Playwriting

Emory’s resources offer special opportunities for joint playwriting majors. Theater Emory and its Playwriting Center provide a unique resource for student playwrights.

Established and emerging playwrights come to Emory to work on their plays with a diverse group of artistic collaborators including students, faculty and professional theater artists. Play development has become a vital stage of playwriting in the United States, and Theater Emory has established itself as an important center for that work. Since its inception in 1989, the Playwriting Center has commissioned and developed scripts with major playwrights including Arthur Kopit, Frank Manley, Steve Murray, Wole Soyinka, and Naomi Wallace. Brave New Works, a biennial marathon of developing and reading new scripts, has developed more than 100 new works, many of which have been produced in American regional theaters from the Yale Repertory Theater to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and internationally in theaters in South America, Canada and Europe. In recent years, Brave New Works has also included exceptional student work submitted by Emory alumni and undergraduates, like Lauren Gunderson, whose play, Leap, went on to be produced by Theater Emory in 2003.

The Lenaia Festival is an annual, student-run festival featuring staged readings of student plays-in-progress.

Nationally and internationally known playwrights come to Emory campus each year as part of the Creative Writing Reading Series, co-sponsored with Theater Studies, which affords students another opportunity to learn from the best in the field. Past playwrights in the Reading Series have included Athol Fugard, Theresa Rebeck, Margaret Edson, John Guare, Jose Rivera, Paula Vogel, and David Henry Hwang.

Playwriting students also may compete for an Artistine Mann Playwriting Award each year. The award is given in honor of Artistine Mann, a young writer and Emory undergraduate who was killed in a car accident before she could graduate.