Palm Beach Dramaworks’ play 2023 The Messenger which it commissioned and premiered at its New Play Festival, From left to right Angela Gulner, Gracie Winchester, Margery Lowe, Annie Fang.(Photo by Alicia J. Donelan)
By Aaron Krause
Area theater-goers are about to encounter a wide spectrum of new theatrical work as three South Florida festivals present plays in the early stages of development.
The region’s unofficial new play festival season kicks off with Palm Beach Dramaworks’ (PBD) annual Perlberg Festival of New Plays, slated for Jan. 9–11 at the intimate Don and Ann Brown Theatre. Two weeks later, Gulfshore Playhouse in Naples will present its inaugural Next Wave Festival, running Jan. 31–Feb. 1. A few months later, Theatre Lab’s annual Owl New Play Festival runs April 11–26.
Palm Beach Dramaworks’ Perlberg Festival
PBD’s annual Perlberg Festival, named for the late theater artist and new play advocate Mark Perlberg (1956–2025), and his wife, Diane, features readings of five new plays, each at a different stage of development. Before the start of the 2023-24 season, PBD renamed its festival in honor of executive producers Diane and Mark Perlberg.
The weekend-long festival brings together playwrights, directors, and actors from across the U.S. Post-performance discussions follow each reading. In addition, the event includes a Playwrights Roundtable discussion.
“We really do look for plays in multiple stages of readiness,” said Jenny Davis, PBD’s resident playwright and literary manager. “Sometimes, work that comes to us is very ready for production. Other times, we’ll find a play that still needs quite a bit of work, but where we feel like our audiences — who are pretty sophisticated — will be able to ask the kinds of questions that will help a playwright take their work to the next level.”
What types of responses or questions tend to be most valuable to playwrights at this stage?
“That really depends on the playwright,” Davis said. “While we often start with a question about ‘What images really stayed with you,’ beyond that we’re often asking the playwrights what they want to know from our audience. If there’s one question I think we hear most often, and that seems to help playwrights the most, it’s ‘What wasn’t clear to you’ or ‘What was confusing?’ If an audience doesn’t understand a moment, it’s hard to feel that moment’s impact.”
Davis said she hopes audiences understand that the process for creating new work isn’t quick, and it isn’t a “straight line.”
“Every playwright I know has come away from at least one reading, or round of revisions, saying ‘Well, that didn’t work.’ Readings and new play festivals, at their best, aren’t places to show off – they’re incubators that allow artists to tinker and experiment with work that evolves with every opportunity to hear it aloud, every conversation with audience members.”
Davis said that the festival allows PBD to take risks and experiment.
“With five plays in three days, we can expand and explore and check in with our audience – we can stretch ourselves and our patrons, and take what we learn back into our mainstage season planning.”
Speaking of the regular season, plays presented at the festival regularly earn a spot in PBD’s regular season. For instance, Davis’s highly acclaimed play The Messenger emerged from a previous festival. Also, this season’s world premiere of Vineland Place by Steven Dietz got its start at PBD’s annual festival.
Said Dietz: “The Perlberg Festival of New Plays has become an indispensable launching pad for new plays in the American theatre. Infused with the generous guiding spirit of Mark Perlberg, the festival offers playwrights both a dynamic collaborative ethos and a coveted testing ground for the urgent work in front of them. My play came to life in their hands.”
Gulfshore Playhouse’s Next Wave Festival
A couple of weeks after the Perlberg Festival wraps, Gulfshore Playhouse in Naples will present its inaugural Next Wave Festival, offering audiences another look at plays taking shape. It will include three new works, conversations with celebrated playwrights and directors, and exclusive events for festival passholders.
Beginning in 2012, Gulfshore Playhouse hosted the New Works Festival, which received blind submissions from playwrights across the country. After the company’s move to its new Baker Theatre and Education Center, its leadership shifted the festival to a curated collection of plays. All the readings and events will take place over one weekend while the play Circle Forward by Debi Hiett will have its world premiere. Gulfshore included Circle Forward in the 2023 New Works Festival.
“It is exciting to see what our New Works Festival, which began in 2012 and relied on unsolicited manuscripts, has become,” said Founder, CEO and Producing Artistic Director Kristen Coury. “This rebrand to the Next Wave Festival is concurrent with the curation of well-known playwrights looking for an opportunity to develop their play and the platforming of this festival at the height of season, so more people can participate, including industry professionals.”
Gulfshore Playhouse Line Producer Audrey Zielenbach echoed Coury’s enthusiasm.
“I couldn’t be more excited about the three brilliant plays we’ve got lined up for the inaugural year of this new iteration of our Festival,” Zielenbach said. “They are unique, thought-provoking, and important pieces that we are honored to play a role in developing. And a huge part of that is inviting you, the audience, into the room to hear them read aloud, some for the very first time.
“Workshops and staged readings allow us to really hone in on the script without all the bells and whistles of a full production, but you can still expect to experience the same caliber of talent you’d find on our stages. Your reactions and your insight are invaluable to the writers as they continue to shape their play for future productions on stages across America.”
Theatre Lab’s Owl New Play Festival
Meanwhile, east of Naples, some elements of the 2026 Owl New Play Festival are still coming together, said Theatre Lab Producing Artistic Director Matt Stabile. However, the majority of the plans are final.
The festival will begin on April 11, with the opening of the World Premiere production of Inferna by Joanna Castle Miller, presented by Theatre Lab, the resident professional theater company at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton.
The next week, on Friday, April 17, the festival will go into “full swing” with the opening of the second full production, a new musical titled By Any Other Name, with book and lyrics by Deborah Zoe Laufer, in addition to music and lyrics by Daniel Green. FAU’s Department of Theatre and Dance will present By Any Other Name.
In addition to the full productions, Theatre Lab will offer several lectures and workshops related to the plays and content at the festival, two free readings of student created work, and four ticketed readings of new plays by professional playwrights. Theatre Lab will finalize the titles of the readings and lectures by mid-January.
Last year, Theatre Lab’s festival expanded from a weekend-long series of readings to a multi-week series of fully-staged productions.
“With our 10th Anniversary season, we wanted to make a splash,” Stabile said in March last year. “This was the natural next step in our growth as a new play center. Folks can come to Boca for a weekend in April and be fully immersed in the world of new plays. The goal is to continue to expand this annual event, establishing Theatre Lab and FAU as a premiere national destination for new play development and production.”
This year, Stabile added: “I encourage everyone to join us for an entire weekend. Stay in our partner hotel (The Wyndham Boca), enjoy some of our local restaurants and beaches, and be completely immersed in the world of new plays. Get your out-of-town friends to fly in – the weather is still pretty great in Boca in April.”
For 2026, Stabile added more readings of new plays and more supplemental programming.
“In the coming years, we anticipate continuing to increase the number of readings offered and adding additional full productions of new plays,” Stabile said.
Theatre Lab is “dedicated to being the premiere new play development center in the Southeast, and one day, the nation. We want playwrights to know that this is a place where they can not only develop their work (with readings, etc.) but also see it come to full life for a first time with a production,” he said.
Stabile said the theme for each festival comes together through the selection of the full productions.
“Typically, we have one show we are interested in producing and then identify another that is ‘in conversation’ with the first piece. That happened last year when we’d already programmed The Impossible Task of Today by Jeff Bower and then E.M. Lewis pitched her large-cast The Frankenstein Project to me at a conference. Once both of those were programmed, I had a meeting with Ken Weitzman about one of his plays and he mentioned The Happiness Gym. It was just clear that these three productions would explore a common theme in such different and interesting ways.”
The Impossible Task of Today uses humor and hope to explore issues of gun violence, mental health, and the dangers of social media. Meanwhile, The Frankenstein Project “is about the monsters we battle, the monsters we create, and the monsters we (sometimes) are,” according to Theatre Lab’s website.
Lewis is no stranger to Theatre Lab; the company mounted the 2022 world premiere production of Lewis’s play, Dorothy’s Dictionary. In the piece, sparks fly when Zan, an angry high school student, is forced to work off his community service assignment by helping Dorothy, an ailing librarian.
The focus for this year’s Owl New Play Festival is the roles of women in the classic theatrical canon, the lessons contained in them, and what might be possible for the future.
“That theme, again, grew out of the selection process, but this year it began with the selection of By Any Other Name,” Stabile said. “That show was originally a one-act play which Theatre Lab spent some time developing (with the help of some of the MFA cohort from that year) into a full-length over the course of a week.”
Following that, Laufer and Green turned the piece into a musical, which received an online reading from FAU’s Department of Theatre and Dance in 2020. The show is “now coming home for its first full production,” Stabile said.
He already had Inferna on his list for this season, and “it was immediately clear how Joanna’s autobiographical story about her experiences in theatre and religion as a young woman is in direct conversation with (Laufer and Green’s) reimagining of what might be possible for the young heroines in Shakespeare’s plays if they could choose their own paths.”
Meanwhile, in the world of new play development, the possibilities are endless. From West Palm Beach to Boca Raton, and Southeast Florida to Southwest Florida, theatre lovers can experience it all live, starting on Jan. 9 with PBD’s Perlberg Festival.
If You Go
The Perlberg Festival will run from Jan. 9-11 and feature the following plays:
3 p.m. Friday, Jan. 9. The Way North by Tira Palmquist, directed by Marya Mazor: When a lost, cold, and very pregnant Agnes stumbles on to a rural homestead in the Minnesota wilderness, Freddy Hanson doesn’t hesitate to take her in. As the county’s former sheriff, Freddy has dedicated her life to doing the right thing, to protecting and serving others. But when her new guest turns out to be a Sudanese refugee making a run for the Canadian border, the question of what it means to protect and serve becomes more complicated, and far more dangerous.
7 p.m. Friday, Jan. 9. Fat Man’s by Matthew Webster, directed by J. Barry Lewis: When Winnie, a progressive small-town minister, inherits a building that houses a down-and-out tattoo parlor, she clashes with its grumpy owner, Fat Man. Their unlikely bond grows from conflict into friendship, but looming life changes threaten to unravel their friendship, their jobs, and the community itself. Fat Man’s is a heartfelt play about love, tattoos, and finding grace in unexpected places.
3 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 10. Provenance by Jennifer Maisel, directed by Casey Stangl: The play follows the life of a sensual, unusual portrait from its beginnings in early 1900s German society, through its theft by the Nazis and its subsequent travels around the world. Canvas. Pencil. Paint. How can one piece of art tear at the hearts of generations?
7 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 10. How Should a Conversation Be? By Malena Pennycook, directed by Lily M. Wolff: When Terry and Kati meet over coffee, their conversation is stilted but it’s love at first sight. As the years go quickly by, their “conversation” continues and the two try, fail, and try again to find the right language for a meaningful connection. A profound, moving, and theatrically bold exploration of LGBTQ love that asks, “If every relationship is an ongoing conversation…how should that conversation be?”
1:30 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 11. Playwrights Roundtable
3 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 11. Bobby Robotowitz & Allison Portchnik by Matt Schatz, directed by Liz Fisher: A struggling novelist and mother turns to a chatbot for writing help and a little emotional support. Soon the bot becomes her collaborator, confidant, and something that’s difficult to define. What begins as comic relief spirals into a sharp, darkly funny exploration of creativity, connection, and how we use machines to get through the day.
For more information about PBD’s Perlberg Festival, visit www.palmbeachdramaworks.org, or call (561) 514-4042.
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At Gulfshore Playhouse, The Next Wave Festival runs Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 with the following plays and events:
Noon Saturday, Jan. 31. Every Anne Frank by Majkin Holmquist, directed by Kareem Fahmy. A powerful exploration of history, identity, and authority, Every Anne Frank follows Majkin, a white public-school teacher struggling to connect her students with Anne Frank’s legacy; Destiny, a Latina eighth-grader navigating a world of systemic bias; and Mrs. B, a principal pressured into punitive leadership models. Holmquist’s nuanced storytelling reveals how cycles of betrayal and power repeat themselves in everyday American life.
3 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 31. The Frozen Ones by Stella Ferra, directed by Amy Marie Seidel. In this haunting and imaginative drama, Robert chooses to unfreeze his wife Marian (cryogenically preserved due to a degenerative disease) on the eve of his 59th birthday. Wrestling with memory, grief, and a startling 30-year age gap, the couple faces a mysterious knocking that forces them to confront what time, illness, and love have left behind. The Frozen Ones blends emotional intensity with speculative intrigue.
Noon Sunday, Feb. 1. Fundraiser by Brent Askari, directed by Kristen Coury. A sharply comedic unraveling of relationships and social dynamics, Fundraiser follows two couples from different economic backgrounds who attend a private-school fundraiser only to clash over a silent auction item. The evening spirals as class tensions, personal histories, and long-hidden truths come to light. Askari’s wit and insight offer a timely examination of privilege, pride, and the price of appearances.
The Next Wave Festival pass includes exclusive gatherings designed to bring artists, supporters, and the community together:
– Festival Passholder Cocktail Reception – Saturday, January 31 (5 p.m.)
– Festival Passholder Breakfast – Sunday, February 1 (9 a.m.)
– Festival Passholder Playwright Panel – Sunday, February 1 (10:30 a.m., Moran Mainstage).
For more information about the inaugural Next Wave Festival, visit https://www.gulfshoreplayhouse.org or call (239) 261-7529.
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At Theatre Lab, the Owl New Play Festival will run from April 11-26. Stay tuned to the company’s website for more information closer to festival time. The website is at https://www.fau.edu/artsandletters/theatrelab/. The phone number is (561) 297-4784.
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