The Afterglow Festival will spearhead a new playwriting initiative this year culminating in staged readings hosted by the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The initiative is intended to create a theater laboratory for professional playwrights, both emerging and established, in Provincetown, with a long-term aim to not only offer acts in festival each September, but also to increasingly cultivate year-round professional theater-making in Provincetown, reasserting the town’s birthright as a key center for playwriting and production. “In my vision I see lamps burning all the year long in Provincetown’s many hotels and inns, which would be filled with audiences coming to town for the sole purpose of witnessing the creation of new, professional American dramatic works worthy of Provincetown’s heritage,” says Quinn Cox, Afterglow’s founder.

Cox approached the directors of the Fine Arts Work Center and together mapped out a plan for the FAWC to physically host and promotionally support this playwriting initiative with the FAWC’s literary fellowship administrator- novelist and short-story writer Salvatore Scibona. The first playwriting initiatives event is slated for November 22-24, 2013, although there is hope for a “teaser” of the program during the Afterglow Festival, September 9-15, 2013. While playwriting was not part of the original mandate of the literary fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center, founded in 1968, the FAWC did briefly offer a playwriting fellowship in its 1995-1997 seasons. There is a precedent for the FAWC presenting plays-in-progress by its literary fellows, like Denis Johnson whose play “Des Moines” enjoyed a staged public reading at the FAWC last year. There also exists some spiritual synergy between the FAWC and Afterglow: Former fellow and current FAWC Vice President Michael Cunningham and FAWC honoree John Dowd sit on Afterglow’s advisory board; Afterglow staged the play, “Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy”, by 2012 FAWC honoree, Pulitzer Prize and Tony award winning playwright Tony Kushner—Cox is in discussion with Kushner as well as Pulitzer Prize winner Doug Wright (“I Am My Own Wife”) to play an advisory role in this new initiative.

The plan for this initiative is to present work by as yet under-the-radar playwrights, emerging playwrights and established playwrights who are stretching in new directions. The hope is to form a selection committee of individuals well versed in the dramatic form, and to involve both known actors and directors as well young aspirants and students, in alliance with colleges and universities with competitive theater programs. The Fine Arts Work Center’s esteemed roster of literary fellows, past and present, be they poets or novelists, are encouraged to break out any dramatic works they might keep in hiding.

More information to come soon! Keep checking this space for updates!