Institute Archive
2010 Classes
| Instructor/Class | Description | |
 | Marcus Gardley Bio Playwriting Bake-Off August 3 through 12, 2010 | The award winning writer and author of …and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi Marcus Gardley is returning this summer to the New Play Institute for a Bake-Off. During Gardley's Playwriting Bake-Off participants will be offered 5 ingredients to draft a play and Marcus will help them stir it up into a fresh, rich and bold new dish! |
 | Lee Blessing Bio Good Note, Odd Note, Better Play? The Art of Revisions July 28 through 31, 2010 | Lee Blessing, veteran playwright, returns to the Institute this summer, as part of the 2010 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, to offer a hands on, 4-day workshop on the joys and challenges of revisions! Good Note, Odd Note, Better Play? The Art of Revisions will teach students how to take a piece in a variety of different directions through revisions. |
 | Dominic Orlando Bio New Play Bootcamp May 4 through 15, 2010 | This is a repeating class that focuses on a different aspect of the writing process each time. Join Dominic Orlando in his latest New Play Bootcamp as he delves into the writer's world-view, which is another way of saying "theme"—which is another way of saying, "What Exactly Are You Writing and Why?" |
 | Thomas Bradshaw Bio Morality and Depravity in Modern Drama April 7 through 11, 2010 | This class covers transgression, censorship and the unspeakable. Exercises will focus on ways to humanize characters that you'd perhaps rather not write about at all! |
 | Octavio Solis Bio Writing Like a Mo Fo/ Writing In Slo Mo March 13 and 14, 2010 | In this amazing new class by Octavio Solis writers experience new ideas for modern storytelling. Writing Like a Mo Fo/Writing In Slo Mo, will inspire writers to bend, fold, spindle and manipulate time in the pursuit of modern storytelling. |
 | Liz Duffy Adams Bio The Tao of Playwriting February 6 to 15, 2010 | A Returning Class—Back by popular demand! Join Liz Duffy Adams, inspired, award-winning writer, and get that draft finished in ten days! The final class is a showcase of excerpts with professional actors. |
 | Eugenie Chan Bio Crack That Whip: Ten Weeks to a Full-Length Play September 23 to January 6, 2010 | You know you want to. You know you can. With a little nudge, a gentle push, and a little trickery, inspiration, and elbow grease along the way, you can finish that first draft by the time the holiday season rears its mighty head. This 10-week workshop will work through the conception, execution, and completion of a first draft of a full-length play. In the first part of our course, we'll explore ways to uncover and create character, story, and text with a multitude of exercises that will play with event, memory, sound, rhythm, word, object, person, and more. Exercises will be tailored to the needs of the group and will be designed to help you establish the world of your play. In the second part, we will move to the nuts and bolts of furthering your play's world -- developing character, story, and the logic of your play. Our last weeks will be devoted to the exploration of structure, especially to uncovering the rules by which your play plays. Expect to romp (metaphorically) in places dark and light, sacred and profane. In each session, you will be engaging in on-your-feet exercises, writing, listening and responding to each other's work. |
| Instructor/Class | Description | |
| Lee Blessing Bio Find a Play in Yourself November 19 to 22, 2009 | Sometimes the most powerful stories really are homegrown. Plays like Long Day's Journey into Night, The Glass Menagerie, How I Learned to Drive, The Ohio State Murders and Marvin's Room--to name but a few--come directly from the life experience of their creators. Everyone's life is interesting--to a writer, at least--and everyone has secrets. This workshop will start you on a journey into your very own heart of darkness--or light, or both. Find a play in yourself. Each writer will be asked to generate a short piece based on these explorations, to be read and responded to in class. |
 | Dominic Orlando Bio New Play Boot Camp Intensive July 7 to 23, 2009 | Let's be honest--what's is the highest value in a writing workshop? Time devoted to your work! Sometimes you just want the time and attention focused on only your work to take it to the next level of development. That's why playwright Dominic Orlando is offering a Boot Camp Intensive this July at The Playwrights Foundation. The intensive is limited to five students, and five students only. The students will be selected by Mr. Orlando--prospective candidates will submit an application, Mr. Orlando's previous students excepted. The Intensive consists of two 3-hour sessions per week for 3 weeks, giving the writers more time between classes to generate work. The sessions will include intensive workshopping and analysis of each student's work, as well as general discussions on the art of writing and the business of being a professional playwright. This is the ideal way to begin a new piece, or to finish that play that just won't get finished (you may also use the Intensive to revisit a completed work). Accepted students will be given a pass to the first weekend of this year's Bay Area Playwrights Festival, so that the group will have a common theatrical experience to analyze and discuss. |
 | Steve Cosson Bio Creating Theater From True Events 2009 | Working with methods developed by the award-winning New York company The Civilians, we'll discover how we can make theater from the intersection of documentary and creativity. We'll each conduct an experimental mini-project, looking at how to pick a subject, frame an inquiry, research/interview, and ultimately how to form and structure a theatrical text. This course is open to any theater artist: writer, director, actor or combination thereof who is interested in making theater from real life. |
| Lee Blessing Bio Afraid to Write that Play? Good. May 21 to 24, 2009 | A rare opportunity to study with one of America's most treasured dramatists, this course examines the usefulness of identifying our own worst fears and using them to create a play. On the principle that truly ambitious works in any genre result from penetrating the most fiercely-guarded areas of a writer's psyche, we will seek to gain mastery over what terrifies us and convert it into drama. Along the way, we'll discuss the dynamic relationship of the unconscious to the conscious mind during the writing process. With any luck, we'll encounter what's scary about that as well. Each writer will be asked to generate a short piece based on these explorations, to be read and responded to in class. |
 | Lisa Kron Bio It's Funny 'Cause It's True: Your Life Onstage May 20 to 21, 2009 | Renowned playwright, monologist and comedian Lisa Kron, celebrated for her Broadway hit Well and revered as head writer for The Five Lesbian Brothers, offers a potent two-day intensive on transforming personal stories into evocative, side-splitting drama. The best personal stories are unexpectedly universal, deliciously funny, and contain the raw material you need to make your theater unique. But tapping them is a fine art, and one that Kron has mastered. Participants will be privy to The Lisa Kron Condensed Bible on mining your life for drama and avoiding the pitfall of personal excavation therapy on stage. |
 | Adam Bock Bio Language As Action May 2 to 24, 2009 | In a play, to talk is more than to express. To talk is to act. Characters use language. To batter each other. To bully, to dare, to delight, to dishearten. How active is the language in your work? Can you suffocate, terrorize, or beguile with language? How does action impact language and vice-versa? Obie Award winner Adam Bock's workshop will look at the many languages of the stage, from awkward silence to song. You'll break language and build traps. And then, when you're tired and it's late in the day, you'll talk about your careers - how to work, where to work, and who to work with. |
| Thomas Bradshaw Bio Provocative Playwriting 2009 | Write electrifying plays with the playwright who has "has sliced open the pretensions of the white avant-garde with a wittily glistening axe." (the New Yorker). |
| Dominic Orlando Bio New Play Boot Camp February 28 to March 12, 2009 | Award-winning writer Dominic Orlando returns with his hit New Play Boot Camp, an intensive two-week workshop to sweat your playwriting muscles and flex your imagination. By the end of this six-Day workout, you'll finish a forty-page one-act or die trying. The focus is on plot and structure, moving the action forward toward resolution. The method is composition, understanding how to shape the rhythms of action and character in the same way composers shape notes and tempos into symphonies. This unique approach and intensive energy will give both new and experienced playwrights a workout they'll be feeling for years. Writers working to finish an existing script also welcome. |
2008 Classes
| Instructor/Class | Description | |
 | Ken Prestininzi Bio Creative Sparks Fly: How To Catch Them December 7 to 28, 2008 | This workshop/seminar will explore the territory between the creative process (attention, commitment, imagination and pleasure) and the demands of structure (narrative, imagistic, performative and spatial). It will ask questions so that writers may articulate and aim at their personal and cultural impulses for writing and making meaningful theatre. Through playful, purposeful and rigorous writing prompts and guided discussions, participants will creatively and critically employ character recipes, narrative strategies, organizing principles of form, poetic images, political and aesthetic manifestos, sinewy language, and their own passion for what makes a stage play necessary. |
| Eugenie Chan Bio Crack That Whip October 8 to December 10, 2008 | You know you want to. You know you can. With a little nudge, a gentle push, and a little trickery, inspiration, and elbow grease along the way, you can finish that first draft by the time the holiday season rears its mighty head. This 10-week workshop will work through the conception, execution, and completion of a first draft of a full-length play. In the first part of our course, we'll explore ways to uncover and create character, story, and text with a multitude of exercises that will play with event, memory, sound, rhythm, word, object, person, and more. Exercises will be tailored to the needs of the group and will be designed to help you establish the world of your play. In the second part, we will move to the nuts and bolts of furthering your play's world -- developing character, story, and the logic of your play. Our last weeks will be devoted to the exploration of structure, especially to uncovering the rules by which your play plays. Expect to romp (metaphorically) in places dark and light, sacred and profane. In each session, you will be engaging in on-your-feet exercises, writing, listening and responding to each other's work. You will also be asked to write at home each week. Please come to the first class with 1-3 ideas of what you're thinking about writing. These do not have to be well-formed concepts. Shards are most welcome. Please also bring an object germane to one of these ideas, one of these shards. |
 | Stephanie Fleischmann Bio Writing Image/Writing Sound September 9 to 25, 2008 | You dream up your plays. Long before they land on a stage, you see them unfolding before you, you hear them in your head. Sound and image are invaluable tools, as instrumental to the playwright as dialogue and character, responsible not just for the visceral texture of the layered, 3-dimensional world of your play but catalysts also for change, for movement, for meaning and emotional resonance. In this workshop we will explore the realm of the stage direction—sound and image as event and action—both as literal blueprint for the staging of your play and as amazingly impossible jumping off point for your collaborators. We will parse the theatrical gestalt and narrative thrust of sound, approaching plays as music—full of shifts and interruptions and the ghosts of the return. And we will explore the music inherent in the juxtaposition of images. We will also investigate the dramatic potential of song, as well as the presence of audio/visual technology on stage, embedded within your text, as a tool for propelling narrative, distance, and intimacy. Exercises will be geared towards generating new material as well as deepening works already in progress. We will also read some excellent (and mostly very short) plays for inspiration/example. |
 | Naomi Wallace Bio Transgression, Politics, and the Engaged Play July 31 to October 3, 2008 | In this 4-day intensive writing workshop/experience with the incomparable Ms. Wallace, students will gain techniques and opportunities to transgress their own deeply held assumptions about themselves and their relationship to mainstream culture and society. How does an artist achieve what bell hooks calls "self-transgression" and a "critical awareness of self" that will allow her/him to dissect the social issues s/he are most passionate about? How can a playwright develop a new "way of seeing" for her/him self—a term coined by John Berger that refers to the socially and culturally determined choices an individual makes when writing. The class is designed to move writers to find new ways to think outside their own experience, their own gender, race, class, age, sexual orientation and culture. Ms. Wallace will engage the class in her six-point process to nudge participants to transgress and disrupt normative ways of seeing and create a more compelling and engaged drama for the stage. "If writers can re-imagine language, with an effort that aspire to fluency in history and its myriad forces, then we can re-imagine ourselves and our communities—and that, for me as a writer, is the highest aspiration—I am not calling for a condescending theatre... but a welcoming, vigorous, inquisitive and brutal theater... to get out of what I call the "wow" state of mind to a 'how' state of mind." -Naomi Wallace |
| Lee Blessing Bio Whose Climax Is It, Anyway? July 10 to 13, 2008 | A rare and significant opportunity to study with one of America's most treasured dramatists—Lee Blessing, who teaches an intensive, hands-on practicum investigating one of the most critical structural underpinnings of playwriting: the nature and utility of a dramatic climax; and fundamental power this choice has on the outcome of your play. Through in-class and assigned writing exercises, discussion and debate, each writer will create a ten-minute play. The intensive will offer a wide range of dramatic strategies to be utilized by students in varying ways—to paint a vivid portrait about how these choices can lead to varying outcomes; Mr. Blessing will also help students extrapolate these concepts from the ten-minute form to the full length. Students will delve into a broad range of issues within the class, such as play structure, characterization, tone, and dialogue. The class will also investigate more logistical questions, including career choices for dramatic writers, "how it works" in the wonderful world of productions, and the dynamics of a commission—and/or other topics that arise from the class. |
 | Erik Ehn Bio Writing & Testimony: Exploring the Writer's Responsibilities to Received Stories June 3 to 8, 2008 | A short and intensive workshop is designed to look at ideas of writing for performance, especially its relation to the world in light of trauma. The class will explore questions such as what are the writer's responsibilities to received stories? How may testimony be ethically gathered, handled and re-presented? The class will include in-session writing and take-home assignments. |
| Liz Duffy Adams Bio The Tao of Playwriting: The Tao de Ching as a Playwriting Manual June 16 to July 5, 2008 | In this workshop we'll use the ancient Chinese book of philosophy, the Tao de Ching, as a playwriting manual. This is not a spiritual journey, but a practical one. This is not a spiritual journey, but a practical one. How do we as writers balance our conscious decision-making intellectual brain with our wilder anarchic creative instincts? How do we create characters, stories, theatrical language that surprise and enrapture ourselves and our audiences? Most simply how do we keep working? The Tao is startlingly useful to the work of the playwright. Playwriting is an art of tension/cooperation between strategy and impulse; intellect and raw creativity; right brain and left brain; yin and yang. The Tao te Ching has a lot to say about this. We'll begin each class with a quote from the book, then write; exercises will be applicable to a play you're already writing, or to beginning something new right then and there. We'll address Getting Started, Tools (language/character, story/structure), Process of Rewriting, and Working with Feedback and Collaboration. I don't consider myself a Taoist (partly because I think any ist or ism is contradictory to the Tao), but I've used the Tao te Ching as part of my playwriting process for years, and find this small book an inexhaustible well of guidance and inspiration. I'll be pulling our quotes from the Stephen Mitchell translation. |
 | Christine Evans Bio Chance, Found Objects and Umbrellas: Creating A New Play From What's All Around Us June 12 to 15, 2008 | Where do ideas come from? How do you find the seeds of an inspiring idea? In this workshop, you don't have to have an idea to start writing. By noticing and creating from what's all around us, writers can learn ways to enter the dreaming-field of a new play through the thousand tiny moments, objects and gestures that make up the everyday. This is an intensive writing workshop that challenges students to find their new play through a process drawn from close attention to "found objects", chance, and the poetry of everyday things. Participants will work (in guided exercises) from humble, everyday materials close to hand. We'll start on the outside, working with pictures, "found" dialogue, gestures, objects, chance encounters. Based on the principle that our attention acts as a magnet to organize material into meaningful patterns, we'll work from external to more internal "found objects": memories, dreams, emotions, scenarios. We will use techniques drawn from early 20th century art practices and concepts, including Tadeusz Kantor's "poor object" and "reality of the lowest rank." By the end of the workshop, students will have the outline of a new work-in-progress and have learned some inventive new ways to continue developing it. |
 | Peter Sinn Nachtrieb Bio Funny Theatre: The Effective Use of Hilarity in Contemporary Playwriting April 2 to May 5, 2008 | Somebody famous once said that while drama is "easy", comedy is "hard." This is a terrible lie. They're both kind of hard. But, in this potentially fun and invigorating workshop, we'll take a particular look at the use of "comedy" (in as broad a sense of the word as possible) in our playwriting. Comedy has the potential to engage and disarm an audience with it's ability to simultaneously infiltrate the intellect and the gut. With the often full-body attention that comedy requires from an audience, ears become extra-sensitive, thoughts can be subtly provoked, and attitudes can be challenged. In discussions, readings, exercises and assignments we will explore humor and develop work that is funny, provoking, subversive and maybe, god forbid, highly entertaining. |
 | Nakissa Etemad Bio Drama? What?: Unlocking the Mystery of Dramaturgy April 17 to May 22, 2008 | Nakissa Etemad, dramaturg, producer, former literary manager of Philadelphia's Wilma Theater, San Jose Repertory and San Diego Rep, returns to the Playwrights Foundation to unlock the mysteries behind this essential yet often misunderstood profession. Learn the full definition of the dramaturg's role in theatre, the in's and out's of collaboration with every kind of theatre artist, all facets of new play development, and the how-to's of nurturing the right skill set for a career in dramaturgy. Understanding the many roles a dramaturg can play will lead to a more effective relationship for both the dramaturg and the artists they work with. |
| Dominic Orlando Bio New Play Boot Camp: Emerge from the Trenches with a New One Act Play April 19 to May 1, 2008 | Award-winning writer Dominic Orlando returns with his New Play Boot Camp, an intensive two week workshop to sweat your playwriting muscles and flex your imagination. By the end of this 6-Day workout, you'll finish a 40-page one-act or die trying. This time out, Orlando focuses on what classical music and composition can teach us about the making of plays, which have more in common with symphonies than they do television or film scripts. This unique approach and intensive energy will give new and experienced playwrights a work out they'll be feeling for years. |
 | Kent Nicholson Bio Staging the Developing Play: A page-to-stage workshop for Playwrights & Directors Working Together March 3 to April 7, 2008 | Are you a Playwright with a New Play who wants to learn how to work with a director? Are you a director looking to work with New Plays? Are you a playwright, actor or designer wanting to break into directing? This is the workshop for you! Staging the Developing Play with Kent Nicholson, premier Bay Area director of new plays, is an in-depth hands-on, practical exploration of the director/playwright relationship and collaborative process in staging a developing play. Additional outside rehearsals are encouraged, but not required. Participants without access to a rehearsal space may contact Playwrights Foundation for assistance. Final class will include a showcase of work. |
 | Leigh Fondakowski Bio Moment Theatre: Making Theatre from Recorded Events February 11 to 23, 2008 | Leigh Fondakowski, creator of The People's Temple and head writer for The Laramie Project, teaches a rare two-week intensive and collaborative workshop on how to create riveting theatrical plays from researched material and/or found text. Students will learn the highly evolved process Leigh has created through her work with Tectonic Theater Project, and can either start something new or work on an existing unfinished draft. Students will work on projects that are based entirely upon text discovered and uncovered through interviews and archival sources—from current and/or historical events or non-fiction. The goal of the two-week course is to generate new material with an eye on understanding the overall narrative, structure and theatrical event of the piece. Students will have a clear sense of how to structure the material, what the forms are and how to proceed in the writing of the whole play. A studio will be available to students for developing work outside of class. The workshop will culminate in a reading/showing of moments created over the course of the two weeks. |
2007 Classes
| Instructor/Class | Description | |
 | John O'Keefe Bio Breaking the Mold: How to work outside familiar forms and find new shapes for your work November 17 to December 22, 2007 | San Francisco playwright and veteran theater artist John O'Keefe brings his unique vision to this intensive workshop, designed to help playwrights break out of their established modes of working. In this five week course, students will begin work on a new play. Every writer has a particular comfort zone, and the focus of the course will be to push beyond familiar forms. |
| Dan Milne Bio Caught By the Tale: A Two-Day Intensive in Theatre Creation October 13 to 14, 2007 | Using personal memory, myth, fairy-tale, rumor and reportage as our material, we will examine the art of the story-teller--be s/he a playwright, a performer, a director or a Psychologist, and precisely how it connects to our artistic practice in the theatre. Through away your pen and paper for a practical, hands-on workshop in theater creation. What are your Stories? Working with the idea that the process of memory is fundamentally a creative act, the workshop will begin to explore the layers of story that make up who we are, from the defining events of our lives to the forgotten corners of remembrance. We will look at how our stories can become the inspiration for dramatic performance or writing. What are the Myths and Fairy-tales that resonate for you, what are the character archetypes that speak to you? What can we learn about how story operates from the impact that these ancient tales have on us? What is the Story of Now? How can we encapsulate what it feels like to be alive at this precise moment in time? What is the Zeitgeist and how can that be communicated in a dramatic form? | |
| Marcus Gardley Bio Magic, Myth and the Playwright's Imagination October22 to 26, 2007 | Marcus Gardley (Love is a Dream House in Lorin, Shotgun Players) teaches his unique and magical weave of myth, history, memory and poetry, providing organic and concrete techniques for creating contemporary urban legends. One of the most sought after up-and-coming playwrights in the country, and a multiple PF Alumnus, Marcus is a top shelf teacher (currently in the Bay Area on leave from Columbia University) who will ignite your imagination, and teach you ways to listen deeply to your own voice singing. |
| Annie Smart Bio The Visual Aspect of Playwriting: a Critical Eye. A workshop for playwrights, designers and directors October 9 to November 6, 2007 | The visual world of the writer--imagination is often neglected in the process of creating a play and yet we know playwrights see their plays in as rich and specific ways as the language s/he crafts. Annie Smart, one of the most sought after and creative theatrical designers working today, will set a playwright's visual imagination free--allowing you to find theatrically sound concepts that match the world you imagine for your story and characters. Designers will have an opportunity to work in depth on the development of a new piece WITH a writer. Directors will have an opportunity to collaborate with writers on the three-dimensional reality. | |
| Dominic Orlando Bio New Play Boot: Emerge from the Trenches with a New One Act Play April 19 to May 1, 2007 | Award-winning writer Dominic Orlando returns with his New Play Boot Camp, an intensive two week workshop to sweat your playwriting muscles and flex your imagination. By the end of this 6-Day workout, you'll finish a 40-page one-act or die trying. This time out, Orlando focuses on what classical music and composition can teach us about the making of plays, which have more in common with symphonies than they do television or film scripts. This unique approach and intensive energy will give new and experienced playwrights a work out they'll be feeling for years. |
Earlier Classes
More 2007 Classes
Leigh Fondakowski
Events in Performance: The Archeology of Playmaking
Rachel Axler
Writing in Someone Else's Voice
Anne Washburn
Human Speech
D. W. Jacobs
The Art of Playwriting: Principles of Movement and Dramatic Structure
Octavio Solis
How to Sabotage Your Own Play and Make Beautiful Art
Mickey Birnbaum
Souling Out: Writing Unconventional Movies for Unconventional Times
2006 Classes
Migdalia Cruz
Migdalia's Method: A Memory Playshop
Sheila Callaghan
A Playwright's Errant Treasure Chest: Finding Character Through Unusual and Improbable Objects
Christine Evans
Building Story
Motti Lerner
Brian Thorstenson
Architectonics
Prince Gomovilas
Rock 'n' Roll Playwriting
Stephanie Fleischmann
Visual Playwriting
Brighde Mullins
Playwriting: A Crash Course in Materials/Methods/Magic
Christine Young
New Play Exploratorium
Dan Milne
From Scratch: Inspiration to Realization
Dijana Milosevic
War Stories
2005 Classes
David Kranes
Kent Nicholson
Staging the Developing Play
D.W. Jacobs
Naomi Wallace
Christine Evans
Developing the Full-Length Play
Amy Wheeler
Arthur Kopit
Claire Chafee
Orderly Disorder
Dijana Milosevic
War Stories
Liz Duffy Adams
2004 Classes
Adam Bock
The Playwright's Vision
Amy Freed
Sharing Stuff That Works: The Courage to Cut, Shape and Refine
Erik Ehn
Dark Night Writing: Approaches to Making and Meaning for Theatrical Texts
Joan Holden
Farce and Melodrama
Liz Duffy Adams
Borrowing, Recycling and Originating: The Art (and trickery) of inventing original language
Mac Wellman
Pataphysics
Octavio Solis
Prince Gomolivas
Don't Try This at Home: The Fundamentals of Playwriting
Tanya Shaffer
The Dramatic Heart: Finding and Defining Your Story