Playwrights' Center Expands Apprenticeship Program

The Playwrights‘ Center will more than double its highly-regarded Core Apprentice program through a deepened partnership with the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF), a national champion of student dramatists, thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Core Apprentice program brings the nation‘s top undergraduate and graduate student playwrights to Minneapolis to develop their work at the Playwrights‘ Center. The grant from the NEA‘s Access to Artistic Excellence program will support an increase in the number of playwright apprenticeships offered annually from five to 10 as well as the creation of a new apprenticeship track in the field of dramaturgy for three additional students.

Frequently working under the radar, dramaturgs act as vital "play doctors" for new plays. "It is essential that we expand the training and practical mentoring of student dramaturgs," said KCACTF Artistic Director Gregg Henry. "That‘s exactly what this program does."

The grant will also help to deepen the experience by pairing each apprentice with a professional mentor for a year.

"This is fantastic news for student playwrights and dramaturgs," said Anna Peterson, Membership Manager & Literary Associate at the Playwrights‘ Center and the collaboration‘s project director. "There‘s just no substitute for working on a play face-to-face with the top artists in the field. We‘re thrilled to be able to bring more students into the program."

The four-year-old Core Apprentice program is an offshoot of the Playwrights‘ Center‘s New Plays on Campus initiative, which uses the Center‘s connections and expertise to match colleges with professional playwrights for residencies, lectures, or as a source of fresh new plays for their stages.

As New Plays on Campus gained traction, conversations with member schools made it clear that educators desired to make the relationship reciprocal—to send their most promising playwriting students to the Playwrights‘ Center. What started as a pilot mentorship program quickly grew into a series of 10-hour playwriting workshops in the Center‘s world-class Ruth Easton Lab. Today, "the Core Apprentice program is a key factor driving institutions to join New Plays on Campus," Peterson said.

Recent Core Apprentices are already making a mark on the field. Martin Zimmerman, a 2009 Core Apprentice, was recently named a 2010 Smith Prize winner by the National New Play Network for his play White Tie Ball, developed at KCACTF‘s MFA Playwrights‘ Workshop. David Largman Murray developed his comedy Robots vs. Fake Robots at the Playwrights‘ Center in 2007; it was subsequently produced by Minneapolis‘s Walking Shadow Theatre Company and will be part of the 2010-11 Etcetera Series at Live Theatre Workshop in Tucson, AZ.

Tiffany Antone, whose play In the Company of Jane Doe recently closed a run at the Powerhouse Theatre in Santa Monica, CA, said of her 2007 apprenticeship, "Being able to workshop my play in a friendly and supportive environment outside the nest of academia was not only incredibly helpful to me as a playwright, but encouraging to me as an emerging artist as well."

The Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival annually serves some 18,000 students and faculty from over 600 institutions in all disciplines of theatre. The National Playwriting Program, founded by the distinguished playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Michael Kanin, is the keystone of the organization‘s goal of developing and supporting the next generations of theater artists.

KCACTF has been a strong partner and proponent of New Plays on Campus since its inception. "New Plays on Campus impacts the students and faculty of our organizations on their home campus; in their own 'learning labs,' woven into the curriculum," said Henry. "No other partnership has the potential to be as wide-ranging in scope or more central to our mission than our partnership with the Playwrights‘ Center."