NEW YORK CITY: Rattlestick Theater, in partnership with the Terrence McNally Foundation and Tom Kirdahy Productions, have announced the winners of Cycle 4 of the Terrence McNally New Works incubator program, designed to support early-career playwrights through mentorship with veteran playwrights, access to a network of artists, and development via Rattlestick and Kirdahy Productions. The fellowship also awards a one-time stipend of $10,000 to be used at the playwright’s discretion.
This year’s cohort includes Katie Bender, a playwright, performer, and theatremaker whose solo show, Instructions for a Séance, has been produced at the Alley All New Festival, Amphibian Stage, Oklahoma City Rep Theater, and Fusebox Festival, and will be at Milwaukee Rep in the fall of 2026; Beth Hyland, whose plays and musicals include Sylvia Sylvia Sylvia at Geffen Playhouse and Williamstown Theatre Festival, Fires, Ohio at Alliance Theatre and Goodman New Stages; and Orlando Hernández, a playwright, tap dancer, and actor who helped develop Teatro en el Verano, a bilingual theatre collaboration between Trinity Repertory Company and Rhode Island Latino Arts in Providence, RI, and whose play La Broa’ (Broad Street) premiered in January 2024 on Trinity Rep’s mainstage.
This year’s cycle of fellows were selected by a Playwrights Advisory Council from a competitive pool of over 500 applicants by by a Playwrights Advisory Council featuring Eboni Booth, Sheila Callaghan, Sarah Ruhl, and Chay Yew.
Recent fellowship mentors have included Jaclyn Backhaus, Hannah Bos, Sheila Callaghan, Sarah DeLappe, Halley Feiffer, Emma Horwitz, David Henry Hwang, MJ Kaufman, Paul Thureen, and Mfoniso Udofia. Recent directors have included Tea Alagić, Arin Arbus, Carson Joenk, Anne Kauffman, Portia Krieger, Goldie E. Patrick, Caitlin Sullivan, and Dustin Wills.Each McNally Fellow will also receive a developmental workshop that culminates in a public reading.
Finalists for the 2026 fellowship included Borna Barzin, Benjamin Benne, Regan Moro, Abigail C. Onwunali, and Caitlin Saylor Stephens.
NEW YORK CITY: The American Theatre Critics/Journalists Association Foundation ATCA has named Adam Wassilchalk as the third Helbing Mentorship fellow. The recipient receives a $5,000 stipend and year of mentorship and collaboration on a LGBTQ+-themed theatre journalism project
Adam Wassilchalk is a Harlem-based arts and culture critic from Austin, Texas. His work has been published in American Theatre, The New Haven Independent, and Midbrow. Adam’s background in stage and production management spans Broadway, Off-Broadway, and the indie theatre scene. For his Helbing fellow project, Wassilchalk plans to focus on current trends in queer representation. He plans to publish these essays throughout the year.
Named for the late gay theatre pioneer Terry Helbing, the Fellowship was designed to encourage the development of LGBTQ+ theatre coverage, and to develop and amplify the voices of LGBTQ+ arts writers through scholarship, mentorship, and professional development in the hopes of making arts journalism a more inclusive and expansive profession.
“The current committee members overseeing the project are all in enthusiastic agreement with the importance of the project selected for the Mentorship’s third round,” said president of Foundation ATCA and founding Helbing committee member Martha Wade Steketee in a statement. “Adam’s plan to observe the current theatre season through a queer lens continues the legacy of Helbing and will craft an important contribution to theater history and theatre journalism.”
The 2026 Helbing Committee included Christopher Byrne (chair), Jay Handelman, Gerard Raymond, Frank Rizzo, Martha Wade Steketee, and past Helbing fellows D.R. Lewis and Billy McEntee.
NEW YORK CITY: The MAP Fund has announced the recipients of the inaugural Playwrights International Travel Grant program. With support from Venturous Theater Fund, the grant offers 15 playwrights up to $10,000, including $2,500 in unrestricted funds, and provides playwrights the opportunity to work on a current or envisioned project that will benefit from international travel.
The inaugural cohort of playwrights include:
- Nic Adams will research pre-Christian Britannia with folklorists in Scotland and travel to sites of Roman occupation in Great Britain for a play about a band of buffoons conscripted by Caesar to gather intelligence on the “barbarians” of Britannia.
- Lyndsey Bourne will travel throughout Northern Alberta and Atlantic Canada for her project Mabel’s Mine, a new play exploring the body and the bodily as sacrifice zones inside the largest industrial project on the planet.
- Kristen Adele Calhoun will travel to South Africa and Ghana, two nations offering a powerful contrast in how queer life is legislated and lived.
- Zola Dee will conduct field research across the Afro-Brazilian hubs of Salvador, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro to expand her intellectual understanding of Orisha based traditions into an embodied, interview-driven practice.
- Franky D. Gonzalez will return to Colombia for his documentary play The Colombian Man, which reflects upon the relationship between the United States and Colombia and a grandfather and grandson living in permanent displacement.
- Darrel Alejandro Holnes will conduct archival research in Spain documenting Black rebellion across the Spanish colonial Americas and Spain itself, to inform a body of plays he is developing on the subject.
- MJ Kaufman will travel with director Rebecca Wright to Poland and Lithuania as research for a play about the Jewish Labour Bund, a popular socialist political party.
- Carson Kreitzer will travel to the Svalbard Archipelago in the High Arctic to work on The Trash Project, a solo show about picking up trash in the Arctic.
- Mike Lew will travel to Trinidad for The Colonialism Project, an interconnected trilogy of plays tracing colonialism from 1700s India to the 1800s-1900s British Raj to the independence movement in 1930s Trinidad to American geopolitics (and race relations) today.
- Shayan Lotfi will go to Istanbul to study its history as a stopover point for West Asian asylum seekers passing through to onward destinations for a play that explores the transitional in-between spaces, physical and otherwise, that refugees inhabit when moving from origin to destination.
- Deepa Purohit will explore the colonial and post-colonial migration histories of the people, landscapes, and seascapes in four islands in the Caribbean: Trinidad, Martinique, Antigua, and Guadeloupe. These travels will inform the next phase of development of a work in progress titled The In Between: A Love Story.
- Melisa Tien will return to China and Indonesia to work specifically with weavers, theatremakers, and dancers on collaborative creation. Each collaboration will draw inspiration from local female-centered matrilineal communities.
- Noelle Viñas will travel to São Paulo to meet with AI researchers for her project MOTHERTONGUE, exploring the roots of language within colonized tongues and communities and investigating how artificial intelligence might help preserve endangered languages. Noelle’s travels will also include visits with Mbyá Guaraní communities in Paraguay, Misiones, and Portuñol speakers in northern regions of Uruguay.
- Lauren Yee will travel to Japan, the one East Asian country that avoided a Communist takeover, as part of her ongoing cycle of plays about the effects of Communism in Asia in the 20th century and its collision Western pop culture. She plans to immerse herself in the culinary traditions of Japan.
- Seayoung Yim will travel to Korea to learn more about premodern Korean cuisine and how it has changed through colonization and war, in hopes of imbuing her script with the terroir of the country she’s hoping to capture in her script.
This pilot program was developed with consultation from staff in developing this pilot at Dramatists Guild Foundation, New Dramatists, and Playwrights’ Center.
LOS ANGELES: East West Players has announced Amanda L. Andrei as the finalist for the 2028 open call commission for a new sports play. The first of its kind at EWP, the open call invited playwrights at all stages of their practice to submit proposals for new plays or musicals that explored the intersection of sports and the Asian American experience.
Andrei’s play Redpoint My Heart is scheduled to receive its world premiere in summer 2028, in conjunction with the Los Angeles Olympics. Along with a $10,000 for the commission, Andrei will receive dramaturgical support and developmental workshops from East West Players. Described by Andrei in a statement as “a rom-com about humans and ropes. And rocks,” the first workshop for Redpoint My Heart will occur as a public reading as part of East West Players’ Inaugural New Works Festival in 2027.
“With its competition at the Long Beach Climbing Theater in 2028, the L.A. Olympics describes climbing as ‘a dynamic and explosive sport that sees athletes demonstrate endurance, power, creativity and coordination to scale climbing walls,’” said Andrei in a statement. “I also see it as a relationship between you and yourself. Who are you on the wall? Who are you when you struggle? What does the rock have to teach you?”
Andrei’s proposal was selected first from a pool of 112 proposals, and then from 10 finalists, by a panel of artistic leaders from EWP and from peer theatres across the country. More than 42 sports were represented in the initial applicant pool; among the most popular were martial arts, basketball, and track, with some more unusual disciplines including sailing, shotput, cricket, and e-sports. Each finalist received a $500 mini-commission from East West Players to generate 15-25 pages of a first draft, which was evaluated alongside the proposal.
Finalists for the sports play call included Robin Berl (bowling), Cris Eli Blak (track and field), Carolina Đỗ (soccer), Oscar K. (fencing), Samah Meghjee (skateboarding), Susan H. Pak (running), Nico Pang (equestrian), Aditi Pradhan (archery), and Kit Yan (powerlifting).
The panelists for this commission include victor cervantes jr., associate producer of New Works at Berkeley Repertory Theatre; Leean Kim Torske, director of literary programs at Denver Center Theatre Company; Jane Peña, former literary manager at Theater Mu; and Alison Qu, co-founder and executive director at Chuang Stage.
SAN FRANCISCO: MENA Theater Makers Alliance has announced 18 awardees for the 2026-28 MENA Theater Makers Fund Awardees. The funding initiative provides funds for Middle Eastern and North African theatre in the U.S. Awardees are all U.S.-based companies that serve MENA artists and audiences with budgets of less than $500,000. Each selected recipient will receive $30,000-$45,000 general operating support over two years, with additional funding available for each organization to award local artists working within their communities. MENA Theater Makers Fund was made possible by the Wallace Foundation’s Advancing Wellbeing in the Arts Initiative, in partnership with the National Arts Regranting Partners.
“One of the great privileges of serving as MENATMA’s Board is witnessing the extraordinary work happening across our field,” said MENATMA’s board chair Denmo Ibrahim in a statement. “At a time when many artists and cultural organizations are facing significant challenges, this cohort reminds us that Southwest Asian and North African theatre is vibrant, resilient, and alive with possibility.”
The selected group of organizations spans the United States, with a diverse focus, ranging from new works to traditional arts, dance theatre, ensemble generation, and community advocacy. Each recipient has a specific MENA focus, in addition to a broader mission to expand MENA artists and stories. Many of this year’s recipients are women-, immigrant-, and queer-led organizations.
The 2026-28 recipients include:
- A Host of People, Detroit
- Art2Action, Inc., Tampa, Fla.
- Aviva Arts, San Francisco
- Body Watani Dance Project, Minneapolis
- Boom Arts, Portland, Ore.
- Central Stage, Richmond, Calif.
- Chicago SWANA Collective, Chicago
- Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists (CAATA), National
- Dance Elixir, Oakland, Calif.
- Flying Carpet Festival, San Francisco
- Golden Thread Productions, San Francisco
- Hakawati, Los Angeles
- LubDub Theatre Co, New York City
- New Arab American Theater Works, Minneapolis
- Noor Theatre, New York City
- Seda Iranian Theatre Ensemble, Seattle
- Uprising Theater, Chicago
- Yaa Samar! Dance Theatre, Brooklyn
ASHLAND, ORE.: Ashland New Play Festival (ANPF) has announced its 2026 Fall Festival Winning Plays. The four winning playwrights will travel to Ashland this October for a week of play readings and development. Each playwright will receive a reading of their winning play to be presented at the Main Stage Theater of Southern Oregon University Oct. 14-18.
The winners of this year’s festival were selected by a group of volunteers who read more than 350 plays, whittling down the list to 12 finalists before turning over the selection to artistic director Jackie Apodaca, who chose the four winning plays.
“All 12 finalists are wonderful and worthy new plays, making the decision of a final four almost impossible,” said Apodaca in a statement. “Our winners share a focus on meaning: the meaning of life, friendship, love, and death.”
This year’s ANPF plays are The Caelumids by DJ Hills, Netta and Ru by Lisa Langford, persian girl play by Ida Esmaeili, and Threshold by Stephanie Fybel.
Tickets for the festival and playwriting workshop go on sale Aug. 5 at ashlandnewplays.org.
NEW YORK CITY: Candela has announced 18 fellows as part of its 2026 Playwrights Summer Fellowship, also known as Summer Jam. The initiative is an effort to expand access to theatre education for playwrights, librettists, musical theatre writers, and choreopoets of Latin American and Caribbean heritage.
The tuition-free fellowship runs July 12-19 in New York City and provides participants with an immersive week of workshops, mentorship, peer exchange, professional development, and artistic collaboration. Fellows will develop new work, strengthen their craft, expand their professional networks, and engage with the broader theatre ecosystem.
The 2026 fellowship cohort includes Carl(os) Roa-Cruz, LySaundra Janeé, Melina Nakos, Ana Candida Carneiro, Paul Torres Wong, Gretchen Suárez-Peña, Krystal Ortiz, Desi Moreno-Penson, Harrison Acosta, Letitia Bullard-Bosfield, Antonio Del Valle, Jesús Esteban Feliciano Batista (Jesús “Chui”), chandra thomas, Ángel García, Nathan Leitão, Smita James, Marcus Scott, and Paloma Sierra.
Selected through a competitive application process, the fellows’ work spans musical theatre, playwriting, performance, composition, lyric writing, and interdisciplinary storytelling, reflecting the breadth and vitality of contemporary Latin American and Caribbean theatremaking.
Founded by writer, director, and professor Darrel Alejandro Holnes and co-directed by scholar, director, and professor Dr. Daphnie Sicre, Candela was created to address inequities in access to professional theatre training and mentorship while building a thriving artistic community for writers across the Latin American and Caribbean diaspora.
MINNEAPOLIS: The Dominic Orlando Fund has selected playwright Lisa Langford as the fourth recipient of the Dominic Orlando Playwriting Award. The award, with support from the Venturous Theater Fund, awards its recipient $12,000 unrestricted funds.
Langford is a Cleveland-based playwright and actor. Her play Rastus and Hattie received a Joyce Award in 2019 and was a finalist for the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center National Playwright Conference and an honorable mention on the Kilroys List. Her other plays include How Blood Go, The Art of Longing, The Bomb, and Revolt.Ing. She is an artistic associate of Black Lives Black Words and a member of Dobama Theatre’s Playwrights’ Gym. Her winning play Netta & Ru will have its world premiere at Dobama Theatre in Cleveland Heights in 2027.
Langford was nominated for the award by Nathan Motta, Dobama’s artistic director. In a statement, Motta described Langford as “among the most treasured theatre artists in our region. As a playwright her work speaks for itself. Her plays often explore the breadth and depth of the Black experience in America, from generational trauma to the humanity of the people behind the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Yet, while examining these weighty ideas, her plays are engrossing and accessible.”
The Dominic Orlando Fund was created to honor playwright Dominic Orlando, who died in 2021. Orlando began his career in theatre, co-running the No-Pants Theatre Company in New York, where he wrote, directed, and produced many of his plays. In 2003, he moved to Minneapolis on a Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellowship, creating work with local theatres, including the company he co-founded, the Workhaus Collective. He moved to Los Angeles in 2015 and to write for television, working on series including Them, The OA, and Mindhunter. The award aims to support writers with an “unconventional career” who have forged their own paths by producing their own work, running their own independent companies, and/or have yet to receive support from large institutional theatres or philanthropic organizations. Previous recipients of the award include José Casas, Christian St. Croix, and David Johann Kim.
Applications for the 2027 Award are anticipated to open in the fall of 2026.
