Purple Crayon Players

SEASON

Fall Mainstage | Winter Mainstage | Spring Mainstage | PLAYground | Special Projects

4th Annual PLAYground Festival

Submission deadline has passed. Thank you to all who submitted!

PLAYground is Purple Crayon Players’s annual festival of new plays for young audiences. PLAYground fosters the development of each script through partnerships between professional TYA playwrights and undergraduate directors and actors, whether as a work’s first reading or its final workshops before publication or production. After a collaborative rehearsal process focused on the playwright’s development goals, we present these fresh works in a dynamic weekend of public staged readings and post-show discussions.

In the past three years, the festival has featured nine playwrights in all stages of their careers, from nationally-known faces to emerging talents. Sandra Fenichel Asher’s Jesse and Grace: A Best Friends Story (a 2011 AATE Distinguished Play Award-winner) and Ramon Esquivel’s Nasty have both received publication following their participation in PLAYground, and Anne Negri’s With Two Wings will receive its world premier production at Tempe, Arizona’s Childsplay in Winter 2012. PLAYground has also been featured in the national publication Incite/Insight.

Selected playwrights receive:
- 3 weeks of script analysis and workshopping by student cast and director before your arrival
- Regular contact with your student director regarding the progress of rehearsals, tailored to meet your development goals
- Assistance funding your trip to Evanston, IL for the festival weekend
- 2 days of in-person conversation, workshopping, and events with student directors, actors, and others in the Purple Crayon, Northwestern, and TYA communities on the festival weekend
- Staged reading of your script and facilitated post-show discussion with audiences
- Dynamic post-festival feedback from audiences, student directors, and cast members

In considering submissions, Purple Crayon Players looks for scripts that show diversity of voice, originality of content and style, and that will enrich and challenge our directors and our audiences. Your development goals are important to us, and we match plays with student directors who are excited by and committed to these goals. Finally, we aim to find three works that complement one another, as well as our main stage productions, by catering to different target audiences and providing variety of theme and form to our festival and our season.

To submit, please email up to three unpublished, original scripts to PLAYgroundTYAfestival@gmail.com by Friday, December 9th, 2011. Each script should be accompanied by a cover letter that includes your contact information, the production history of the script, and your current goals for development.

Questions? Feel free to email us at PLAYgroundTYAfestival@gmail.com!

————————————————————————————

Praise for PLAYground

“One can readily see the PLAY Ground joining the ranks of New Visions/New Voices and the Bonderman as America's premier TYA play development laboratories.”
- Barry Kornhauser

"PLAYground will quickly establish itself as an important venue for testing out new TYA work. What makes it unique is also its strength: student actors, directors, designers and producers working with professional playwrights. You put so much enthusiasm and care into developing these plays. I greatly appreciate that high level of respect towards me and my work. The field of TYA will be better for the PLAYground's existence."
- Ramon Esquivel

"Everybody's so dedicated and invested... [Purple Crayon Players] is doing such a high level of work."
- Drew Chappell

"[Purple Crayon Players] handled every detail of this -- the programs, the facility, the logistics of the whole thing, as well as three very different staged readings so professionally. I am blown away."
- Sandra Fenichel Asher