PAST.PRESENT.FUTURE.

I am perpetually impressed by the caliber of work that is featured in our New Work Development Reading nights or festivals. The Past. Present. Future. Reading night on March 31, 2026 was no exception, there were 3 new plays featured and they were fantastic. Ocean Harris, our Interim New Work Development Director, curated a moving, stimulating and thought provoking night of new works - WELL DONE Ocean and THANK YOU for working so hard to create this wonderful night.

Most of my time is spent trying to make sure we fulfill our mission, a large part of which is to support new work and artists. I do this because I need to be able to write grant applications and have evidence of how much work we are doing and sometimes I lose sight of exactly why we are doing this when I'm in the weeds of reports/data/numbers - so as a reminder we do this to nurture and support new work/writers/performers, to be a home for the creative arts and a safe space for people to express their ideas and develop those ideas with feedback from people who will challenge them in all the right ways so that their work grows and becomes stronger and better. This night reminded me of that and I felt so proud to be a part of an organization that truly wants to be a home for creatives.

The audience was hanging on every word and right there with the characters in each play. It felt electric and buzzing! Each actor was immensely talented and the writers, well, they should be tremendously proud of the work they produced. Like all new work the plays need revision and I hope that hearing their work out loud performed by talented actors helped them to refine their plays so that they can go from a reading to a workshop production to a full production.

If you go to the Previous Plays tab on our website you will see all the photo's we took that night, great action shots and a super record of a wonderful night of new work.

It takes courage to write a play and submit it to a program, we got almost 200 submissions and a team of readers went through them and with Ocean's guidance these three plays were selected. It was a tough choice, if we could have chosen more we would have. Hopefully we will raise more money and be able to do another reading night this year and feature more of the plays submitted for this reading. If I were rich I would fund every writer and help them develop their plays. I did buy a lottery ticket so you just never know.

I leave you with Ocean's welcome speech - he says it best!

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/77d39b_c6a5854589d1415d8044928ff49efb1b/1080p/mp4/file.mp4