UNION – Premiere Stages, the professional theatre company in residence at Kean University, has selected its four finalists for the 2024 Premiere Play Festival. Now in its 19th year, the Festival is an annual competition for unproduced scripts that offers developmental opportunities to playwrights with strong affiliations to New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Delaware. This year’s finalists were selected from 760 submissions.
This year’s finalists are: The Ancestry Play by Alyssa Haddad-Chin, the 2024 Playwright-in-Residence at SPARC New Voices and a 2022/ 23 Writing Fellow at The Playwrights Realm; Castling byAnthony Goss, a resident writer with the Liberation Theatre Company and a semi-finalist for the 2024 Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference; The Mallard by Vincent Delaney, whose plays have been produced, commissioned and developed at the Guthrie, Woolly Mammoth, the Lark, among many others; and The Totality of All Things by Erik Gernand, whose plays have been produced and/or developed at Chicago Dramatists, Actors Theatre of Louisville, as well as The Barrow Group. Both Delaney and Gernand are previous winners of the Festival.
In The Ancestry Play, Samia never knew her father, and her secretive Lebanese mother is more interested in watching Wheel of Fortune than providing answers. While she’s proud of her Arab American heritage, Samia wishes she knew more about her family history — until her friend does her DNA test without her consent, making Samia confront just how much knowledge about her ancestry she can handle.
In Castling, workers at a local tire shop in Newark play chess as part of their daily morning ritual. But when their long standing workplace becomes the target of a business takeover, they scramble to avoid being put into the ultimate checkmate. A play about the effects of gentrification and the castles being built all around us, Castling provides a powerful study of loyalty and perseverance.
In The Mallard, Freya and Gillian are teachers who have offended their school board and lost their jobs. Davis and Reagan are yard sale fanatics in search of a priceless antique duck decoy, the Horace Crandall Mallard. What follows is a fierce, funny and escalating battle over a symbol that has wildly different meanings – intersecting the couple in a journey that far surpasses the quest for treasure.
In The Totality of All Things, Judith Benson is “teacher-famous” for the award-winning student newspaper she proudly oversees at her small high school, a program that extols truth and integrity in journalism. But when an anti-gay hate crime occurs one fall, everything Judith believes about inspiring the next generation of reporters, and the definition of truth itself, is called into question.
All finalists will receive professional readings, as part of Premiere’s 19th annual Play Festival Finalists Reading Series June 6-10 at the Bauer Boucher Theatre Center, and will be considered for expanded development in Premiere’s mainstage season. One of the four plays will be selected for an Actors’ Equity Association (AEA) 29-Hour Reading in November 2024 and the most promising play will be awarded a full AEA production as part of Premiere’s 2025 season. All finalists receive cash awards ranging from $1,000 to $3,000. Readings are offered by invitation only. To request admission to any of the readings, please call (908) 737-4077 or email premiere@kean.edu.
This year’s submissions were evaluated through a process coordinated by Premiere Stages’ Play Festival and Education Manager Nick Gandiello, Literary Associate Emily Dzioba and Literary Assistant Jessica DeLuca, in partnership with esteemed panelists Erin Breznitsky, Erin M. Callahan, William Eddy, Alexis Morgan, Claudia Nolan, Lysna Marzani, Matthew Paul Olmos, Carole Shaffer-Koros and Ernest Wiggins.
In the nineteen seasons since its founding, the Premiere Play Festival has received over 8,000 submissions and developed more than 85 plays. Multiple plays produced at Premiere have been honored by the American Theatre Critics Association, selected for agency representation, and/or been published by Theatrical Rights Worldwide, Concord, Dramatists Play Service, Dramatic Publishing Company, Playscripts, and Broadway Play Publishing. A number of Play Festival winners and finalists have subsequently been produced in New York, internationally and at regional theatres across the country.
