I spent the weekend blueberry picking, swimming, and stargazing in Pennsylvania with family and friends. I’ve had a slow, quiet season, mostly at home in Brooklyn, caring for my 11-week-old son, who is a wonder and a joy. I haven’t been seeing theatre, aside from my first outing since the baby arrived: Shakespeare in the Park’s Romeo and Juliet on a balmy night in June. So learning about productions and in-progress works has been a welcome portal back to the theatre world.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Rich Brown and Idris Goodwin, co-founders of Western Washington University’s Summer Test Kitchen, a new-work development program. Now in its fourth year, Summer Test Kitchen brings guest writers and students together on WWU’s campus to collaborate on projects at various stages of development and across genres, with a particular focus on theatre for young audiences.

The program provides two weeks of collaborative development, culminating in a free public reading of each work. Students serve as actors and stage managers, working alongside faculty directors, actors, and dramaturgs, as well as guest artists.

This summer, four projects—Goodwin’s Problematic Word Play, Doug Wright’s The Cutter Incident, Cindy Lou Johnson’s Fission, and Shanna Allman’s Eve’s Ale—were developed in partnership with Seattle Repertory Theatre, Seattle’s Union Arts Center, La Jolla Playhouse, and other arts organizations.

“Part of the mission of our department at Western Washington University is to train our students to be not only theatre interpreters but also theatre creators and self-generative artists,” says Brown. For students, the benefits are both educational and professional: they gain firsthand experience in new-work development, see how institutions partner on co-productions, and connect with industry leaders, all while getting paid to participate.

“One of the goals is to create a bridge for our students from academic theatre into professional theatre,” says Brown. That bridge is already producing tangible professional opportunities. Case in point: When an actor dropped out of the Alliance Theater’s production of Doctor De Soto in 2025, a student who worked on the show through the Summer Test Kitchen stepped into the role.

The university setting is ripe for new-work development, offering artist housing, rehearsal space, and invaluable resources, including subject-matter experts. When developing his young adult novel King of the Neuro Verse into a stage play as part of the 2025 program, Goodwin worked with WWU’s linguistics professor and director of the language and neural systems lab, McNeel Janzen.

Beyond the campus, the Summer Test Kitchen is filling a void in the American theatre ecosystem, where opportunities for new-work development have been dwindling. The deprioritization of new-work development is a loss for the field. “We sometimes overknead the dough, if you will, and we become beholden to processes, structures, and systems, and not beholden to the makers and the storytellers,” says Goodwin.

“[Summer Test Kitchen] is really about ensuring that students in the next generation are well equipped and imbued with some level of hope for themselves and for the field they’re going into,” says Goodwin.

Speaking of hope, be sure to check out Kelundra Smith’s dispatch from this year’s International Thespian Festival, where 5,000 high school and middle school theatre students from across the U.S. descended on Indiana University Bloomington’s campus.

Here’s to squeezing in more stargazing and playmaking these final weeks of summer!