything the theatre needs it to,” says Golston. “Although we do put an emphasis on the collaboration aspect of the development of the play.”
Does anyone out there know if this has been a real help?

The above, by the way, is from a recent Stage Directions article surveying various creative solutions to fostering new plays.

3 comments:

Sarah McL said...

I've had some experience with this program - a little disorganized, but overall pretty terrific. I'd say the only drawback is their terrible, terrible marketing. This is a list of the plays they have produced:
http://www.nnpn.org/programs/index.html

Anonymous said...

of course there would be flaws - hearding cats is a constant in the theater, but ya gotta give 'em props. $5K for each company (.4mil - 5mil) ain't much, but good for them. found one play they supported amusingly apropo...

The Playgoer by Christopher Bomba, Prop Thtr (Chicago, IL)

Anonymous said...

Curious Theatre in Denver's part of the Network, and they've put on pretty good new plays with it.