Playwrights Initiative

Endstation Theatre Company is pleased to announce a call for script submissions for our 2024 Playwright’s Initiative Reading Festival, June 13-16, 2024.

Submissions (and questions about Playwright’s Initiative) may be submitted to casting@endstationtheatre.org!

To be considered, please include the following information: 

• Brief biography (1-2 paragraphs)

• One paragraph play synopsis

• Ten pages of sample dialogue OR a full length script

Submission parameters:

• Plays must be written by a Central Virginia playwright OR the play must be set in Central Virginia. We are particularly interested in stories that are historically or thematically relevant to the Central Virginia community.

• Plays must be unpublished and must not have had a full professional production.

• We are searching for full length plays (70-120 minutes), so samples must be submitted with a goal of finishing a full length draft by May 2024 (in time to prepare for the Staged Reading Festival). 

• Plays must be submitted electronically.

Submission deadline: February 15, 2024

Stipends will be provided to playwrights whose work is selected for the festival. It will be expected that these playwrights will work with the ETC artistic staff to refine and develop their scripts.

We already know that the 2024 Playwright’s Initiative Reading Series will include the following (working) titles:

Whirlwind - about Dr. Robert Walter "Whirlwind" Johnson. Dr. Walter (as the Johnson Foundation puts it) "built a tennis dynasty in Lynchburg, Va. that produced the first two African-American grand slam champions, Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe." Without the contributions of Dr. Walter, tennis greats like the Williams sisters and the rising star Coco Gauff may not have had a future in the sport. 

Good Birth is a new play about The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. This facility, right across the James River, is now called The Central Virginia Training Center. It became known for its forced sterilization of the poor and people of color. It was also the facility at the center of the 1927 Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell that upheld a physician’s right to sterilize a patient. Good Birth is a fictional tale of a young girl asked too soon to fight for her right to bear a child and suffer society’s misguided view of intelligence; all while facing down the brute force of the American Eugenics Movement in the early 1900s.

Original Theatre about Central Virginia

Since the first years of Endstation Theatre Company, we have worked to tell stories related to Central Virginia, its history, and its people, beginning with The Bluest Water: a Hurricane Camille Story in 2008 and most recently with T-Room…The Musical in 2023.

Endstation Theatre Company invites playwrights who are working on stories about the Commonwealth to share their work with us. Are you a playwright? Performer? Poet? Is there a story you would like to tell about Central Virginia? Let us know, and we can consider your project for development!

Previous Initiative Participants