A New Model for
Engaging Playwrights, Audiences, and Communities around the Power of
Playmaking
Jersey City Theater Center (JCTC)
and The New Jersey Play
Lab (NJPL), in partnership with the Department of Theatre and
Dance’s BA Theatre Studies Program at Montclair
State University, is thrilled to announce the collective of
playwrights selected for participation in the inaugural year of The Garden State New Play Festival (GSNPL).
The diverse collective of playwrights
include:
Yangzhou (Yao) Bian Sichuan; China (Binghamton University, NY)
Khadija Diop; Jersey City, NJ
Boris Franklin; Highland Park, NJ
Gabriel Diego Hernández; Jersey City, NJ
Vincent Langan; Union, NJ
Rossella Lopez; Bayonne, NJ
Elijah Maldonado; Belleville, NJ
Palesa Mazamisa; Johannesburg, South Africa
Tiffany McQueary; Jersey City, NJ
Cynthia Mellon; Newark, NJ
Francisco Mendoza; Brooklyn, NY
Dave Osmundsen; Denville NJ
Syd Rushing; Raleigh, NC
Marcus Scott; West New York, NJ
Dylan Zwickel; New York, NY
(For more information on these writers,
visit The NJPL website)
(For a Full pass to the festival, visit www.jctcenter.org )
This collective of writers was carefully selected from an
extensive submission and outreach process to honor the mission of JCTC, and
to realize the goals of The GSNPF: Community,
Festivity, Advocacy, Sustainability, and Artistic Equity.
As artistic institutions in a rapidly changing world, it is
incumbent upon us to constantly question whether our work is truly being
created, developed, and produced in service of our community, and assess
whether or not our work is reaching audiences in a meaningful, impactful
manner.
The GSNPF was conceived around a new strategy of blending
community and artistic development in which community members are given
access to create art not just consume art, resulting in an understanding and
celebration of the opportunity for individual and collective growth inherent
in the process of new play development.
The Collective of Playwrights participating in the GSNPF
include both emerging and early career playwrights, Jersey City Community
Members working in the non-profit and advocacy sector, international artists
both from abroad and from our local immigrant communities, college students,
and high school students. Each of their plays focuses around an aspect of
social justice.
The Garden State New Play Festival will
take place on May 1st-4th and 8th-11th, 2025 at Jersey City Theatre Center.
Over the course of the six months leading up to the Festival,
each writer will embark on an individualized dramaturgical track to further
develop their play for presentation at the Festival. Woven into each track
will be an interactive forum with a local community group or organization
selected according to the lens of social justice through which the play has
been conceived.
Concurrently to the individualized play development tracks, a
schedule of workshops, exchanges, classroom visits, play readings, and public
events, will take place between November and May, and be open to all Festival
participants, including writers, actors, dramaturgs, directors, and community
leaders.
The goal is that by the time the Festival itself opens,
hundreds of artists and community members will have collaborated and
contributed to this process of new play development, and personally
experienced the power of the written word for the stage.
The GSNPF offers a new model for a new play festival that
brings together artists of all career levels without barriers of hierarchy,
and blurs the lines between artist and audience, all while respecting the
integrity of each individual artist’s craft and experience. This model frames
the art of playmaking as a means of expression and advocacy, and as a tool
for deeper understanding of self and one’s community, and dismantles barriers
to producing full productions of new plays by cultivating a vibrant ecosystem
that values and champions the power of playmaking.
The Garden State New Play Festival is
supported by a grant from the NJ State Council on the Arts, Project Serving
Artists grant.
|