Workshopping the New Play: A Guide for Playwrights Directors and Dramaturgs

Workshopping the New Play is a guide for playwrights, directors, dramaturgs, and other theater professional and students. The book begins with an overview of the basics of playwriting and goes on to cover all aspects of the new-play workshopping process: selecting a director and/or dramaturg to run the workshop sessions, assembling a team of actor/readers and dealing with constructive criticism, putting together a staged reading of one's work, structuring a successful talkback, and properly and professionally submitting one's work to theaters. Throughout the book are essays by well-known theater professionals: playwrights, teachers, dramaturgs, an artistic director, a spoken word performer, and workshopping experts. The book is written in a friendly, nonacademic style, but should be valuable for educators as well as practitioners of theater.