New Play Festival

The New Play Festival will take place in Spring quarter, beginning in 2025.

Guided by Assistant Professor LisaMarie Rollins, the festival is student-run with student playwrights, directors, actors, dramaturgs and technicians!

BRIEF OVERVIEW

Works are selected in WINTER by a committee of students and faculty for the class in SPRING.

Plays may be anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes in length. Possibilities include one person monologues, 10 minute plays, 30 minute one-acts, 10 minute interdisciplinary experiments, poems with movement, or any variation in between.

Plays will have no costumes, no sets, are allowed one prop, two light cues and two sound cues, max. The purpose is to showcase the play, the imagination of the playwright, and, if applicable, set the play up for future consideration in a longer production. This is a place for pure experimentation!

This course provides playwrights, directors, writers and performers an opportunity to develop new works in progress and to become familiar with the process of how new works for the stage are written, revised and presented.

The class culminates in a staged reading/workshop performance near the end of the quarter.

Enrollment, Requirements and Schedule:

• This course is open to students with all levels of theatrical / performance experience.
• Playwrights and projects are selected on the basis of submissions made in the Winter quarter. Other roles will be determined after the class begins in Spring.
• Permission numbers are not required. Playwrights whose work is accepted via the selection process in winter quarter, as well as students in all other roles, enroll in the THEA 158 New Play Festival class for 5 units of credit in spring quarter.
• The class may be used toward an Upper Division Studio or Upper Division Elective requirement for the Theater Arts major or an Upper Division Studio requirement for the Theater Arts minor.
• The “Days and Time” listed in the Schedule of Classes Class Search will be adjusted for each student depending on their role(s) – rehearsal schedules are created the first and second week of the quarter in conversation with the director, playwright and cast of each piece.

Questions? Email Professor Rollins: lirollin@ucsc.edu

Student playwrights are also invited to learn about the PPD Dharma Grace Creative Writing Award!

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