House, Divided
 La Tempestad
 The Ballad of John Wesley Reed
 Girl Science
 The Allure of Oriental Wisdom
 Memorial Day (formerly Varia)
 Pride of the Lion
 The Dostoyevsky Man


 Monica for Chanukah
 Angie and Arnie Sanguine
 Edward and Ellie Supine
 The Lion Eats His Lunch
 The Lion in His Lair
 The Lion Leaves His Mark
 Prayers


 But Who's Counting?
 Emma Goldman Imagines the Millenium


 Just Before the War Between the Plates
 I Can Handle That


 Talking  with Lee Blessing

...with Tom Coash
...with Mary Fengar Gail
...with Richard Kalinowsky
...with Jamie Pachino
...with David Rambo
...with Jason Sherman
...with Naomi Wallace
...with Tom Gibbons
...with Dick Goldberg

In the past three months, I have traveled nearly 20,000 miles on the dual mission of seeking exceptional new work for InterAct to consider for future seasons and spreading the gospel according to InterAct to theatre professionals here and abroad. Some of my travels were with artistic director Seth Rozin and some were alone. All of these trips were to professional theatre conferences or theatre festivals where artistic directors and literary managers gather to talk about their theaters, to watch plays, and to exchange ideas.

The first stop, in early June, was Washington, DC, for a conference called Who Needs New Plays. This two day conference was book-ended by keynote speeches by Paula Vogel and Wendy Wasserstein, and focused on new play opportunities for theatres and playwrights from the Washington DC metropolitan area. Another featured speaker at Who Needs New Plays was Jerry Patch, the dramaturg from South Coast Repertory who developed the Pulitzer Prize winning play Wit. Seth and I spent time talking to playwrights as well as to Artistic Directors of theatres interested in work we have developed. Among others we met with Ernie Joslovitz whose developmental lab produced Oni Fadia Lampley's play The Dark Kalamazoo, and Howard Shalwitz of Woolly Mammoth Theatre, a National New Play Network company. Woolly and InterAct have overlapping missions and will likely work together on commissioned scripts in the future.

The next week I was in Denver, Colorado at the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas annual conference. One focus of this conference was new play festivals - an important topic for InterAct because we are planning a national new play festival for June of 2002. About 100 literary managers and dramaturgs came to Denver, including Megan Monnehan from Playlabs in Minneapolis, Tanya Palmer and Amy Wegener, the literary manager and dramaturg responsible for the world-renown Humana Festival of New Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville (where Seth and I first saw God's Man in Texas two years ago), and Michael Dixon, the literary manager at the Guthrie Theater. These representatives of companies which have been producing festivals for many years had a great deal to teach me about curating the literary part of our upcoming event.

In late June, all of the InterAct staff spent four days at the Theatre Communication Group (TCG) conference in Philadelphia. Over 650 theatre professionals attended TCG, many coming to Philadelphia for the first time. Significant numbers of conference attendees came to see It's All True, InterAct's Barrymore Award-nominated final production last year. Along with the rest of the Philadelphia theatre community, InterAct was able to show the artistic leadership of the nation's larger non-profit theaters the kind and quality of work we do. The conference officially focused on theatre in the digital age. Breakout session topics included workshops on connecting new plays to theaters. We were able to network with a large number of playwrights, including Julie Jensen and Y. York, whose work interests us.

In early July, I flew to Irvine, California to South Coast Repertory's Pacific Playwright's Festival. South Coast's dramaturg, Jerry Patch, who I had gotten to know in DC, was my host. I saw eleven plays, 5 short and 6 full length plays, including Amy Freed's the Beard of Avon which you will be hearing about on the national scene in upcoming months, a new Horton Foote play Getting Frankie Married, and several plays more closely related to InterAct's mission including Eye to Eye by Kevin Heelan, a play about a black South African family in exile in America on the day Nelson Mandella is elected president. One of the best plays I saw all summer was called Nostalgia by Lucinda Coxon. Although her play is not in InterAct's mission, Lucinda is a playwright whose career we will follow on the chance that she may, at some point, write a play we would want to do. All of the playwrights were in attendance at South Coast, and it was good to hear them talk about their plays and have a chance to talk to them one on one. While Pacific Playwrights Festival is largely a play reading festival, the acting was superb and included many well know LA-based screen actors including Larry Drake (LA Law) Jillian Bach (Two Guys and a Girl), and Jessalyn Gilsig (The Horse Whisperer, A Cooler Climate).

In Minneapolis in late July, Seth and I attended the National New Play Network (NNPN) conference. This meeting included sessions with one of the top agents in the country, Morgan Jenness of Helen Merrill LTD, as well as discussions with artistic leaders from all of the companies in the NNPN. Many of the NNPN companies will participate in InterAct's new play festival next summer. During our stay in Minneapolis we went to see a play in development at Playlabs, one of the foremost developmental workshops in the country. That play, Tilt Angel by Dan Deitz, provoked heated discussion about the issue of attracting young audiences to the theatre. In addition, at the pre-curtain gathering, one of the incoming class of he Playlabs playwrights, Vince Delany, pitched a play to Seth and me which he felt we ought to consider. I had previously read his play MLK and the FBI, which intrigued me. One of the great things about these gatherings is that both formally and informally, information about good new work gets transmitted to literary managers and artistic directors, and plays we might not know about in other ways get our attention.

Finally, in August, Seth and I traveled to Edinburgh, Scotland to attend the famous Edinburgh Festival and Fringe Festival with other artistic leaders from the Philadelphia theater community on a wonderful trip sponsored by the Philadelphia Theatre Initiative (which is part of the Pew Charitable Trust.) We saw 14 plays in seven days, virtually all world premiers, several of which had potential to be InterAct plays. We were struck by how bleak English drama has become, how slice-of-life many of the plays were, and how essentially a-political much of the drama we saw was. There's a lot of anger in United Kingdom drama at the moment, but not a lot of drama which asks what we felt were significant questions. Still, several of the writers whose work we saw interested us, and I will spend some time this fall reading their past scripts and requesting new work from them.

There are many reasons for me to be doing all this travel. Foremost is finding new plays for InterAct. Next, in festival and premier production environments, my job is to learn how other companies do things that we are interested in doing - like creating an national festival. Networking with other professionals is also a high priority and learning about new work they are considering or which they think might be right for us. As more and more companies around the country get to know what InterAct does, I am more reliably able to seek advice from literary managers at other theatres and also to offer it to them. I read over 100 plays a year and many are very good -- but don't fit into InterAct's mission. The exchange of information about plays, as well as the exchange of artistic ideas, broadens us. Finally, it is also part of my job to try to continue to raise the profile of InterAct locally and nationally. The higher our profile, the more clout we have seeking new plays from top playwrights, and the more chance there is that plays we develop will be staged elsewhere. Because launching a new play is a high-risk enterprise, playwrights often look to theatres for their premiers which will devote the appropriate resources and energy to the production. The more we are in the national spotlight for the work we do, the more we are likely to be considered by writers as a place they want to premier their work. Several of InterAct's premier productions have begun to have a significant theatrical afterlife. Tom Gibbon's Bee-Luther-Hatchee will have 13 national productions this season, on top of seven last season. Mary Gail's Drink Me has now been mounted in Albuquerque and is being considered elsewhere. Mary's reputation is also increasing nationally, as indicated by her being chosen as one of three commissioned playwrights by the National New Play Network. By talking to theatre professionals about how we chose and nurtured and produced these successful plays, and by talking about our annual showcase of new plays and our upcoming national showcase of new plays, we expand our reputation as a company with a track record for doing exceptional premier work. The desired outcome of all of this travel and talk is to find work which will produce exciting, artistically intriguing, and thought-provoking seasons of theater for you, our audience.