Applications For New Foundry Members Open June 2024

Foundry Applications will go live on the PlayPenn website on June 1st and will remain open until June 30th, or until 50 submissions have been received— whichever happens first— so that each application can be carefully considered. Playwrights are encouraged to begin the application as soon as possible, and submit promptly. Only Philadelphia writers are eligible to apply to the three year playwriting program. Finalists will interview with Lead Artists L M Feldman and R. Eric Thomas. The three playwrights selected will be announced in August 2024.

The Foundry has over a combined 30 members and alumni. Notable alumni include Terrence McNally Award Winner Stephanie Kyung Sun Walters, Power Street Theatre Co-Artistic Director Erlina Ortiz, and Lead Artist himself R. Eric Thomas. 

The three year program is both an opportunity to share new pages in a safe space, and a place to learn new tools and techniques that will advance your craft. Since 2022, PlayPenn produces a staged reading of a play written by each of the graduating members that year. 

L M Feldman is a queer, feminist playwright (and circus artist) who pens plays that are wildly theatrical but deeply intimate. Formally ambitious plays that move, take up space. Plays that are questing, wrestling, asking. Plays without answers. Plays about women and queers, about outsiders and searchers. Plays grappling with voice and agency, opportunity and access, history and its wake. Plays about the human connection. Plays that seek to be a greater, communal, rare theatrical event in which something transcendent transpires – for those both onstage & off.

R. Eric Thomas won the 2016 Barrymore Award for Best New Play and the 2018 Dramatist Guild Lanford Wilson Award and was a finalist for the 2017 Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award and two 2020 Lambda Literary Awards. He is the recipient of a 2017/2018 National New Play Network Commission and has also been commissioned or produced by Baltimore Center Stage, Arden Theater Company, Azuka Theater, Single Carrot Theater, About Face Theater, City Theater Miami and more. His debut memoir-in-essays, Here For It, or How to Save Your Soul in America was a national bestseller and a Read with Jenna book club pick featured on Today. On screen, he has written for the Peabody Award-winning series Dickinson (AppleTV+) and Better Things (FX) and is currently developing multiple television projects.