Our Programs
Workshops for youth
PlayWrite, Inc. strives to create supportive, transformative experiences for marginalized and at-risk youth. We provide safe and creative spaces through playwriting and performance arts workshops that serve immigrant, refugee, LGBTQ, and farmworker youth. We invite all young people regardless of housing, religious belief, and ethnicity to participate in the empowerment of sharing their stories through performance art.
the playwrite Workshop process
To ensure that PlayWrite creates safe spaces with the most potent possibilities for sharing difficult stories, our workshops focus on small group dynamics and 1:1 connection. Workshop size is limited to 4-8 participants, each one paired with a dedicated mentor coach, trained by PlayWrite.
With assistance from their coaches, workshop participants are guided to dig deep, exploring conflict and the elements of an impactful play. Drawing from their personal experiences, dreams, and aspirations, they are challenged to create meaningful, fully inhabited characters. By placing their characters into true emotional conflict, participants cultivate self-awareness and empathy. What results is a powerful, self-created 8-10 minute one-act play that is then directed by the student participant and enacted by professional actors.
The PlAYWRITE WORKSHOP FORMAT
PlayWrite multi-day workshops led by our professional coaches run throughout the year:
10-Day Intensive: One 2½ hour session a day for nine days. 5-hour rehearsal and final performance on the tenth day.
3- & 5-Day: Other workshop formats are available. Contact us to discuss how PlayWrite can help meet your needs and interests.
How the PlayWrite workshop unfolds
Our first workshop meeting or session includes simple group exercises, deconstruction of a classic theater scene, and character work. Following sessions continue with sensory exercises, exploring the keys to dramatic conflict, and writing a short one-act play.
On the final day, participants meet the professional actors cast in their plays and take on the role of director. The workshop culminates in a staged reading of the plays before a live audience.
All PlayWrite, Inc. performances are videotaped and professionally edited. They can be posted on Vimeo or burned to a DVD. Watch a play in action below!
Interested in bringing a PlayWrite workshop to your school or organization? Contact us for more information.
You have opened our eyes to imagination. We learned to appreciate even more the work of our own and the work of others, and to help encourage each other in new adventures in life. We will hold on to what you taught us and use it as much as we can throughout our life span.
— Nicole
I'm from a poor family. I would never have had the opportunity to take a writing workshop if you hadn't come here. I want to kidnap PlayWrite, and do this every day.
— Student Participant
PlayWrite is a youth-oriented program that has strong and long-term benefits for young people. I’m overjoyed and proud that we had a chance to be involved in PlayWrite, to be trained as coaches in Portland and implement this fantastic program in our country.
— Elene Japaridze
My imagination grew bigger. All these different ideas come to my mind, more than they used to. Like, I get more creative. Once I start writing, I can’t stop. Before, I’d write, some ideas would come to me, here and there. But now when I write, I just remember, keep the pen flowing, you know?— Student Participant
I really liked PlayWrite.
It brought out a lot of my feelings and showed me a lot of things that I didn’t know about myself. It was a great experience and the coaches were wonderful. It was great to see a play that I wrote. I had never thought of writing anything like it. It was great.
— Krystal