Programs

Bay Area Playwrights Festival
As our cornerstone program and the heart of the organization, the annual BAPF brings together a select group of playwrights and professional collaborators to engage in an in-depth development process over three weeks every summer. The work leads to two public staged readings of each play, with a week for rehearsal and rewriting in between the readings.

Producing Partnerships and Commissions
Support the inception and development of new work by BAPF Alumni, finalists and others, and advance the work from development to full productions by forming partnerships with local new play producers.

Rough Readings
A partnership with The Lark Play Development Center (NY) and the National Center for New Plays at Stanford University (CA), Rough Readings are often done in a series and they showcase first draft plays by PF and LARK resident playwrights that allows them to receive feedback at a critical stage in a play’s early development.

Resident Playwrights
A pilot program launched in 2008, the goal of the Resident Playwrights Initiative is to grow and sustain the Bay Area as a vibrant and fertile center for new plays. The six playwrights in the pilot phase of the program were selected from past BAPF alumni and finalists.

INKubator
A pilot program launched in 2008, the INKubator Series (INK, affectionately) is a series of one to two week intensive closed-door workshops, safe from the pressures of producers and public scrutiny. INK supports works nearing a premiere production or simply serves as an in-depth collaborative exploration for the development of new work.

Sister City Playwrights Exchange
Sister City Playwrights Exchange, founded by playwright/director Vincent Murphy at Emory University in 2003 in cooperation with several theaters and nine of the Play Labs, relocated to the Playwrights Foundation in January of 2010. Its mission is to swap talented, under-recognized playwrights in several regions of the US, Canada and England.