WHAT HAPPENS AFTER I SUBMIT?

Every year over 600 plays and monologues are submitted to our Playwriting festival and every single play gets personalized feedback. To make that happen we bring together readers from all walks of life, from professional playwrights and directors, to classroom teachers and teaching artists, to alumni of our PYP programs. Every reader gets assigned between 5 and 20 plays or monologues to read and many of the pieces get read multiple times to be sure they get proper consideration by as many perspectives as possible. After our first round of readers read your plays, they write responses to send to you to help guide you in continuing to write. Every response is reviewed by our PYP staff to ensure you get quality feedback!
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After the first round of readers review the plays, some plays get identified as being a good fit for the opportunities Philadelphia Young Playwrights offers each year. Some of those opportunities are:

Writing Community

One of our favorite things that we offer the young playwrights who submit their plays to us is a writing community! Whether this is the first play you’ve ever written or you have been writing and creating theater for years, PYP wants you to get the chance to explore your writing with other young people who are writers too. For many of the young writers who submit their pieces to us, the idea of writing and revising outside of a class assignment is new and scary. That’s why we think the opportunity for a writing community is so vital! 

If we choose to offer you space in our writing or revision workshops, that’s because we think your voice is exciting and your writing is full of potential. These writing and revision workshops are a chance for you to continue to work on your writing with a community of other young writers and a whole support staff of professional writers, actors, and theater artists. If you’re chosen to participate in these workshops we will contact you at the end of the summer with the date and time of the available workshops and a way to RSVP. Then you’ll come to our office space at 1219 Vine Street to get a chance to work on your writing in community!

We also offer other opportunities and workshops year-round for all the writers who have submitted to our festival and we’ll be sure to let you know all about them. These include one day workshops, vacation camps, and year-round writing groups–all ways that you can continue to develop as a writer around other young writers like you. 

Production

Every year Philadelphia Young Playwrights works with partners across Philadelphia to produce some of our exceptional student work. If your work is chosen for production that means we think it is ready to be performed by professional actors and staged by a professional director and presented to a public audience!

If we choose your work for production we will contact you at the end of the summer to tell you more about the reading opportunity you’ve been chosen for. This may include working with a professional dramaturg to further hone and revise your work, coming into rehearsals to give feedback and answer questions, and coming to performances to talk to the audience about your writing process. 

Your creative team will work to realize your writing and artistic goals, which means you’ll have lots of opportunities to contribute ideas, pose questions, give feedback, and experiment!

Readings

In addition to full scale productions, every year Philadelphia Young Playwrights chooses some exceptional plays to be a part of our reading series. If your play is chosen for a reading that means we think it is ready to be performed by professional actors and presented to a public audience! 
This means that your play will be performed in front of a public audience by professional actors, but instead of memorizing the play and performing the blocking for it, actors will read the words directly from the script itself and stay relatively still. We may choose your play for a reading instead of a fully staged performance for many reasons–sometimes it’s because your play requires staging elements we wouldn’t be able to fully realize with our partners this season, or because it is particularly long or complicated and we want to devote more rehearsal time to doing the words justice instead of staging it. 

If we choose your work for a reading we will contact you at the end of the summer to tell you more about the reading opportunity you’ve been chosen for. This may include working with a professional dramaturg to further hone and revise your work, coming into rehearsals to give feedback and answer questions, and coming to performances to talk to the audience about your writing process. 

​Your creative team will work to realize your writing and artistic goals, which means you’ll have lots of opportunities to contribute ideas, pose questions, give feedback, and experiment!

Mentorship

Writing can be lonely! Through one-on-one mentorships, Philadelphia Young Playwrights offers some of our playwrights a chance to work on their playwriting in partnership with professional playwrights, directors, dramaturgs, and PYP staff. 

If we choose your play for a mentorship, that means we believe your play has exciting potential and we believe YOU have exciting potential too! Although there may not be space for your play in our production or reading season, we think your play deserves careful and considered feedback and development and we’re excited to go on that journey with you. 

If your play or monologue is chosen for a mentorship, you’ll get a call or email at the end of the summer to give you more details about the mentorship. If you choose to participate in this opportunity, you’ll be matched with a mentor whose specific strengths are well suited to your play. 

Your mentor will work to realize your writing and artistic goals, which means they’ll look to you to contribute ideas, pose questions, and propose changes. You and your mentor will meet weekly to discuss your goals for your play and for yourself as an artist. Between meetings, your mentor can give you weekly online feedback on your writing-in-progress, too!

​After you and your mentor work together on revisions, your play may even be chosen to go on to a reading or production if space is available in our season, or if you’ve completed significant revisions, we may encourage you to resubmit the play to our festival next year.