![]() Unlike the Humana Festival, which used to rely mainly on out-of-town actors, or the Pacific Playwrights Festival, which relies on local Southern California actors, SNPF was exactly half and half out of a full festival cast of 24, 12 actors were local and 12 from out of town. It helped that the festival set out to be a blend of local and national talent. But they did it, and people at every theatre went out of their way to tell me how thrilled they were that this festival was happening. Dramaturg hot tip: Striking up lobby conversations can often prove useful! I can’t imagine the herculean effort it took to find a week in the calendar where all five companies (the Peace Center, with two spaces, along with the Warehouse, South Carolina Children’s Theatre, Greenville Theatre, and Centre Stage) had space to donate to a start-up effort. As West put it, “When Shelley and I discovered Greenville, and realized the city had six performing arts venues all located downtown on Main Street within a mile of each other, we knew it was the perfect place to produce a city-wide new play festival.” So the festival was taking place at five different venues across town, who’d all agreed to donate space and share resources. Most of the new-play festivals I’d worked on had been housed in (and produced by) a single year-round theatrical institution, but SNPF was different. West and Shelley had spent months meeting with the arts leaders and supporters of Greenville to create a city-wide event. It wasn’t my first in-person new-play festival post-pandemic (I’d produced the Her Words festival at Soulpepper in Toronto in October 2021, and worked as a dramaturg at the Denver New Play Summit in February 2022), but the inaugural year of anything has a special sense of excitement: Is this for real? How does this work? How is it the same or different from the others? Still, from the start, this felt a little different. I’d had great advance meetings with the playwrights-haven’t we all gotten adept at forming relationships on Zoom?-and this initially felt like a super-sized version of the job I’d done countless times before, i.e., dramaturg for a reading of a new play as part of a festival. Having lived in Louisville, I found August in Greenville to be not nearly the sweaty swamp weather I had feared when I arrived. Taking a deep breath, I agreed to give it a whirl.ĭramaturg Kimberly Colburn, left, and festival co-founder Shelley Butler, right, with the team behind “Dodi & Diana”: actors Rosaline Elbay and Peter Mark Kendall, director Adrienne Campbell-Holt, and playwright Kareem Fahmy. And Kate Hamill, playwright for The Scarlet Letter, would be away on her honeymoon, so other than attending the first read-through, I could focus my time on the rehearsals that were making more script changes. Like most TYA pieces, Dragonsoul Offline by Samantha Miller had the virtue of being shorter. Basil E Frankweiler, would be primarily pre- and post-festival work, as the bulk of rehearsal time would be dedicated to actors learning music. The musical, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. ![]() One of the plays, Dodi & Diana by Kareem Fahmy, I’d already been working on. There were two straight plays, one musical, and one play for young audiences. Frankly, many producers would skip hiring any dramaturgs at all. West and I talked through the festival and the scheduling the breadth of programming seemed to make it viable, and I was sympathetic to the economics of starting up a festival from scratch and needing to stretch the resources. ![]() However, I was surprised to be asked to dramaturg all four readings. ![]() Shelley, the artistic director, is a collaborator I’ve worked with frequently, so I wasn’t shocked to get a call from West, the festival’s executive artistic director, to dramaturg for the festival. Shelley Butler and West Hyler started SNPF in Greenville, S.C., and it had its inaugural run Aug. The South Carolina New Play Festival (SNPF) is a surprising blend of what came before, and a welcome start to a new new-play festival after a time when all we’ve heard about were festival postponements and closings (see: The Lark, Sundance, the Humana Festival). If you take the best parts of all the play festivals I’ve worked on, you might get a sense of the newest.
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