New Plays for Young Audiences

New Plays for Young Audiences is a play development series devoted to the work of the Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) playwright and the development of TYA plays while also providing NYU students the opportunity to study and experience the process first-hand. Housed in the historic Provincetown Playhouse and supported by NYU Steinhardt’s Program in Educational Theatre, NPYA was founded in 1998 by Lowell and Nancy Swortzell as a supportive space to nurture and evaluate new TYA scripts.

Our work honors the history of the Provincetown Playhouse where the early plays of Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, and Edna St. Vincent Millay were first presented. However, this series changes focus by devoting its efforts to development of new works for children, youth, and family audiences written by both NYU students and noted authors in New York City, the US, and abroad.

The prize-winning series has developed dozens of new plays written by leading playwrights for young audiences and families, many of which have gone on to receive both national and international recognition, publication, and production. In July 2025, NPYA was awarded AATE's Sara Spencer Artistic Achievement Award, which honors artistic theatre practice of long duration and wide recognition. 

Keeping with the goals of the Program in Educational Theatre, our series offers both students and theatre professionals the opportunity to test new ideas and methods within the field of TYA.

In conjunction with the series, the Program in Educational Theatre runs a graduate course, Theatre Practices: Problems in Play Production, the Development of New Plays, which studies theories and methods of play development utilizing the series as a laboratory. Students in the class both observe rehearsals and interact with the playwrights, directors, and dramaturgs over the course of the series.

For some background on how the season is chosen, HowlRound has published “From Soup to Nuts: Choosing a TYA Play Development Season” written by our producer.

David Montgomery, Artistic Director (dm635@nyu.edu) and Teresa Fisher, Producer (taf263@nyu.edu) 

Acknowledgements

New Plays for Young Audiences is supported by The Nancy and Lowell Swortzell Permanent Fund in Educational Theatre and with thanks to NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions.

Steinhardt’s Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions, established in 1925, instructs over 1,600 students majoring in music and performing arts programs. Music and Performing Arts Professions serves as NYU’s “school” of music and is a major research and practice center in music technology, music business, music composition, film scoring, songwriting, music performance practices, performing arts therapies, and the performing arts-in-education (music, dance, and drama).

NPYA is housed in the Provincetown Playhouse which is located on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Munsee Lenape.

We thank the Program in Educational Theatre faculty for their report, “Racial Justice and Social Change: 2020-2021 Educational Theatre Report”, found here, which will guide our work along with TYA/USA’s 2020 interactive guide, Anti-Racist & Anti-Oppressive Futures for Theatre for Young Audiences.  

Images from The Great Ignored by Finegan Kruckemeyer (2024) and Speak by Laurie Brooks, adapted from the novel by Laurie Halse Anderson