PlayLabs Go Public

Posted by Jaime Green, Literary Associate--

Phew! Last night was the final reading of our first-ever fall PlayLabs series, and several months of preparation and craziness just came to a close!

Opening up the PlayLab reading series to the public was a new thing for us. For the past seven years, we’ve held monthly PlayLab readings, one Sunday afternoon a month, for an invited audience of theatre professionals and friends. These readings are for writers from our Playwrights’ Coalition, a chance for them to hear what they’re working on in front of an audience, and to celebrate.

But, this year we changed things up! We’re doing two series (four Monday evenings in a row) – one in the fall and one in the spring. And now they’re open to our subscribers and to the general public. We even designed a sweet little postcard for advertising:

Click here for play info!

In preparation, we solicited scripts from our Playwrights’ Coalition writers, programmed the series, found directors, cast the readings, printed up programs, and on each of the four Monday afternoons, we got to work! The cast and playwright, and director (if there was one) met up to read through the script and talk about it. These are new plays, not even finished yet, just at a point where the writer wants to hear it out loud, and hear how an audience takes it in. (At least two of the plays had never been read before an audience at all.) After a couple of hours of rehearsal, the (brave, brave) actors got onstage and read the play.

We had no way of knowing what the response would be – we’ve never done this before, so … Would anyone even come? Would the wine and food we schlepped down to the Baruch Performing Arts Center each day go uneaten and undrunk? Well we were blown away! Each reading had a full audience of sixty or seventy people - a mix of MCC subscribers, theatre artists, and the occasional random person off the street (or off the halls of Baruch, looking for Tovah Feldshuh in Irena’s Vow). Afterwards, the artists and audience gathered to mingle and swap thoughts. It was so exciting to see that this new program was filling a need people already had, giving them something they were really excited about. Can’t wait till April to (muster up my strength and) do it all over again…

(Top photo, L-R: Lucas Papaelias, Ari Graynor, and Eddie Kaye Thomas in Brooke Berman's The Jesus Year. Bottom photo, L-R: Mark Schultz, Ryan O'Nan, Patch Darragh, Laura Heisler, Matthew Stadelmann, and Jamie Klassel in Ashlin Halfnight's Second Life.)