Calling all playwrights—NEXT ACT! submissions are closing

Have you heard about the NEXT ACT! New Play Summit? It’s Capital Repertory Theatre’s (theREP) annual new play festival and an expansion of the theatre’s commitment to the development of new work. You can’t find the next Lynn Nottage if you don’t work with new plays (and their playwrights), and theREP is dedicated to being a theatre that looks for—and helps develop—the next new great American Play/Playwright.

In fact, the biggest goal of the summit is to find a script that theREP can provide with its world premiere production—a goal that theREP has reached for every summit (not including the summits during the shutdown) it has held. To date, theREP has produced 12 World Premieres that came directly from NEXT ACT! (Ok, technically the 12th is this season’s production of “Rosie Is Red And Everybody Is Blue” by John Spellos, which is the winning script from the 2023 Summit.)

The 14th annual summit will take place in April 2025 (dates TBD) and will feature readings of several never-before-produced plays, with additional events throughout the week.

The summit actually begins with an open call for play submissions. Each year hundreds, yes you read that correctly, hundreds of new plays are submitted to the theatre in the hopes that they will be included in that season’s summit. In fact, the submission process for the fourteenth annual summit is currently underway (closing August 31, 2024), and the theatre has already received close to three hundred submissions. So, if you are, or you know, a playwright … click here for more information on how to submit your new work!