Every spring, the work of the Litwing culminates in Playwrights’ Week. This week-long festival of new plays, identified through the Literary Wing, provides selected playwrights with a creative team (including a director and actors), ten hours of rehearsal time and a public presentation to work on specific developmental goals in his or her play. This year we have focused on expanding our outreach effort by partnering with specific cultural communities whose perspectives are not reflected in mainstream theater. To this end, we are working with the South Asian and Middle Eastern Diaspora communities.

We are cultivating Playwrights’ Week as our premiere “discovery festival” and a place where playwrights can feel safe to explore ambitious work. It will remain an occasion for artists to have the freedom to discover new aspects of their own work and for all involved to discover ideas and perspectives new to them.
 
Over the course of the five years we will be expanding our current outreach project to include other underrepresented voices and perspectives.

Playwrights’ Week is complemented by opportunities to engage in lively conversation about the relevance of new plays and works of theatre. Our annual panel, “The Playwrights’ Role in Fostering Social Change” has been facilitated in the past by Washington think tank chief Richard Healey of the Grassroots Policy Project, dramaturge and literary agent Morgan Jenness and Polly K. Carl, Producing Artistic Director of the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, and has featured leading playwrights Lisa D’Amour, David Henry Hwang, Kia Corthron, Theresa Rebeck and John Weidman among others.

Plays developed in Playwrights’ Week regularly go on to full productions at theaters across the country. This year Ian Cohen’s Play Lenny and Lou was at Woolly Mammoth Theatre in DC; Daphne Greave’s play Day of Kings had its premiere at the Alliance in Atlanta and Sujata Bhatt’s Queen of the Remote Control is currently playing at Mixed Blood in Minneapolis.