PlayGround announces 2026 Young Playwrights Contest

PlayGround has announced and officially opened the submission window for their 18th annual Young Playwrights Contest, a showcase celebrating the best budding new voices for the stage. The Young Playwrights Contest will feature original short plays inspired by the prompt “Tales of the City”, a prompt also given to PlayGround’s professional writers for the January 2026 round of Monday Night PlayGround.

“This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.” -Plato

Bay Area High School students are invited to write an original short play, fictional or fact-based, historical or contemporary, that is specific to a Bay Area city of the writer’s choosing, telling a tale of its people and its history (i.e., the play helps tell a story of the city and couldn’t be transplanted to another city) to be submitted by Monday, April 20, 2026. Four finalists will be selected from plays submitted by high schoolers from any of the 9 Bay Area counties. For more information and the complete guidelines, visit https://playground-sf.org/ypp-guidelines.

In their continuing efforts towards inclusion, accessibility, and fostering new work at all stages of creation, PlayGround is offering 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. 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 an April 20, 2026 submission deadline.

Submissions for the 18th annual Young Playwrights Contest are due by 11:59pm on Monday, April 20th, 2026. Four finalists will be announced on or before May 4. 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 29, 2026. Young Playwrights Project alumni include: Arisa Sky Krueger (Ruth Asawa School of the Arts), Lucy Urbano (Oakland School for the Arts), Jake Rosenberg (JCHS), and Lucas Baisch (SOTA), among others.

In addition to the Contest, through the 18th Annual Howard & Lenore Klein Foundation Young Playwrights Project, PlayGround also offers free tickets for high school students in the Bay Area to attend PlayGround’s public performances, virtually or in-person, including the Festival of New Works at Potrero Stage and Monday Night readings at the David Brower Center. For more information on tickets and accessibility, schools can contact ypp@playground-sf.org.

PlayGround, a leading national playwright incubator, provides unique development opportunities for the Bay Area’s, Los Angeles’, New York’s, and Chicago’s best new playwrights, including the monthly Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series, annual PlayGround Festival of New Works, full-length play commissions and support for the production of new plays by local playwrights through the New Play Production Fund. To date, PlayGround has supported over 350 early career playwrights, developing and staging more than 1,500 of their original short plays through the Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series and the PlayGround Festival. PlayGround has also commissioned 100 new full-length plays by 60 of these writers through its Commissioning Initiative and, through the innovative New Play Production Fund, has directly facilitated the premiere of 36 plays at theatres of every size, including three that have gone on to NYC and other major theater communities. Most recently, PlayGround renovated and relaunched the former Thick House Theater in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill as Potrero Stage, a state-of-the-art center for new plays, home to PlayGround’s expanding artistic programs and some of the Bay Area’s most distinguished new play developers and producers. Over the past twenty-seven years, PlayGround has served to identify some of the most important new local voices for the theatre. 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), O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and New York International Fringe Festival, among 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. Visit https://playground-sf.org for more information.