Resident Dramaturg

The Job: 

As a Resident Dramaturg for Philadelphia Young Playwrights, you will serve as a key partner for our young playwrights, aged 8-19, whose work has been chosen for production or development with professional and collegiate actors. You will help them realize the vision and goals for their work, work with them to identify and accomplish any revision goals, and help them learn their own styles and tendencies as a writer and revisor. Your job will be to help guide them to accomplish their own goals, not prescribe goals to them.

Before rehearsal starts, you will communicate with playwrights and hold at least 2 meetings with each playwright to help identify their goals and help them accomplish any revisions, and to ensure you know the vision and values behind their pieces. For some playwrights, this may look like giving them writing challenges to help them envision how they can go about revisions, whereas with others it may be sitting with them as they write. How this process works is up to you and the playwrights to discover together. 

During rehearsals, you will serve as the liaison between the playwright and director, ensuring the student's voice and vision is prioritized in the rehearsal room. You will be in close contact with students, whether or not they are present during rehearsal to ensure their goals and visions are being met by the work in the room. For some of the student pieces, you will do historical or cultural research to share with the playwrights and rehearsal rooms, but the focus of your work will be on new play dramaturgy with the playwrights, not production dramaturgy. 

You will also be in close communication with the Resident Producer and Director of Education and Programs about your conversations with playwrights, filling us in on their writing and revision progress and their availability for rehearsals and performances. 

The Schedule:

In this role, you will serve as dramaturg for student productions and readings throughout the year, including:

Dramaturgy for two student playwrights during the Temple New Voices Workshop Productions (September-October). October will be the busiest time of the year and we will ask that you attend 10-12 hours of rehearsal each week of this month. Rehearsals take place 6-10pm Monday-Friday, and during the day on Saturdays. 

Dramaturgy for 2-3 students playwrights for the October-November CCP reading. These rehearsals take place twice a week during the day in 2-3 hour windows. We will ask you to attend at least one rehearsal each week. Since this is the only during the day rehearsal schedule, this is negotiable. We understand you may be balancing this job with a day job. 

Dramaturgy for 4-5 student playwrights for Drexel reading in February. These rehearsals take place 6-9pm for one week of February. We ask that you attend 12 hours of rehearsal this week. 

Dramaturgy for 1-2 student playwrights for Rutgers reading in February-March. This will be a total of 12 hours of rehearsal, spread between two weeks.

Dramaturgy for 3-5 student playwrights for SaturPLAY workshop production in April. This will be a total of 24 hours of rehearsal, spread between two weeks, typically 4-8pm. 

Dramaturgy for one to two summer workshop production or reading, TBA

Outside of your time in rehearsals, you will also be asked to be a mentor with 3-5 playwrights, to meet virtually with them to help them develop their work. These are playwrights whose pieces and voices showed great promise, but who we did not have space in our season to produce, so they may be playwrights whose work will be produced in the coming seasons. These sessions will be self scheduled. 

In the summer, you will also serve as a section head for our Literary Committee process, reading and evaluating a group of up to 175 student plays, and helping to guide a group of readers in writing feedback for those student playwrights. This work will be self scheduled. 

You will also be asked to have biweekly check in meetings with the Director of Education, but these can be scheduled around your availability. 

The Qualifications:

We are seeking an experienced new play dramaturg who is excited about working with a huge variety of play styles and playwright experience levels. Ideally you have worked on play readings and workshops before and are ready to jump in to help our young playwrights feel like professionals!

We are also seeking someone who has significant experience working with young people of a wide variety of ages. Our program values treating our young playwrights as experts in their own stories and writing, but we also acknowledge that young people are all at different points and experiences in their development as writers, thinkers, and speakers, and dramaturging for an adult playwright and an 8 year old or 18 year old are all very different experiences. We will guide you in learning this role and getting to know our young playwrights and playwriting model, but having previous experience as an educator or at least with young people at various points of development would be helpful. 

Finally, we are seeking someone who is able to put their own ego and taste aside in service of the goals of our young playwrights. Even more than when mentoring and dramaturging for adults, dramaturging for young people we need you to find every way possible to uplift their own instincts instead of imposing your own. Our young playwrights can so easily adopt outside adult voices as their own and our goal is always to lift their own inner voice up instead of allowing them to conform to our own ideals of taste or success. 

PYP Mission and Values:

Philadelphia Young Playwrights celebrates student voices through the art of playwriting.

Our Vision: 
Philadelphia Young Playwrights envisions a joyful world in which youth in the Greater Philadelphia area are empowered to use their voices to tell stories that matter to them, using their words to build their sense of agency, inspire change, and create theater that speaks to the future of our region and our world. 

Philadelphia Young Playwrights values:
-Empowering young voices, fostering creativity, and championing the power of storytelling. 
-Creating space for students to exist as their full selves, joyfully and truthfully.
-Encouraging self-expression, building self esteem and agency, embracing diverse perspectives, and providing a platform for young people to share their unique stories uncensored.
-Guiding teachers and teaching artists through the work of fostering new generations of storytellers and theater makers, through robust dialogue, supportive thinking spaces, and responsive professional development.
-Providing access to theater for young people of all backgrounds and experiences