DG National Report: Florida by Andie Arthur
@dramatistsguild @andiearthur
In the fall of 2014, Palm Beach Dramaworks, one of the larger regional theatres in the South Florida area, announced the Dramaworkshop – a new play development program. This is new territory for Palm Beach Dramaworks, who primarily produces American and early modern classics and as of the time of my writing, just closed a critically acclaimed production of Our Town. However, artistic director William Hayes saw a need to further support new work in the community, particularly in light of the many local theatre closings in the past five years that were champions of new work.
The Dramaworkshop is a unique program in our community, as it has multiple components of interaction with local artists. Playwrights will be invited to submit plays annually from November 1st to December 31st, through a link directly on the Palm Beach Dramaworks’ website. Florida playwrights may submit without an agent, but out-of-state playwrights must submit with agent representation. The plays then will be read and evaluated by a company of resident artists, which includes local actors, directors, and other theatre artists that have long standing relationships with Palm Beach Dramaworks. The Dramaworkshop will accept five plays from the submissions to further develop – including readings, developmental workshops, and eventually production.
Hayes hired Susan Hyatt to run the program. Hyatt is the founder of Blue Planet Writers’ Room (a non-profit creative writing center), the former educational director of Florida Stage, and has most recently been working for the Palm Beach County Schools as a project administrator for a federal arts grant and as a teaching artist. “I had approached Bill about an arts education initiative, as I know Palm Beach Dramaworks is invested in serving youth as well as adults, and we ended up talking about the new program he was starting, The Dramaworkshop. I was fascinated; he offered me the position. It’s been three months and I’m enjoying every minute of it,” says Hyatt.
Hayes and Hyatt’s plans for the Dramaworkshop are ambitious and strategically planned. “The five-year plan for The Dramaworkshop is to start conservatively, soliciting new works, building relationships with playwrights, doing table reads, staged readings, and a few three-week development workshops for the selected plays; in the following year, we anticipate mounting a full production of at least one new play in our second stage space, the Perlberg Studio Theater, with an eye toward possibly moving the work to our mainstage. The goal for this program is to grow to become an incubator for new work, a place for playwrights to explore and develop their work, and then to see it come to fruition as a fully-mounted production that will ultimately have a life beyond Palm Beach Dramaworks,” says Hyatt.
Built into this new program is the renovation of Dramaworks’ current rehearsal hall into the Perlberg Studio Theatre, which will be a 40 seat theatre. The process will involve installing a technical booth, soundproofing, a new sound system, and new flooring. All of this work is expected to be done this summer, in anticipation of a Playwrights’ Forum in November 2015, which will consist of local and national playwrights coming together to share their experiences, their work, and their thoughts on writing for the theatre, with panel discussions, lectures, readings and receptions planned around the Forum for the public.
It’s really exciting to see this expanding vision from Palm Beach Dramaworks, which is one of the major local success stories over the past five years. In 2011, they moved from their old 80-seat space to the renovated 250-seat Ann and Don Brown Theatre on Clematis Street. They’ve thrived in the new space at a time when similar moves devastated other companies. As your regional rep, I find it very encouraging that they really want to work with local artists – both playwrights and their company resident artists. While the list of resident artists has not been formally announced as of this writing, expect that they will be well-respected members of the community and provide a variety of perspectives. For more information about the Dramaworkshop, visit www.palmbeachdramaworks.org/dramaworkshop.php.
