Since the early 1970s, the University of Iowa Department of Theatre Arts has presented an annual festival centered on producing, reading, and discussing new scripts from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. The Workshop was formally organized in the fall of 1971, although a strong tradition of playwriting existed at the University since 1921, when the department was under the leadership of E. C. Mabie. Head of the department from 1920 until his death in 1956, Mabie was dedicated to the writing and production of original plays.

In the 1970s, at a time when the regional theatre movement was growing along with interest in new American plays, the Head of the MFA Playwriting Program, Oscar (Okkie) Brownstein, led an effort to strengthen the professional orientation of the program, with connections to the professional theatre, a “workshop” approach to new play development, the country’s first course in Dramaturgy, and what was then called the Iowa Playwrights Festival. In the process, The Department of Theatre Arts became one of the most production-oriented playwriting programs in the country.

Many of the plays premiered during the Festival have gone on to productions at professional theatres throughout this country and abroad, while the playwrights have gone on to successful careers. Among many others, and at the risk of excluding a number of successful graduates, Festival alumni have included: David Adjmi, winner of  the 2024 Tony Award for Best Play for Stereophonic; Keith Josef Adkins, founder of the New Black Fest; Rick Cleveland, writer/producer for The West Wing, Six Feet Under, and House of Cards; Samuel D. Hunter and Naomi Wallace, both recipients of  MacArthur “Genius” Awards; Mary Eliabeth Hamilton, whose 16 Winters, or the Bear’s Tale, a companion play to The Winter’s Tale, won the American Shakespeare Center’s Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries competition, and will be produced in the Theatre Arts Department’s Mainstage season this fall; Jen Silverman, whose The Roommate was produced on Broadway (as has the work of David Adjmi and Sam Hunter); and Megan Gogerty, Tony Meneses, and Lisa Schlesinger, all current members of the Playwrights Workshop faculty.

All members of the graduate Iowa Playwrights Workshop (currently, there are nine), along with students from the Undergraduate Playwriting Workshop course, are represented in the Festival. Preparing nine new full length plays and an undergraduate event and presenting them in a single week is a monumental undertaking that is only possible through the utilization of UI Department of Theatre Arts’ wide-ranging resources in acting, directing, design, dramaturgy, stage management, and technical support.

Through staged readings, workshops, and productions, Festival showcases the process of new play development. While the play begins with the playwright’s vision, Festival’s focus is on the script-in-process, and on the artistic contributions the playwright’s collaborators make to bringing the play to life on stage. Like the scripts, Festival productions are in-process. The purpose of readings and performances is to reveal the essential vision of the play.

A special feature of our Festival is its Guest Artists, who are invited to attend the Festival to give dramaturgical feedback to both playwrights and their collaborators, and to provide advice on the future artistic and professional life of the play. This year’s guest artists include Noel Allain, co-founder and Artistic Director of The Bushwick Starr (Brooklyn); Ruth Margraff, a leading experimental playwright and professor at the Art Institute of Chicago; and Alexis Williams, producer, director, dramaturg, agent and Associate Director of The Playwrights Realm. (A fourth guest was being invited at the time of this writing.) We thank our Guest Artists for their support, and we thank you, our audiences, for your presence at our shows, contributing the first responses to the process of creating new theatre.