About the Premiere Stages Play Festival
“At Premiere Stages I was nothing more than genuinely inspired, and I fervently hope that other playwrights might be allowed to reap the same benefits.”
~ Hal Corley, 2007 Premiere Play Festival Winner

Premiere Stages is committed to supporting emerging playwrights by developing and producing new plays. We provide playwrights with an encouraging and focused environment in which they can develop their work through discussions, rehearsals, sit-down readings, staged readings, and fully produced Equity productions.

At Premiere Stages, we pride ourselves on a uniquely accelerated process, in which plays we find particularly promising are developed and fully produced within a year of submission. In many professional theatres the time span between meeting a writer, staging a reading and producing the play can be years. At Premiere Stages, immediately following the Spring Readings, two plays enter an intensive development phase. Playwrights work with a director, dramaturg, and design team to develop the play for a staged workshop or full production only a few months later. When we find a writer we believe in, our play festival process allows Premiere Stages to fully commit the time, talent, and resources necessary to share their work with a broad regional audience.

Premiere Stages’ productions offer playwrights the chance to see their work fully realized on stage. We hope, however, that the plays developed at Premiere will go on to subsequent productions throughout the country. Because of this, playwrights whose scripts we produce retain the coveted “World Premiere” brand on their plays. Premiere Stages also strives to facilitate relationships between playwrights and other theatres professionals who we think will respond to their work.

Submission to the Premiere Play Festival is open to playwrights living in the greater metropolitan area (New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania) and there is no fee to enter. A cash prize is awarded to the three finalists, and the winner of the Festival is guaranteed a slot in the upcoming main stage season.

All plays submitted to the festival are evaluated by a professional panel of theatre producers, dramaturgs, playwrights, scholars and publishers. For full submission guidelines, please click here.