In the 1940s, J. Robert Oppenheimer gathered the world’s most brilliant minds at Los Alamos to create a rocket project at once awesome and terrible. Similarly inspired in 2013, Cleveland playwright Peter J. Roth began his own “Manhattan Project,” a laboratory for “awesome and terrible” new play development. There are occasional bombs, but with these, nobody gets hurt.

Roth borrowed his working model, in part, from the Theatre Lab at the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama, where he earned his MFA in Playwriting. They teamed small groups of playwrights, directors and actors to create and produce short plays suggested by writing prompts. “In that class, I experienced some of the BEST theatre I’ve ever seen and some of the WORST,” he enthuses, in CAPS. “It was amazing.”

It was that sense of danger and possibility that he has brought back to his native Cleveland. Every other month, he invites playwrights and actors to create new work in a low-stakes, non-threatening environment. At the first session, actors demonstrate their skills and playwrights receive writing prompts meant to inspire ten-minute plays. Weeks later, the teams rehearse the scripts in progress and by the end of the month the pieces are staged for live audiences.

Roth says his Manhattan Project offers regular opportunities to get new work produced. What’s missing for most of us are places where we can actually WORK on full productions, he says. “The playwright’s job is to write for the stage, not the staged reading. Readings teach [us] to write for music stands. That’s why so many damn plays take place around a sofa.”

Roth acknowledges that doing non-juried plays can yield mixed results, but this is the point. “[Playwrights need] to just write and write and write and see their work succeed and fail in front of an audience,” he says. But the payoff can be the beginning of a full-length work, or at very least, discovering new collaborators and friends.

Roth’s Cleveland start-up got a huge boost when Mahalls, a local bar, offered him space rent-free. The productions are all low-tech, with props and costumes often homemade. Roth recalls the masks created by playwright Krysia Orlowski’s young children for her play about an alien invasion. “They were the most terrifying costumes I’ve ever seen,” he says.

As the program moves through its second year, it has already exceeded expectations. At first, Roth accepted any writer who asked, as long as there was room on the roster. Now that he has identified a cadre of loyal artists who write and perform, he is looking for the same commitment from newcomers. Playwrights wishing to join the group are advised to come in as actors or spectators to understand the depth and nature of that commitment.

“I hate gatekeepers and I find it despicable that I’ve become one,” says Roth. “I suppose I wouldn’t write though, if I didn’t have some sense of self-loathing.”

What terrifies him more than gatekeeping is the possibility that the project grows so legitimate that it requires paying rent, seeking grants or running an education/outreach program. Should that day come, he worries, “We’ll suddenly have something to protect and we’ll stop trying to be awesome and terrible.”

Roth will try for his personal awesome best with his play The Gyntish Self, “a spastic, foul-mouthed adaptation of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.”It was a semifinalist at the 2012 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference and is ready for a Manhattan Project premiere this winter.

Roth, who teaches playwriting at Cleveland State and Kent State University’s Stark Campus, is the Guild’s recently appointed Young Ambassador for Northern Ohio. We welcome his energy and look forward to the creative fusion he’s bound to generate.

fsholiton@dramatistsguild.com