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.

Playwrite Workshops Are Offered
in three formats

PlayWrite workshops led by professional coaches are available in three multi-day formats:

1. 3 Days: One 2½ hour session each day for two days. 5-hour rehearsal and performance on the third day.

2. 5 Days: One 2½ hour session each day for four days. 5-hour rehearsal and performance session on the fifth day.

3. 10 Days: One 2½ hour session each day for nine days. 5-hour rehearsal and performance session on the tenth day.

Our ten-day intensive workshops run throughout the year.

the workshop process

To ensure that PlayWrite creates safe spaces with the most potent possibilities for sharing difficult stories, we focus on small group dynamics and 1:1 connection. Our workshops are limited to 4-8 participants, and each participant is paired with a dedicated mentor coach, trained by PlayWrite.

With the assistance of their coaches, workshop participants are guided to dig deep, exploring conflict and the elements of an impactful play. Drawing from their dreams, aspirations, and personal experiences, they create meaningful characters that they are challenged to fully inhabit. 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.

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.

Watch another play

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