Founding a Festival…
From Festival Founder Margaret Van Sant:
In 1998, Provincetown celebrated its stature as the longest still active arts colony in the country. A major focus was on the visual arts community, as 1888 was the year artists flocked to Provincetown to study with Charles Hawthorne.
I wanted to add the importance of Provincetown as the birthplace of modern American theater, with the Provincetown Players and the first productions of Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell, both winners of the Pulitzer Prize for drama. I put together a program of play readings and productions to celebrate that history, and to show the public the extraordinary scripts being created here.
Since then, I have been working with playwrights in a variety of Playwright’s Labs and Playwrights Festivals. Eventually, I really wanted to create a program that would go even further and fully concentrate on the development of new scripts with additional resources - to give playwrights the opportunity to work with seasoned professionals as directors and dramaturges, and hopefully to secure an audience that would engage with us in discussions about the plays.
Also, I hope other theaters will attend and take a look at these great new scripts and consider them for productions at their theaters. The whole goal is to produced complex and compelling new theater work and to give it a further life, and further employment for playwrights,