Eboni Booth, Roger Q. Mason, and Sarah Mantell Headline PlayPenn’s 2026 New Play Development Conference: “Democracy in Action”
- PlayPenn
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
This year’s new play conference marks the nation’s 250th anniversary and features a national cohort of artists including Tyler Dobrowsky, Danilo Gambini, Taibi Magar, Amrita Ramanan, and Charlie Thurston.
PlayPenn, a Philadelphia-based artist-driven organization dedicated to the long-term development of new plays and playwrights, will transform new play development into a laboratory for civic imagination through their 2026 New Play Development Conference: "Democracy in Action” running July 17-August 2 at various venues in Philadelphia and New York City. Registration opens Monday, June 1 at www.playpenn.org/2026-conference. View our 2026 Conference Events!
PlayPenn’s nationally recognized New Play Development Conference brings together readings of new plays alongside a citywide series of civic gatherings, workshops, artist exchanges, and public conversations focusing on art, democracy, historical memory, belonging, and collective imagination. This community-focused approach to new play development reflects a broader vision of theatre in a shared civic life that illuminates what theatre can do, who participates in it, how it unfolds, and why it matters.
Serving as the centerpiece for the Conference are new plays that ask audiences to reconsider the architecture of freedom, featuring new works by 2026 Creative Capital Awardee Roger Q. Mason (Lavender Men with Skylight Theatre), PlayPenn Foundry alum and Susan Smith Blackburn Prize winner Sarah Mantell (In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot with Playwrights Horizons), and newcomer Zoe Palmer.
The 18-event Conference brings together 22 playwrights participating across workshops, conversations, and five new work presentations while expanding its scope to include an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Eboni Booth (Primary Trust), free playwriting workshops for adults, teens, and women over 50, and a public conversation examining constitutional history and civic identity. Additional programming includes a community workshop for queer theatre makers; a convening on innovation in theatre-making with leaders from Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Cannonball Festival, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Lemonade Stand, and Tiny Dynamite; and an acting lab focused on approaches to new play development and cross-community exchanges among theatre artists.
“Curating a conference in Philadelphia during the country’s 250th anniversary means engaging difficult questions about whose stories are protected, whose histories are remembered, and who gets to belong in public life. I hope our events give audiences a way to grapple with those ideas,” said Che’Rae Adams, Artistic Director of PlayPenn. “Roger, Sarah, and Zoe’s plays wrestle with urgent questions about where we belong and what we owe one another. They’re giving us an opportunity for collective dreaming, and that’s exactly what new play development should do – bring everyone together to build new dreams inspired by the courage of our nation’s playwrights.”
This year’s Conference celebrates the nation’s 250th anniversary and features contributions from a distinguished group of guest artists and institutional leaders including Nancy Boykin (The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington) Mathilde Dratwa (Dirty Laundry), Tyler Dobrowsky (Macbeth in Stride), Danilo Gambini (CATS: The Jellicle Ball), L M Feldman (Another Kind of Silence), Nick Jonczak (Trinity), James Kern (The Contrast), Taibi Magar (Wonder, Night Side Songs) Amrita Ramanan (The Waterfall), Rayne (COMET), Charlie Thurston (Liberation), Stephanie Kyung Sun Walters (Esther Choi and the Fish that Drowned) and partnerships with Cannonball Festival, Philadelphia Theatre Company, and Philadelphia Young Playwrights.
The complete schedule of events and locations is available at www.playpenn.org/events.
Highlights from the 18-event Conference in Philadelphia include:
Friday, July 17
The Dream We Were Promised: The U.S. Constitution and the Struggle Toward Belonging
A public conversation examining constitutional history and the modern challenges of civil rights in America.
Saturday, July 18
Living Out Loud: Writing Radical Futures with Roger Q. Mason
A half-day creative gathering of writing, discussion, and visioning, culminating in a sharing of short pieces that imagine radical futures for America.
Monday, July 20
PlayPenn Solo Fest!
Featuring Mathilde Dratwa and 11 playwrights from across the country sharing work-in-progress excerpts from their new one-person shows.
Saturday, July 25 - Philadelphia Reading
Monday, July 27 - New York City Reading
Bill by Roger Q. Mason
Directed by Danilo Gambini
Dramaturgy by Amrita Ramanan
Featuring Rayne, Nick Jonczak, Roger Q. Mason, and Charlie Thurston
Democracy is dead, to begin with, and Taffeta, a Black queer femme of impossible brilliance, refuses to be this country’s janitor once again. But a stranger forces Taffeta to confront whether the country she’s inherited is worth fighting for, or whether it deserves to be rebuilt at all, forcing her to choose a louder, riskier dream. A sequel to Roger Q. Mason’s LAVENDER MEN, their new play excavates U.S. Constitutional history and asks who was intentionally excluded from the founding vision of “We, the People.”
Wednesday, July 29
PlayPenn Presents Eboni Booth Live
An intimate conversation with one of the most produced playwrights in the country and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Primary Trust.
Saturday, August 1
Emergence by Zoe Palmer
Presented in association with Philadelphia Young Playwrights (PYP)
Directed by James Kern
Dramaturgy by Madeline Charne
Before birth, a person must choose their body. Afterwards, they are taken on a “journey” to connect themselves with their new body and prepare for life. However, when someone becomes afraid of the struggles they may face after birth, they must learn what makes life worth living and gather the courage to face the unknown.
Sunday, August 2
The Good Guys by Sarah Mantell
Presented in association with Philadelphia Theatre Company
Directed by Tyler Dobrowsky & Taibi Magar
When Aarón joins a group of Civil War reenactors, he is horrified to discover that visiting troops get to play Union soldiers while he is forced to fight in Confederate uniform. When the unit’s leadership is usurped and gender, racial, and sexual identities come to the forefront, the group must find a way to make it to Gettysburg, where they will finally get to fight as the North.
About PlayPenn
PlayPenn is an artist-driven organization dedicated to the long-term development of new plays and playwrights. PlayPenn reengineers the relationship between time, labor, and creation so artists can move beyond urgency and expectation and feel limitless in their work. For over twenty years, PlayPenn has served as a regional and national anchor for new play development, rooted in Philadelphia and shaping the American theatre field. To date, PlayPenn has helped develop more than 160 new works, which have gone on to receive more than 400 full productions at theatres throughout the United States and abroad.
PlayPenn has helped launch or support the careers of many of today’s nationally recognized theatre writers including Stephen Belber, Kara Lee Corthron, Ty Defoe, Steven Dietz, Gabriel Jason Dean, L M Feldman, Dominic Finocchiaro, Jacqueline Goldfinger, Kate Hamill, Jeffrey Hatcher, Jordan Harrison, Michael Hollinger, Willy Holtzman, Samuel D. Hunter, James Ijames, MJ Kaufman, Sarah Mantell, Deb Margolin, Roger Q. Mason, Antoinette Nwandu, Erlina Ortiz, Aaron Posner, Iraisa Ann Reilly, J.T. Rogers, Jonathan Spector, Jen Silverman, R. Eric Thomas, Bess Wohl, Stefanie Zadravec, and Lauren Yee.
PlayPenn is currently represented on Broadway by three PlayPenn playwrights during the 2025-2026 theatrical season. Alumni of PlayPenn’s developmental programming include Jordan Harrison, author of Marjorie Prime; Samuel D. Hunter, whose play Little Bear Ridge Road received a 2026 Tony Award nomination and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play; and Bess Wohl, whose play Liberation won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize and received a 2026 Tony Award nomination for Best Play. www.playpenn.org
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