Eric Marchese of Voice of OC did a deep dive into our On The Radar: New Works Program!
Read full articleChance Theater’s Resident Playwright Program Gives Emerging Scribes a Leg Up
The seeds for Chance’s commitment to supporting playwrights in their work were sown during the company’s inaugural season (1999), which included only new, unproduced plays whose Chance productions were world premieres.
Oanh Nguyen, Chance’s founding artistic director, said, “We’ve always known that new work would be a part of our core mission.”
If there’s a heart to Chance Theater’s commitment to supporting every aspect of what playwrights do in creating something new for the stage, it’s the company’s OTR New Works Program – OTR standing for “On the Radar,” a phrase which suggests that Chance is continuously scanning the national theater landscape for playwrights and scripts worth supporting.
Created in 2011, the program consists of a series of staged readings of new scripts, support for a playwright’s one-year residency with Chance, and a mechanism through which past resident playwrights can receive a commission to create and develop a new play.
McHale notes that every new play being developed takes on its own life and specifics.
Through audience feedback, Iraheta said, “others will expose areas you hadn’t realized or are just discovering.”
“It’s less about what’s working or is confusing, less about how we can fix it, and more about how the stories land with audiences.” With other theater companies he has worked with, “you don’t really get that kind of care with audience response.”
She says by providing playwrights a space wherein they can develop their work, the company “is serving a vital role in American theater, creating the kind of access point that allows people to attend, participate in, and take ownership of what’s on stage in a way that other, larger institutions just can’t begin to match.”
The 2015 RP, Lauren Yee, has seen two of her plays fully produced and two more receive staged readings, saying Chance “has been a warm and welcoming home to my work in Orange County and has been the launching pad to numerous works that have had a continued life across the country.”
Jessica Huang, the 2019 RP, said she found the process “so useful just to hear the play in front of Chance’s audiences,” calling them “experienced, focused and eager to support experimental and challenging work” and saying “their engagement and reactions taught me so much.”
Most recently added to the Chance’s resident playwright program is a playwriting commission awarded annually to a past RP. The commission, McHale said, “allows us to further support RPs on the creation and development of new plays for the American theater canon.”
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