New Play Conference Theatre Workshops

GPTC New Play Conference Theatre WorkShops are a vibrant series of hands-on writing and performance-related classes designed and led by national theatre professionals.  WorkShops cover a variety of techniques and approaches and provide participants and an excellent opportunity to create and collaborate with one another while under the instruction of some of the top theatre artists in the country.

WorkShops are free of charge for all attendees and the general public.  Priority for attendance is given to the current GPTC Playwrights, Young Dramatists and conference participants. Sessions are held throughout the Conference week. Registration for the workshops will be available soon. Please check back here for registration information.

To sign up for a workshop please send the name and day of the workshop (or workshops) in an email to: commons@gptcplays.com. We will place everyone that we can into each workshop until they are at full capacity. We will respond back to let you know the status of your request asap. Thank you!

2022 GPTC New Play Conference Workshops

WORKSHOP SESSION 1

SUNDAY, MAY 30

11:00am – 12:30pm

Hansol Jung

Structuring Your Weird:  First half will be idea generating writing exercises, second half will be structuring schemes with said ideas. WORKSHOP FULL

Don Nguyen

Sending Your Play Out Into The World: Submitting your play to conferences, festivals and theaters can seem daunting.  Well, it is! Unfortunately it’s necessary.  This workshop will explore the submission process from making sure your script is ready to submit to writing an effective artistic statement, and finally what happens when you finally get into a conference.

 

WORKSHOP SESSION 2

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1

9:00am – 10:30am

Vicki Grise

This is a Manifesto!:  A writing workshop designed for theater artists to write their own artist manifesto. What are your wildest, boldest, most audacious dreams – for you, your people, the world? How do you create an art practice that will help manifest those dreams and a life practice in alignment with your true calling?

Mfoniso Udofia

Writing The Autobiographical: Some artists choose to mine from their own lives — their art deeply personal to themselves and to the communities around them. Sometimes these personal plays hold refractions — shards–  of a story already lived. Sometimes these personal plays can be wholesale reproductions of said life. How does one tell a true/true-ish story safely? What are the frameworks that need to be in place so one can explore healthily? We will ask ourselves these questions, and hopefully acquire some new tools for our tool-kit so we can tell the story of ourselves without fear.

Josh Wilder

Being Ruthless: You know sh*t’s supposed to get real in Act 2. So why are you holding back? In this workshop we’re going to investigate what makes us pause before pushing our characters off the proverbial cliff… and then we’re gonna do it for real this time. Bring your knives.

 

WORKSHOP SESSION 3

FRIDAY, JUNE 3

10:00am – 11:30am

Kate Busselle

The Dramaturgy of Intimacy:  When intimacy professionals approach a text, there are many factors to consider when it comes to staging. How do we honor the boundaries that actors set for us in the work while simultaneously honoring the playwright’s intent? What if outside factors like COVID change the way we have to stage intimacy, and how do we still strike a balance with the feeling of intimacy with creative staging? How do we be mindful of the intimate or sexually graphic images we create onstage for the audiences who come to see the play? In this workshop, we will explore ways to investigate moments of intimacy within dramatic text and the ways we can honor story, boundaries, and aesthetics.

Kim Louise

Chopped: The Playwright’s Edition: “Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.” – James Baldwin

Let’s break out of the proverbial “box.” No, let’s cast it aside. No, let’s chop it up! During this generative workshop, we will explore new ways to create plays by delving into mash ups with other literary and writing forms. We will write without boundaries and invent, for ourselves, unique recipes for constructing drama. Building on the premise that genre informs genre, our goal is not to eliminate but to elevate our writing by introducing a new practice or strengthening a current one.

Anne Washburn

Directions, Misdirections, Frisks and Capers… :  It’s always a pleasure to write in response to a weirdo prompt proposed by a teacher or workshop leader or colleague; in doing so we find new, strange impulses and there is value in exploring them without expectation.  It’s hard to surprise ourselves.  In this workshop we’ll go through a few useful ways of setting up nice prompts for use in warming up before a writing session, or jiggling one’s way through a bit of a writing block or stall.  We’ll run through a few exercises, and participants will be asked to share their own tactics, triumphs, tactical failures, sorrows. WORKSHOP FULL