Very Young Playwrights

Finding new programs for young writers is always fun. Most playwriting opportunities are spread among the grade levels in upper elementary school to high school, I am especially excited to find project that include, or are specifically for, students in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade!

Last month, Stage Left Theatre presented the "Kid's Korner" program at their West 3rd Avenue space in Spokane, Washington. As described on the website, the plays were written by first graders and performed by students from the local community college. You can read a review about Kid's Korner published in The Spokesman-Review here.  (Update 12/29/2021: while reviewing links on old posts, I noticed that Stage Left now has a program for the very young called Fe-Fi-Fo).

This program joins a handful of other young playwrights projects available to 1st graders already listed on the Map including the Marilyn Bianchi Kids' Playwriting Festival at Dobama Theatre in Cleveland (the oldest, continuously-running program for young playwrights in the United States), the Young Playwrights Festival Residency Program at CenterStage in Baltimore, the Young Playwrights Festival at the Prescott Center for the Arts in Arizona, the Young Playwrights Festival at all for One Productions, Inc. in Fort Wayne, and the WRITE A PLAY Program & Young Playwrights Festival at Florida Studio Theatre in Sarasota.

Playwriting and devised work with this younger group of children appears to be a growing area of interest for many theatre companies. This may be attached to the emergence of Theatre for the Very Young productions (generally identified as for audiences aged 0-5) throughout the past decade and there are likely more programs out there. I look forward to discovering them as the Young Playwrights Map continues to grow!