WINNERS OF THE 2026 YOUNG PLAYWRIGHTS CONTEST

PlayGround is pleased to announce the winners of the 2026 Young Playwrights Contest, an open-submission competition that provides winning high school playwrights with a professional staged reading during the PlayGround Festival of New Works. The winning plays and playwrights of this year’s contest are Tales of the City: A Waymo Carol by Rover Dijkstra (Galileo Academy of Science and Technology), The End of the Line by Juan Li Chen (Galileo Academy of Science and Technology), The Tramp of the Galaxy by Christiana Rajakumar (Crystal Springs Uplands School), and There is No Elevator to Success, You Must Take the Stairs by Chloe Schoenfeld (Ruth Asawa School of the Arts). All four plays will receive staged readings by professional actors on May 29 at 7pm PT at Potrero Stage (1695 18th Street, San Francisco) & Simulcast. For tickets and more information, visit playground-sf.org/youngplaywrights.

Each year, Bay Area high school students, grades 9-12, are invited to submit short plays for consideration in the Young Playwrights Contest. 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. This year’s theme was “Tales of the City” and drew submissions from throughout the Bay Area.

THE PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS

Tales of the City: A Waymo Carol by Rover Dijkstra
Tales of the City: A Waymo Carol is a new take on the classic story by Charles Dickens, where a tech worker discovers the beauty of humanity through the exploration of the past, present, and future of San Francisco. Rover Dijkstra has lived in San Francisco for the last 8 years. He is a senior at Galileo Academy of Science and Technology, and loves everything related to travel and aviation. He is also a soccer referee, coach, and player at San Francisco Youth Soccer.

The End of the Line by Juan Li Chen
Two Chinese brothers who built the transcontinental railroad wait on the Oakland wharf as the celebration begins without them, where they argue about whether America is somewhere they leave or somewhere they plan to stay. Juan Li Chen is a current senior at Galileo Academy of Science and Technology. He was born in Colombia to Chinese immigrants, and moved to the US at the age of 5.

The Tramp of the Galaxy by Christiana Rajakumar
Two outer-space beings, tasked with infiltrating the Pentagon, instead find themselves headed for Fremont, California. Christiana Rajakumar is from Fremont, CA and has been acting in plays since elementary school. She loves theatre because it presents her with a transcendent experience unlike any other. In the future, she hopes to continue to explore playwriting and pursue a theater artist career.

There is No Elevator to Success, You Must Take the Stairs by Chloe Schoenfeld
A drama that features opposing perspectives on disability rights activism in the context of the 504 Sit-ins. Chloe Schoenfeld is a teen author, poet, and aerialist. She was born and raised in San Francisco, where she currently attends Ruth Asawa School of the Arts for Creative Writing. Schoenfeld’s writing is often whimsical and thoughtful, exploring dystopias and hope.

Honorable Mentions:

Passion Projects by Taishi Rector (Galileo Academy of Science and Technology)
Apricots by Andrew Strong (Heritage High School)

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.

Why Free?
PlayGround has made all programs admission-free in furtherance of our commitment to radical accessibility. If you are able, we hope that you’ll consider donating with your free ticket reservation, recognizing that your direct support makes it possible for us to continue providing fair and equitable wages for professional artists while sustaining our radical accessibility efforts for all.