17th Annual Young Playwrights Contest Guidelines and Deadline Announced!

Posted by on January 16, 2025

“The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment for promoting human happiness.” – George Washington, January 9, 1790

PlayGround has announced and officially opened the submission window for their 17th annual Young Playwrights Contest, a showcase celebrating the best budding new voices for the stage. This year’s Young Playwrights Contest will feature original short solo plays inspired by the prompt “The American Experiment”, a prompt also given to PlayGround’s professional writers for the October 2024 round of Monday Night PlayGround. Bay Area High School students are invited to create a new first-person (not autobiographical) solo piece that explores American Democracy and the great experiment through the experience/reflections of a fictional or historically-inspired fictional character, to be submitted by Monday, April 21, 2025. For more information and the complete guidelines, students should visit https://playground-sf.org/youngplaywrights.

Four finalists will be announced on or before May 1. The finalists will each receive a professional staged reading of their play as part of the PlayGround Festival of New Works at Potrero Stage and simulcast on Friday, May 23, 2025. Young Playwrights Project alumni include: Alexis Tuchinda (The Nueva School ’24), Lucy Urbano (Oakland School for the Arts ’19), Cicely Henderson (SOTA ’19), Alona Bach (Berkeley High School ’11), and Lucas Baisch (SOTA ’10), among others.

Through the Lenore & Howard Klein Foundation PlayGround Young Playwrights Project, PlayGround and Bay Area high schools partner to enable young writers to find their own expressive voice through the creation, development, and production of short plays. In addition to the contest, PlayGround offers Bay Area high school students free tickets to its Monday Night PlayGround series and PlayGround public programming at Potrero Stage, including the PlayGround Solo Performance Festival, PlayGround Festival of New Works, and the PlayGround Innovators Showcase. For more information or to reserve student group tickets, contact PlayGround at ypp@playground-sf.org. In addition, PlayGround is offering a free playwriting master class on Saturday, March 1, 12pm- 2pm PT, in-person at the PlayGround PlaySpace (3286 Adeline St #9, Berkeley, CA 94703) and online via Zoom, as well as a limited number of complimentary in-school (or virtual) playwriting master classes for Bay Area high schools to help students become more familiar with playwriting in the theatrical short form. Led by distinguished PlayGround alumni and staff, these classes are designed to complement existing creative writing and playwriting education within the schools, while opening up the opportunity of the Young Playwrights Project for budding/aspiring dramatists. To register for the March 1 master class, click here. Schools interested in hosting a master class either in person or virtually should contact Jim Kleinmann at jim@playground-sf.org. In-school classes will be offered until mid-April, are first-come first-served, and will directly prepare students for this year’s Young Playwrights Contest.

PLAYGROUND, founded in 1994 by Jim Kleinmann, Brighde Mullins and Denise Shama, has grown into one of this nation’s leading playwright incubators and theatre community hubs, with a core commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, helping to uplift and center artists from historically underrepresented communities. Over three decades, PlayGround has supported more than 300 early-career playwrights, developing and staging over 1,500 of their original short plays through PlayGround’s signature programs, Monday Night PlayGround and the PlayGround Festival of New Works. PlayGround has also commissioned 100 new full-length plays by 60 of these writers through its Commissioning Initiative and has directly facilitated the premiere of 36 of those works through its innovative New Play Production Fund. Over the past 29 years, PlayGround has developed a unique model for identifying and nurturing some of this country’s best new writers, while helping them to build a significant body of original work and lasting connections with the artistic collaborators they need to know to ensure their success. PlayGround expanded to Los Angeles in 2012, to NYC in 2021, and to Chicago in 2022.

In 2015, PlayGround signed a long-term lease to operate the former Thick House Theater (San Francisco), where PlayGround has produced its festival since 2008. Following a successful $300,000 renovation, PlayGround reopened the theatre in February 2017 as Potrero Stage: PlayGround Center for New Plays. In addition to supporting PlayGround’s expanding new play programs (including the PlayGround Solo Performance Festival launched in 2018, as well as Free-Play Festival and “Twisted” Holiday Show, both launched in 2022), the theatre serves as home for some of the Bay Area’s leading new play developers and producers. In 2019, PlayGround launched the Innovator Incubator, fostering theatrical innovation and next generation innovative theatre companies. The program culminates in the annual Innovators Showcase, which takes place each November, featuring over half-a-dozen new works, from developmental readings to full premieres, by the year’s Innovator Incubator cohort. PlayGround has fostered 13 new companies through this program.

Following the closure of theaters due to the pandemic in 2020, PlayGround was one of the first theatres in the country to shift all of its programming online, with the launch of the PlayGround Zoom Fest and a unique partnership with the performers union, SAG-AFTRA. With the return of in-person performance, PlayGround recommitted to radical accessibility with admission-free programming and online simulcast and on-demand streaming of all performances.

PlayGround’s alumni have gone on to win local, national, and international honors for their short and full-length work, including recognition at the Steinberg Awards, Glickman Awards (including 6 of the last 10), Humana Festival, O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, New York International Fringe Festival, and others. PlayGround received the 2009 Paine Knickerbocker Award for outstanding contributions to Bay Area theatre, 3 BATCC Awards for Best Original Script for PlayGround commissions, a 2014 National Theatre Company Grant from the American Theatre Wing (founder of the Tony Awards®) and a 2016 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award.

In addition to its company of playwrights, PlayGround maintains a company of leading local directors, actors, designers and technicians whose work is regularly seen on the top professional stages in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago and at regional theatres across the country. PlayGround has actively positioned itself as a hub, bringing together hundreds of individuals and organizations representing the best in local theatre. For more information about PlayGround, visit https://playground-sf.org.

POTRERO STAGE is a 99-seat state-of-the-art performance space located in the heart of San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood, operated by PlayGround, and serving as home to some of the Bay Area’s leading new play developers and producers, including PlayGround, Crowded Fire, Golden Thread, and Playwrights Foundation, among others. While the venue is closed during the COVID pandemic, Potrero Stage will highlight the best in online programming by PlayGround, Potrero Stage resident companies and other Potrero Stage producers. For more information, visit https://potrerostage.org.

For more information, visit https://playground-sf.org/youngplaywrights/ or call (415) 992-6677.