Philadelphia Young Playwrights

Philadelphia Young Playwrights’ mission is to tap the potential of youth and to inspire learning through playwriting. Driven by our core belief that every young person has an important voice that is worth hearing, our programs support the advancement of critical academic and literacy skills, cultivate critical workforce development skills, and maximize students’ capacity to engage in and direct their own learning through creative writing, collaborative revision, and exposure to professional theater. Young Playwrights began its first full year of operations in 1987 and quickly established a reputation for its innovative classroom practices, focusing on playwriting as a literacy-learning tool and as an opportunity to engage students in new, creative ways. Today, Young Playwrights annually serves approximately 2,000 students through roughly 60 program placements in 35 or more public, private, and parochial schools throughout the five-county Greater Philadelphia region, with a special emphasis on the School District of Philadelphia (SDP). Young Playwrights is dedicated to the development of young writers. Our mission grounds our practice in the classroom, where we work one-on-one with classroom teachers and students to advance literacy and empower individual voices. But our work doesn’t end inside the classroom, and one of the first discussions we engage in with our students is that theater is meant to be seen, not read. As such, our Play Development Series—wherein students work alongside professional directors, dramaturgs, designers, and actors to develop and produce their plays or monologues—takes student work from page to stage and extends a student playwright’s learning and development arc to the world of new play development, production, and meaningful collaboration. Each year, we produce dozens of new plays and monologues written by student playwrights through partnerships with universities, theater companies, and cultural organizations in the region.