NEA and New Play Development

So this is really interesting and I was completely unaware of it and found out about through the TPS online message board.

The NEA New Play Development Program (NPDP) is a new leadership initiative created by the National Endowment for the Arts and managed by Arena Stage. The program will support the process and production of new American plays. This is the first round of the new program, through which a total of seven projects will be selected, developed, and documented over the course of the next two and half years. The Program is open to nonprofit, professional theaters or a consortium of theaters who apply in collaboration with a playwright. The Program Director is David Dower, Associate Artistic Director at Arena Stage. The Program Coordinator is Arena Stage’s Vijay Mathew. You can reach them at npdpinfo@arenastage.org, or by calling 202.554.9066 x1215.

In June of 2007 the National Endowment for the Arts issued a request for proposals looking for a “Cooperator” for a new Leadership Initiative for New Play Development. The goal of the New Play Development Program is:

"To advance the American nonprofit theater’s ability to provide meaningful support for new work. This program will provide support to theater institutions for the development of new plays of substantial merit. …This initiative will also identify, organize, and disseminate widely in the theater field information on effective collaborative models for the sustained development of outstanding new American plays."

Arena Stage was selected to partner with the NEA on the New Play Development Project as a result of a national competition.

In this establishing language of the NPDP, you can see that there are three primary areas of focus for this program:

Providing financial support for the playwrights and institutions developing outstanding new American plays;

Advancing the field’s ability to provide meaningful support of the development process for new work, and;

Disseminating information on effective models for developing outstanding new American plays.

The selection process for the seven plays supported in this round will be highly competitive and the successful applicants will be those that most directly address the Review Criteria which grow out of these goals.

For questions or more information, e-mail npdpinfo@arenastage.org.

You can read more about it on the blog.